u/MrDontCare12

Hello everyone,

Just a rant about AI peer pressure.

So, working in a big tech company, our main goal for this term is to "use AI". We have access to almost every model and every tool in the market with crazy quotas. Soo, I use it. A lot. For coding.

My work is now to wait in front of my computer for 70% of my day, the remaining 30% are meetings.

We're supposed to use it for everything. So, to meet KPIs, my colleagues are starting to use it for everything. Every PR description is AI slop, they create "slides" about "how to use AI efficiently for [you name it]". Always low effort as fuck. When you ask questions about the content, most of the time they haven't even really read it.

And that's "okay". I don't really give a fuck, our project is quite shitty already, so why not. Everyone thinks that it's kinda shit, but everyone does it anyway. I will start to create all this low effort content as well, as I want to meet KPIs and get my bag.

But, yesterday I was talking with some colleagues about personal projects. And they where like "what?! You don't have a 200$ Claude subscription for personal projects?!". And to me, that's crazy. Personal projects are supposed to be to do something fun or sharpen our skills, right? Why would you want to improve your productivity regarding that? And paying 200$/m to do so?! And it's not the first time, everyone at work and some of my friends are baffled that I do not pay for that to use on my free time. And the pressure is building.

Anyway, idk where all this shit is going. We produce 10x the software for 1.5x the features, and people wants to start to do that on their personal time. They don't do web research anymore, and just take what's out of Claude/ChatGPT as truths.

Maybe it's not for me anymore? I have an electrician/network technician vocational school degree, should I switch to that?

Hello everyone,

I have a question about meetings.

I'm working in Japan for several years (software engineer), and I still don't get the meeting culture in here. I actually kinda get it, I understand that meetings exists to display decisions that were made beforehand in some kind of theater of a discussion to find "consensus" (although the consensus is not a consensus, but an agreement to what was discussed beforehand by managers).

The thing is, where I work, those rules are a bit off. There is no sharing beforehand, no open informal conversation. Most of the decisions are taken by one to two persons, that talks privately. This is kinda fine, with strong hierarchy, you need to follow the manager, blablabla, OK.

Although, we're "implementing" an agile environment, where open conversations within the team is supposed to create the work rules that makes work more efficient and improve productivity. Every tentative of challenging anything is taken down, and rules from "above" are force fed.

In this setup, why would Japanese culture prevails, as the very work structure we're implementing is supposed to be the exact opposite? How can a Japanese organization think that adding a crazy amount of meetings will improve any kind of productivity if nothing is discussed during those meetings?