This might have been a genuinely useful system, something which broke down with the existence of LLMs.
If someone wants a new computer they should just have to say why. And if it's a good reason, give it to them. If not, don't. Managers have to manage. They have to do their jobs. I'm a manager and I do my job by listening to the people I manage. I don't put them through humiliation rituals to get new equipment.
People want new computer because new hire Peter got a new one.
People want new computer because they just had lunch with a friend that works in a different company and got a new computer and they just need to one up him next time they go to lunch.
That is why I am not going to just give people computers because they ask. Worst crybabies come back because they „spilled coffee” on perfectly fine 2 years old laptop.
Not everything you read on the internet is 1 to 1 real life ;)
>If someone wants a new computer they should just have to say why. And if it's a good reason, give it to them. If not, don't.
If you are awarding computers based on 3 paragraph essays, you are having horribly inefficient process that rewards creative writing rather then work.
Which is why none of it happen in real companies, unless they are someones startup expected to fail anyway.
so I'm sure there's large corps that do this for everything. probably ones where you're not asking your manager, but asking finance or IT for everything
Gen-AI completely negates meaningless verbosity as a proxy of time spent. It will be interesting to see what emerges as a new proxy, since time-as-currency is extremely engrained into the fabric of human social interactions.
There are some parallels to that in compression and cryptography, but they are rather far-fetched.
Social media will give you a good idea what sort of person enjoys writing 4 paragraphs when something goes wrong; do you really want to incentivize that?
If they don’t care they don’t care. They pay most of us for our time anyway, not what we achieve.
As to the content of the letter, the 4 paragraphs are supposed to be "these are reasons I think were missed and why it'll cost more to not correct it" not just "I put effort to write 4 paragraphs of stuff" friction alone.
Having run a short stint as an internal IT manager at an IT focused company... it's astounding how many non-standard/out-of-cycle laptop request are actually either basic user error (even for the most brilliant technical employees) or basic IT systems problems (e.g. poorly tested management/security tool changes eating up performance/battery in certain configurations) that a new laptop won't actually solve. E.g. reports of "my battery runs out in 2 hours and my IM is dog slow" but they are on an M1/M2 MacBook Pro and probably wouldn't notice if they got an M1 or M4 MacBook back as their issue isn't actually the hardware. When someone writes an email or ticket explaining why their use case just wasn't accounted for it's generally pretty obvious they really do need something different.
At the NYC employment job, I was on a 2 year upgrade cycle being a software developer. Just whatever the current year Dell corpo laptop was. No procurement procedures, just IT got 2 year replacements, our laptops went to the non IT workforce after reimaging.
As a consultant I usually bring my own device, and my laptops are usually WAY more capable since I will run each client on their own VM - makes it easy to delete the client when the contract is up. But I've had one client who did not allow BYOD, and any billed work had to be done on their hardware. That was fine, except that the desktop I was given was already a 12 year old dual core non-hyperthreading CPU that wasn't meant for developers even when it was built. I begged and pleaded for 6+ months for me to either bring in my own hardware they could image now and wipe at the end of the contract, or to please buy me a PC from this decade.
It took 3 years to get the budget approval for a $2000 tower, roughly the equivalent of 15 hours of pay. The thing that finally pushed it over the edge, was that my PC could not handle Teams + Visual Studio at the same time, and manager couldn't handle that he couldn't watch me program.
All of that to say I doubt these non-data-driven organizations are basing these decisions on anything other than micromanagement. Nothing to do with measured or assumed productivity, nothing to do with costs, so all I can think is they have to be a "decision maker" on all aspects.
Sure, as long as we completely disregard the water, power and silicon wasted to accomplish this goal.
I've been aware of similar dynamic in politics, where the collective action/intelligence of the internet destroyed all the old signals politicians used to rely on. Emails don't mean anything like letters used to mean. Even phone calls are automated now. Your words and experience matter more in a statistical big data sense, rather than individually.
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This puts me in sci-fi world-building mode, wondering what the absurd extension is... maybe it's just proving burned time investment. So maybe in an imagined world where LLMs are available to all as extensions of thought via neural implant, you can't be taken seriously for even the simplest direct statements unless you prove your mind sat and did nothing (aka wasted it's time) for some arbitrary period of time. So if you sat in the corner and registered inactive boredom for 2h, and attached a non-renewable proof of that to a written word, then people would take your perspective seriously, because you expended (though not "gave") your limited attention/time to the request for some significant amount of time
Because politicians literally write the rules of the system, it's incredibly difficult to prevent abuse, bad incentives, and inefficiency.
One of the most fundamentally broken aspects of the US system is that:
1. politicians stay in power by being elected.
2. people are not required to vote and casting a vote incurs a cost (time, travel, expense), therefore not everyone votes.
3. politicians just have to get the votes of the fraction of people who actually do vote and can ignore those who don't.
What may seem like abuse and bad incentives to YOU are perfectly aligned goals for THEM.
Want a bandaid for people voting randomly? Throw in a randomly (llm?) generated question about the policy they're voting on and if they get it correct, showing some rudimentary understanding of the policy, they can vote.
Bob’s manager is lazy and or an idiot.
Probably both.
> Bob’s manager receives 4 paragraphs of dense prose and realises from the first line that he’s going to have to read the whole thing carefully to work out what he’s being asked for and why. Instead, he copies the email into the LLM.... The 4 paragraphs are summarised as “The sender needs a new computer as his current one is old and slow and makes him unproductive.” The manager approves the request.
"LLM inflation" as a "bad" thing often reflects a "bad" system.
In the case described, the bad system is the expectation that one has to write, or is more likely to obtain a favorable result from writing, a 4 paragraph business case. Since Bob inflates his words to fill 4 paragraphs and the manager deflates them to summarise, it's clear that the 4 paragraph expectation/incentive is the "bad" thing here.
This phenomenon of assigning the cause of "bad" things to LLMs is pretty rife.
In fact, one could say that the LLM is optimizing given the system requirement: it's a lot easier to get around this bad framework.