Management = Bullshit (LLM Edition)

I've seen this happen in emails too:

"Recent outage was due to a retry loop for the Foo API exceeding rate limits. We're implementing a backoff algo"

Sender, via ChatGPT:

Hi,

I wanted to provide more context regarding the recent outage.

The issue was triggered by a retry loop in the Foo API integration. When the API began returning errors, our system initiated repeated retry attempts without sufficient delay, which quickly exceeded the rate limits imposed by the API provider. As a result, requests were throttled, leading to degraded service availability.

To address this, we are implementing an exponential backoff algorithm with jitter. This approach will ensure that retries are spaced out appropriately and reduce the likelihood of breaching rate limits in the future. We are also reviewing our monitoring and alerting thresholds to detect similar patterns earlier.

We’ll continue to monitor the system closely and share further updates as improvements are rolled out.

Best regards,

Receiver, via ChatGPT:

"The outage was caused by excessive retry attempts to the Foo API, which triggered rate limiting and degraded service. To prevent recurrence, exponential backoff with jitter is being implemented"

This is how society collapses and OpenAI wins.

Recycling a prediction from a year ago:

> Ultimately a lot of this generative tech stuff is just counterfeiting extra signals people were using to try to guess at interest, attentiveness, intelligence, etc.

> So yeah, as those indicators become debased, maybe we'll go back to sending something [...] all boiled down to bullet points.

This is the kind of thing my manager and skip manager are up to. Most of our jira tickets now are written as a random jumble of ideas, fed into internal proprietary LLM and then turned into jira description and acceptance criteria. Totally pointless

Funny how encoder-decoder architectures have led to decoder-encoder behaviors.

Wow. Full circle

I’ve used LLMs to generate text for a soc2 audit about our processes. For one requirement, it took me 20 minutes to produce 8 pages that otherwise would have taken hours at least. This wasn’t misrepresentation or anything - more like here’s the requirement, here’s a summary of what we do, describe specifically how that meets the requirement. Outside of coding, it’s a perfect application for the tech.

They're like backups, in that they don't actually exist unless you've tested them.

A copy-pasted plan is actually fine, as long as whoever's responsible for following it actually can follow it and it works.

A plan that nobody's even looked at much less tried to follow isn't fine. Even if it's word-for-word identical to one that is fine.

The real management failure is taking a problem and assigning it to someone who has no interest in solving it. There's plenty of people interested in working on these kinds of things. Why waste this guy's time.

People will down vote you, but when I worked for a mega corp and a hurricane knocked out our office, they had a plan, and it worked: they set up in a hotel, and continued operations, people stayed employed, people got the products (which were largely essentials) in their supermarkets, etc.

This is not like, super trivial. People needed to figure out power, hardware, networking, vpn, etc.. etc.. etc.. and staffing. A lot of that had absolutely nothing to do with IT, but some of it did.

middle manager spotted ^

It's really just monitoring you. A designated technical lead on your team can be very helpful, but once someone moves off the dev team but also isn't able to make any decisions from the product/business side they just become dead weight. I have the same issue with my EM trying to get coaching and visibility and have gone to LLMs just like you because manager is clueless.