from Hacker News

Management = Bullshit (LLM Edition)

by dxs on 5/22/25, 11:20 PM with 41 comments

• by byoung2 on 5/23/25, 1:59 AM

  My skip manager started asking for weekly status reports so my manager started pulling Jira reports and feeding them to ChatGPT. It turns out that my skip manager was using Copilot to summarize those reports into basically what you could get directly from Jira.

• by roenxi on 5/23/25, 3:30 AM

  Plans are useless but planning is essential

  ~ Lots of people

  This guy is quite possibly going to end up looking stupid when something goes wrong and it turns out he lied about having thought about it. I hope he is as clever as he thinks he is at anticipating what will go wrong in the future. Fires and whatnot do happen. Even AWS us-east-1 has experienced outages.

• by tptacek on 5/23/25, 3:20 AM

  The author jokes, but almost everybody's DR plan (at least, the DR plans motivated by regs like SOC2 --- which I believe are most DR plans) are worse than what you'd get from an LLM. An LLM can at least take some input and craft something ostensibly related to your circumstances. The DR plans the LLM competes with are literally just copy-pasted.

• by satisfice on 5/23/25, 2:56 AM

  Or you could just do your fucking job and create a real disaster recovery plan.

• by Joker_vD on 5/23/25, 1:51 PM

  "More paper — cleaner ass". Something bad happens — it's not your fault, since you've reported (in writing!) several times to your superiors that it could happen, and was told it's fine, so please go and try to find someone else for a scapegoat, thank you very much.

• by apwell23 on 5/23/25, 3:40 AM

  I've been using chatgpt for career coaching and improving my visibility at work. It has been surprisingly helpful. A million times more helpful than my own manager.

  I really don't understand what the point of EMs is.

• by OutOfHere on 5/23/25, 3:11 AM

  For new companies, how about "management as a service", featuring AI+MCP? No need for human managers.

• by rurban on 5/25/25, 8:39 AM

  what's more to that than alias desaster='git commit -am desaster && git push'? Works fine without LLM.

  To overcome desaster artists is best to get them fired earliest. To bomb them with llm is fine, but this is just papering.

• by joshstrange on 5/23/25, 1:46 PM

  Bold to post this under, what I assume is, their real name?

  This really reads as "I was asked to do something _I personally_ deemed beneath me or a waste of time so I just didn't do and provided BS instead, aren't I smart?".

  No, no you aren't. You are incredibly selfish. If and when that DR is needed and the team realizes it's BS will you still be as proud as you are in this post?

  I can tell you that if I was your coworker I'd probably drop a link to this post in your manager's inbox. I cannot stand people who just don't care and setup landmines for their coworkers because "they know best" and decide to do something different than what was asked for. It's the same as using AI slop in a PR but not/never being on call, it's not your problem so why do you care if the system goes down?

  If I pulled out a DR plan in the middle of a crisis and found it was AI generated BS I'd be furious and after the head of whoever half-assed (zero-assed?) it. It's just so incredibly disrespectful.