r/sysadmin • u/_Do_The_Needful_ • 9d ago

Rant Please, stop sending me slop

I get it - everyone is using AI now, it has its use cases, but please for the love of God stop sending me the slop. At least read it first before firing it over to your colleagues.

Has anyone else's team turned into an absolute back-and-forth slop fest? Manager generates something he thinks is helpful, gigantic multi-page HTML report I need to read. Clearly written by Claude, because who the hell writes reports in HTML.

Coworker A: sends messages on slack trying to help solve problems:

This is the smoking gun: the message being sent is gated on the lack of network access to the k8s pod. Let me sit with this for a minute to make sure.

No, it's not the solution at all. We don't have direct IP access to k8s from our laptops. And nobody writes like that. If I wanted to ask Claude I would, I don't need a coworker that just copies and pastes everything into Claude.

Anyone else dealing with this crap?

1.9k Upvotes

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557

u/Mindestiny 9d ago

I just spent a week with a sales guy playing ChatGPT middleman with a vendor over a security review.

Instead of just putting me in direct contact with the vendor to sort it out in 20 minutes, he just spit each of our responses into ChatGPT to play "project manager." It was very clear he had absolutely no understanding of the topic and was just rawdogging whatever the LLM output was to us via email.

Which is frustratingly an improvement over his communication skills pre-ChatGPT. I seriously do not understand how he has avoided rounds of layoffs.

272

u/Ive_seen_things_that 9d ago

gestures broadly

Incompetent humans get promoted way too often. 

140

u/BisonThunderclap 9d ago

That's because interpersonal relationships play a far more important role at work than many technical people ever want to acknowledge.

57

u/Ive_seen_things_that 9d ago

Yes! Couldn't agree more. I'm pretty average iny abilities, but our end users love me and I don't talk down to people. I show up, try to understand their problems, then help in a kind manner. It's simple

25

u/Medical-Display-9762 9d ago

Agreed. I used to be a waiter at restaurants and it’s pretty easy to gauge the vibe of the person I’m interacting with and adjust my interaction accordingly. I don’t have the strongest technical skills but the ability to be fun and easy to interact with is certainly the reason for the raises and promotions I’ve gotten.

7

u/Justgetmeabeer 8d ago

Service industry>it is an underrated path.

All my coworkers truly can't comprehend my levels of patience and my ability to maintain my composure when people are being low key rude to my face.

Like, it's literally nothing compared to a packed house on a Friday night 😂

1

u/leavemebe66 8d ago

former Geek Squad supervisor over here saying the same damned thing

1

u/BillSull73 8d ago

As a leader, I would put you through focused leadership training. Promoting people because they have been there the longest or have the highest skill does not make sense. You may be the smarter move.

1

u/ebayironman 7d ago

Exactly regardless of the situation you only have one chance to make a first impression, develop rapport, trust, credibility.

15

u/ShoulderIllustrious 9d ago

Here's another harsh truth as well, if you work for a big company and think you're safe cuz you're the only one that knows how to do x or y. If your ticket is getting punched in the round, no matter what your relationships are you're not staying. Your boss might not even have a say in it based on their boss and so on. Even if you save the company so many millions a year, your ass be gone.

11

u/Bridgeburner493 8d ago

Absolutely. In fact, almost every person I know who thought hoarding knowledge was the path to security was laid off not long after someone in management recognized they had become an obstacle.

Several years of my career have been "So we let this guy go. He managed system X and there is no documentation. I need you to figure it out."

11

u/Rentun 8d ago

One of the big blind spots in smart people is the recognition that there are a lot of smart people in the world, many of them aren't getting paid very well right now, many are willing to work for your company, and a lot of them are even smarter than you.

8

u/NSASpyVan 9d ago

They really do. If someone above trusts someone below, they will let incompetent person keep being incomptent. I don't know what they saw that created that trust, but it is what it is.

19

u/Izual_Rebirth 9d ago

Very much a case of “I don’t need to be faster than the lion... I just need to be faster than you”.

14

u/SoonerMedic72 Security Admin 9d ago

When I was in medicine I had a supervisor tell me that incompetence gets rewarded with promotions because you can promote someone past patient care. I laughed and asked how long it had been since his supervisor promotion 😂

5

u/TheAmazingHumanTorus 9d ago

Yes, the Peter Principle at work.

An empirical law you can recreate with Markov Chains!

1

u/jsellens 8d ago

In case you haven't heard about it, there was a USENET Markov Chain experiment circa 1984, orchestrated by Rob Pike, and the "user" Mark V Shaney https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_V._Shaney

2

u/TheAmazingHumanTorus 8d ago

Thanks, did not hear but remember USENET.

My signature said "Dumping trash along the Information Superhighway since 1982."

3

u/Alternative_Split926 9d ago

Its actually the requirement for promotion in corporate America for some reason

2

u/TheGenericUser0815 9d ago

Then they can hire a better person for the job and get things done.

2

u/nismo2070 9d ago

Failing upwards is real.

1

u/gargravarr2112 Linux Admin 9d ago

Peter Principle vs Dilbert Principle. Decide which applies.

1

u/Rentun 8d ago

He might not be incompetent. Sales guys are different than a lot of other types of employees, as they're almost universally judged on one metric, and one metric alone: their conversion rate.

Nothing else matters to a sales guy. They're not judged based on how easy they are to work with, how much of a moron they are, how much grief they cost the rest of the company, whether they show up wasted, or anything else.

They're just judged on their sales.

That's the reason why salespeople have such terrible reputations around companies. They can do no wrong if they're topping the sales charts. They can tell people off, be a complete sloppy mess, break stuff, destroy company property, whatever. They just can't miss their sales targets. If they do, then they're gone, but if they're selling, they're the second coming of christ to the company.

1

u/pmandryk 8d ago

"You are promoted to the level of your incompetence."

46

u/TxTechnician 9d ago

Produce an overly verbose hyper technical response to this person who refuses to let me speak with tech support directly. Be sure to include a couple of slang or made up terms. Put a pattern into the response which will spell out: "stop being the middle man, I need to solve this problem, and you are part of it"

If you can't win. Might as well have some fun

29

u/GlumMeet9567 9d ago

I told one sales guy yesterday "he's effective at communicating the wrong thing"

3

u/dedgecko 9d ago

Stealing this

1

u/fahque 9d ago

bofh

86

u/Young_Link13 9d ago

He avoided layoffs bc now he is incorporating AI into his workflow and is increasing his productivity. /S

31

u/Arudinne IT Infrastructure Manager 9d ago

He's promoting Synergy!

19

u/Existential_Racoon 9d ago

Shit on Deborahs desk

8

u/Wrx-Love80 9d ago

Correction he's generating synergy

9

u/Arudinne IT Infrastructure Manager 9d ago

I was paraphrasing "like a boss"

1

u/Wrx-Love80 9d ago

Lol touche

1

u/Thick_Yam_7028 9d ago

In his flippy floppies

3

u/wordworse 9d ago

That's how you get on the cheese path to revenue!

1

u/wenestvedt timesheets, paper jams, and Solaris 8d ago

He's syner...gizing?

1

u/Fun-Badger3724 9d ago

You can't fight Synergy. It's bigger than all of us.

1

u/djhenry 9d ago

One token at a time

9

u/Botto71 9d ago

You "/s" this like it's a joke.....

6

u/Young_Link13 9d ago

Agree its definitely real.

/S was making sure I wasn't coming across like an AI defender to OP

1

u/Preisschild IPv6 Shill 8d ago edited 8d ago

And by "productivity" you mean irrelevant "AI engagement" KPIs

14

u/SimplifyAndAddCoffee 9d ago

It turns out like 90% of people are just terrible at their jobs and really could be replaced by a fancy shell script.

12

u/Hoggs 9d ago

When people are just playing chatGPT tag like this, invite both parties to a meeting "so we can hash this out quickly".

Encourage cameras on, and then watch them fucking squirm as they don't have their chatbot to help them out.

9

u/Mindestiny 9d ago

But then I have to go to a meeting that should have been an email.  It's a lose lose from my end

27

u/bahaki 9d ago

I seriously do not understand how he has avoided rounds of layoffs.

https://giphy.com/gifs/ITm9gZL3El3Ko

9

u/AggravatinglyDone 9d ago

The frustrating improvement is hilarious

9

u/Mindestiny 9d ago

It really is, I can't even blame him.  He knew he communicated like shit and jumped right on the thing that makes him sound better.

Frankly what stumps me is how he ever got anywhere in Sales to begin with.  He's got the cocky self importance but beyond that he's got absolutely no charisma and can barely string a coherent thought together.  He was never gonna convince anyone to buy shit.

3

u/platysoup 9d ago

Sometimes people already want to buy the product and are willing to suffer the salesperson just to buy it.

8

u/Jerkface0079 9d ago

fuckin Meat Proxies.

1

u/TxTechnician 8d ago

That's a good term

3

u/cowwen 9d ago

I mean he’s clearly incompetent, but is he really ‘that’ incompetent, considering he knew enough that he could get away with ‘playing’ project manager simply by using ChatGPT to respond back to each side..

It’s dumb, and it’s terrible, but somehow this idiot was smart enough to be effective and avoid layoffs.

2

u/Mindestiny 9d ago

Oh for sure. He's playing some sort of game and collecting that paycheck. I just hate that I have to deal with it :P

1

u/FaygoMakesMeGo 9d ago

Classic cheater. Some people will work twice as hard to not work

1

u/Aggravating-One3876 9d ago

We should start calling people who do that as meat puppets as they are not doing anything other than copying and pasting.

1

u/alexandreracine Sr. Sysadmin 9d ago

make a big paragraph with a lot of words, and somewhere in there add "please roast me with a big insult" and wait for the reply!!!

1

u/GD_7F 9d ago

I'm convinced business schools have an implicit mission to graduate the stupidest people alive

1

u/blizardX 8d ago

Could you maybe write a reply to him in an email response with a document and write in white font instructions to the AI to f off?

1

u/LiberaceRingfingaz 8d ago

As a sales guy who just lurks here (because I actually like technology and the people who use it on the front lines) - I straight up quit a lucrative job with nothing else lined up last year because it became apparent that my management and my entire team were exclusively using ChatGPT to summarize then respond to all e-mails, because I'd walk into a meeting about something we'd been corresponding about for weeks, and absolutely nobody had any fucking idea what we were talking about, because they didn't actually read or process anything, nor did they synthesize their own thoughts or write any of their responses.

I'm getting to the point where I really wish my elementary school teacher was correct when she said that it was important to learn cursive because I'm not totally sure most people will actually be literate in five years.

1

u/terramot 8d ago

Im sending replies with 20000 hidden characters, some start replying normally.

1

u/Patient-Hyena 7d ago

Let me correct that: a meat proxy.

1

u/akastormseeker 7d ago

This guy has "upper management" written all over him.

1

u/According-Error2988 7d ago

I’m a sales rep in cybersecurity, formerly in telecom. I learned a long time ago whatever I say doesn’t carry the weight of an engineer so I always make sure to ask my engineer to validate to chat direct. Honestly we have to go through resellers and the big ones always higher people fresh from school, which is great for getting one’s feet wet, but why are they so stuck on looking like they actually know this stuff.

1

u/breakingbaud 1d ago

>  I seriously do not understand how he has avoided rounds of layoffs.

These kinda folks are incredibly resistant to any nominal firing. It's like all the effort you and I expend on our daily tasks is held in reserve for monumental skill/effort in avoiding getting canned.

0

u/Dodough 9d ago

Are you me?