STOP PRETENDING

6 months ago I decided that I wanted to quit my job. I wasn’t (and probably also am not currently) super sure of exactly what caused it, but it was probably a bunch of different things that made the vibe slowly get worse and worse. The most obvious reason was a change in how I was being treated by management (DISCLAIMER: if you are part of “management”, plz close this post and go do something else, thank!!). I think as technical people we (the team) used to be pretty free to choose our own priorities, which made work quite enjoyable. I would think of something that I thought was “important” and I’d do it. Cool, I win, company wins (or not, but that’s not my fault).

I’ve recently been noticing more and more cases of people pretending to be/know something they aren’t/don’t know. It might be because of moving into this more “corporate” side of work, in which I interact with management more, or maybe just because of the effect AI has had in the ways that I perceive the quality of things people do/say.

Pretending to know stuff is a survival instinct. I’ve obviously done it before as a way to stop the other person from thinking less of me. It’s harmless when you are lying about stuff that doesn’t matter. The problem starts when you affect other people, and work is definitely an example. I’ve realized that pretending is extremely common among people that are scared of losing their jobs, as obviously they don’t want to show their incompetency. The funny thing is that if you work with competent people it has exactly the opposite effect. You obviously don’t know what CSP is, don’t pretend you do. We can tell.

AI has created a trend of serial pretentiousness everywhere, and its a bit interesting to witness. I think it used to be fairly difficult to tell someone was lying about their competences, probably because the intensity and volume of such lies would be a lot lower than currently. It’s just too easy to win an argument on the internet by asking AI to argue for you, or to “not work” by asking AI to work for you. The thing is, AI will sometimes (and maybe I’m being too generous here) make pretty bad mistakes, your “job” is to recognize those mistakes, but I guess you can’t if you don’t know wtf you are doing in the first place. If you can’t recognize the mistakes, such generated “work” becomes “good work” and that’s what you tell the world you did.

AI made people perceive themselves as capable of anything, it’s obviously just one prompt away. This makes most people think they can get away with pretending more. It obviously looks extremely stupid to a person that understands what you are pretending to know: if you look at the AI generated drawings a facebook grandma is generating, do you think they are “artist quality” drawings? Obviously not. This is not because AI can’t generate images of such quality, but rather because there is absolutely no knowledge of what makes a good quality drawing in the first place. The “filter” is broken.

Back to my old job: My non-technical boss started giving out technical opinions, because obviously he’s capable now, right? And obviously the Executives, that also don’t know shit, will be like oh awesome this guy is doing so much smart stuff. No one in the chain understands what’s smart or valuable, slop = quality. Cool, if you want to do quality stuff, now the slop generating coworker is going to get 10x more bonuses and perks than you because he’s outperforming his Q1 KPIs or whatever. Old corporate environments value volume. In the “post-LLM era” volume is worthless, and obviously these businesses are going to suffer from it.

Well anyways, I quit my job in early January, and have a new one now. Fortunately, my new boss(es) know their stuff, which makes my life a lot less miserable, but I think there isn’t much escape from the slop revolution right now, and I still get a bit affected. I had a super weird conversation today with a coworker (who is not my manager, fortunately) about a vulnerability I had found in an application that involved misconfigured access-control-allow-origin and access-control-allow-credentials headers. He started asking me something that didn’t make much sense, which is totally fine, I don’t really care if you know how these headers/CORS work or not as long as you are willing to learn. The vulnerability would have been exploitable if the authentication token was stored in the browser’s cookies but in this case it was stored in localStorage, which made it a lot “less impactful”. He proceeded to affirm that I was wrong, and that localStorage was accessible cross-origin, which is literally false, to which I obviously countered. He then literally said “Haha I know, I was testing you” as if he knew what I was going to answer. He very clearly had no idea of what I was talking about.

I am not your boss, I cannot take your job from you. Why are you wasting my time asking me stupid shit. You are not superior even with your prompting skills or whatever.

What are you scared of anyway? Losing your job?
Are you not capable of finding another one?
Why is your job “hacking” if you can’t hack?
Stop pretending. You have already lost.