I currently work as a software engineer, but I've worked in the past in restaurants (dishwasher/prep cook), doordashing, as a musician, as moving help. If AI automates software I'll just do something else.
All of those are basically low wage garbage jobs. We have little to no respect for them as a society, too, to add insult to injury.
If it were up to me, I'd be flipping burgers right now. But I literally can't do that, it doesn't pay enough for that to be a job I can take. Id have to, like, find roommates.
You can do this with some forms of trip insurance. I stared hard at arbitrage there a few years ago but it was too hard to get your money out if you were right.
I'm not talking about getting more in-depth explanations or clarifications about class material, I'm talking about: "If I were you, I would really focus on that exercise on page 47 (wink wink). Also, just skip chapter 4 (wink wink)". This creates a scenario where a student with genuine subject mastery can actually be outscored by someone who simply got the hints.
To answer your question, I don't recall ever going to "office hours", as I was generally a top student with minimal effort and an autodidact, but I learned about it through friends. Having parents who are both professors also gave me a front-row seat to how common this was.
I'm encouraging my folks to try it pretty hard because A) I've personally seen the productivity gains and B) using it is at first deeply weird/uncomfortable. Sometimes you've got to convince people to push through that kind of thing.
They measured 16 developers and called it a "study"? That is amusing. Not to mention it was conducted almost a year ago, the tools have already changed dramatically.
So just run a new study this year. I do think the tools have improved, but it should show up empirically. The only people for whom the urgency of "right now" is present is for the C-suite and investor class who are fighting to make sure they survive, but it might also be a crisis of their own making. Don't confuse your identity as a worker with the identity of the capitalist class.
I think my employer should buy me a laptop and possibly a monitor or two to help my productivity because I subjectively feel they'd be helpful, and I have the market power to insist on tools that I subjectively feel are helpful. If my CEO announced that monitors are super important and everyone will be tracked on monitor space usage going forwards, I would still want to see evidence that this is going to accomplish something.
Your CEO likewise subjectively feels all of their employees using AI will be helpful, and has the market power to insist that their employees use them.
When engineers demand evidence that AI is productive, but not that having laptops and monitors are productive, it screams confirmation bias. "I'm right, you're wrong" as a default prior.
I wouldn't call it confirmation bias, but you're right that is my prior. If an executive and a line worker disagree about whether a tool is useful, I assume unless presented with evidence to the contrary that the executive is wrong.
I would emphasize that I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with the converse either. If an executive is just absolutely convinced that dual monitors are a scam and nobody needs more than their laptop screen, they can run their company that way, and I'm sure there are many successful companies with that philosophy.
> It's like "A study found that parachutes were no more effective than empty backpacks at protecting jumpers from aircraft."
Are you under the impression that we don't bother to empirically prove things that seem obvious, like the safety benefits of parachutes? You don't think parachute manufacturers test their designs and quantify their performance?
There are no randomized controlled trials that parachutes save lives.
This is repeatedly used as an example in the medical community about the limits of randomized controlled trials. This isn't some impression - your impression that such evidence exists is wrong.
There might be some parachute company tests about effective of velocity, etc., but there are no human trials.
> There are no randomized controlled trials that parachutes save lives.
It's a good thing "randomized controlled trials" aren't the only kind of empirical evidence, then.
We know the limits of how fast a human can safely land. Parachute manufactures have to prove that their designs meet the minimum performance specifications to achieve a safe speed. This proof is not invalidated by the fact that it doesn't include throwing some poor bastard with a placebo parachute out of an airplane to demonstrate that he dies on impact.
Also, the answer to your original question is yes. There are numerous studies showing that multiple monitors improve productivity.
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