So I am 25M. I finished my masters in AI last year and joined my company about 8 months ago as a junior engineer. Its a mid sized tech place with around 4000 employees and most of them are software. The job felt pretty boring compared to my research work. I tried applying for senior and staff roles but kept getting rejected besides at early stage startups which annoyed me a lot.
So on my own time I started secretly working on an AI tool. I didnt tell anyone because I thought they would just stop me or say I was wasting time. I trained it only on public github repos first. The tool basically looks at engineering patterns like code clarity regressions you introduce architecture choices best practice following and it makes a score. Theres even a leader board that shows trends in who writes clean stable stuff and who tends to add issues that need fixing later. And it also gives advise before you push new contributions so its not just judging past work.
When it started working well I showed it to the director of my org. He really liked it and asked me to try it on our actual company code base since most code is visible internally. It worked even better than we expected. He promoted me to tech lead for this tool. Teams started using it and managers said the explanations really helped with evaluation and helping people grow. Folks across the org said it made their workflow smoother.
Now they are preparing to introduce it to other orgs company wide which is honestly wild to me.
But theres this one woman from my old team she is 27F. We used to be friendly and talk a bit and get coffee. Now she kind of glares at me or ignores me flat out. She is 4th from last on the leader board and yeah you can sort it in descending order so its possible to see that. But I never called her out I never joked about her score nothing. And no one has gotten punished or fired or even scolded over this. Its literally just a tool to show patterns and help people improve and while it is quite accurate just because you committed something doesn’t mean you are responsible if it is of low quality since you might have been forced to do it that way by following a superiors instructions.
I really dont know why she is acting like I built the entire thing to humiliate her. I didnt even think about who would be at the bottom or the top until after it got rolled out.
AITA for making this tool and taking the promotion even though one coworker now thinks I did something against her personally. The dashboard literally has a disclaimer saying it isnt meant for shaming or blame and is only for improvement and analysis.
you DO know your bosses are likely to use this perceived increase in efficiency to reduce staffing & that your leaderboard makes it super-easy for them to pick targets, right? can’t really make a judgement based off your post since there’s basically no real info on anything besides what you’re working on, but i can see how it could make you unpopular with your coworkers. Even if this coworker isn’t at immediate risk personally with 3 others ranking lower, she also might just not want to see coworkers laid-off to help profits increase a few pennies per share
If by “picking targets” you mean identifying inefficient or ineffective employees who need support in improving their skills, then it can be a very useful tool. If they choose not to take advantage of the opportunity to improve their performance, there are plenty of more ambitious workers ready to step into those roles.
read OPs reply. it’s not even doing that accurately
As with any ranking system, someone will be at the top and someone will be at the bottom
NTA but you’re definitely not going to be the most popular guy when the company starts downsizing employees coincidentally located at the bottom of your AI tool’s ranks.
In the annoucenemt when they said they would roll it out company wide they said they wouldn’t.
So you were born yesterday.
I have put a lot of effort to make it fun like leetcode and Hackerrank so it doesn’t have the surveillance vibe unlike a lot of the existing stuff.
People like it’s suggestions better than Co-Pilot and how it integrates with our company specific stuff
That just means that the reason they give for firing those people will officially be something else.
>The tool basically looks at engineering patterns like code clarity regressions you introduce architecture choices best practice following **and it makes a score. Theres even a leader board that shows trends in who writes clean stable stuff and who tends to add issues that need fixing later.** And it also gives advise before you push new contributions **so its not just judging past work.**
>*Teams started using it and managers said the explanations really helped with evaluation and helping people grow. Folks across the org said it made their workflow smoother.*
You should have made the tool without the part I bolded. The leaderboard is a really bad idea. If it had been just “The tool basically looks at engineering patterns like code clarity regressions you introduce architecture choices best practice following, and gives advise before you push new contributions”, that would have been sufficient to achieve everything I put in italics.
You can put as many disclaimers as you want on a leaderboard about it not being intended for shaming anyone, but if the ranking is between “who writes clean stable stuff” and “who tends to add issues that need fixing”, it will invariably become about shaming people – and sooner or later also about who gets to keep their jobs.
>Its literally just a tool to show patterns and help people improve and while it is quite accurate just because you committed something doesn’t mean you are responsible if it is of low quality since you might have been forced to do it that way by following a superiors instructions.
Superiors can be very forgetful when it comes to which instructions came from them, and just see the “low quality”…
NTA, but you do sound very naive.
YTA, stack ranking is the worst, it’s ineffective at creating better workplaces/work output and pits coworkers against each other unnecessarily.
You wouldn’t be the asshole if you’d omitted the leaderboard, especially since you yourself say in the comments that someone’s leadership can tank their stats. If it were truly about improvement there wouldn’t be a number attached. You’ve just exposed your company as a toxic place to your coworker and she might be mad because you disillusioned her from liking her job.
YTA for studying AI in the first place.
YTA in a big way for deliberately building an AI tool that has a negative impact on humans.
YTA especially because you’ve done it so you can win praise from your paymasters.
YTA because you think at 25 you have nothing to learn.
What you’ve just described is textbook assholery. You’ve made this tool without a single thought about its impact.
Next time listen to the product designers and strategists whose role it is to consider the implications of releasing a product, and resist the damaging ideas of the psychopathic capitalists that run businesses.
YTA both for making the layoff list and for being that classic person that asks for judgment and when the majority declares them yta, has to argue and justify their actions instead of accepting that they are indeed, an asshole.
you don’t want judgment. you want praise.
>Theres even a leader board that shows trends in who writes clean stable stuff and who tends to add issues that need fixing later.
Got it. So you wrote a tool that penalizes people for tackling difficult problems, and rewards them for fixing minor bugs. Can’t imagine what will go wrong with that!
YTA