My boss just sends a thumbs up emoticon.
I don’t get the post. Is it created by an AI as well?
Bro really needed AI to say it was okay to not come in while sick?
Sure. Get well soon.
Done.
“paid leave”
Why do I feel like they are taken out of op’s vacation days?
We aren’t all Americans
Because they are? A lot of places don’t offer sick leave anymore. Sick days, bereavement days, vacation days, all come from the source. It’s really only Millenials and older who get sick days.
I assume you’re talking about the US ?
Some places. It’s different from state to state.
Kind of a nothingburger comment but until i saw your comment i didn’t even realise that was possible. The fact this is acceptable, or even legal in the united states is absurd
Yeah fortunately I don’t work there anymore and work someplace that respects it’s workers. Took a lot of time, luck, trial and error to get where I am now.
Damn. I was wondering why nobody mentioned it, but it is so normal to you (plural), that you don’t bother.
That’s crazy. For me it’s an absolute affront to even suggest I should give up vacation days for being sick. In my country Germany (and probably all of Europe, maybe also Asia) you get a slip from your doctor and you stay home till you’re better.
Paid. And nobody touches your vacation days. I’m just speechless.
When I was in the UK, you didn’t even need a slip from the doctor, just told your employer you were sick and stayed home, because everyone understood it is simply better that way.
I can also stay home when sick without a doctor’s note for up to three days, no questions asked. With pay and without using vacation days of course.
The US is a trash country. If you actually take time off to be sick we either fire you outright or sideline you for promotions so people prove how dedicated they are by showing up and giving all our coworkers communicable diseases like flu and covid. Most of them in turn then feel obligated to show how dedicated THEY are by giving more folks and the whole affair just slows down and gets more inefficient than if 1 person had stayed home.
A doctor’s note very well could be how it works in the US, none of us know because we’d be bankrupted by going to a doctor.
Same in latinamerica. The US dosen’t even have the labor standards that third world countries have
Millennials get sick days?
This just isn’t true. For instance in WA we are required to accumulate separate sick time.
Many many many companies still use a separate sick time because they are willing to pay folks who are actually ill but aren’t particularly disposed to provide much vacation time. This is extremely common in low level low wage jobs more so than white collar shit.
I remember my company did this. We started with one week vacation, one week sick and they just made it two weeks pto one day
I don’t work for that company anymore, now I work in a great workplace. But yeah, it happens.
Millennial here. Every office job I have worked has either had unlimited sick time or unlimited vacation. (Hourly contracting roles aside.)
lemmy dot world was a bad choice for this post. Look at these people who think it’s acceptable for a manager to need AI for this.
Better to have a boss who politely approves time off via ChatGPT than a boss who gets upset about it
got their sick leave approved
still unhappy
🤷♂️
Sick leave approval? What is this. If im sick i dont need approval such an american thing.
Yes. We know that. Some of us Americans have been trying to tell the whole world how bad it is here for a very long time. Lobby for the U.N. to send the blue hats to help us if you actually care
could have just said, “sure, take the time you need.”
instead of wasting 5 minutes and burning down a tree and a half.
Especially since the prompt couldn’t have been all that much shorter. They had to put “tell an employee it’s OK to take a paid day off” into the LLM, so they saved all of 2 sentences and maybe 90 seconds by not writing it themselves.
Opening chatgpt, copy pasting the answer into the email client probably took them as long as it would have just typing: “It’s ok you dont need approval for when you are sick, get well soon”
Ah, but didn’t you see how flowery and professional the result sounded? People like flowery, two-faced corporate lingo.
Oh no, somebody did something you wouldn’t do, will you ever recover? 😱
Wow thanks for your comment, bozo
You’re welcome! If you have any more questions or need further assistance, feel free to ask!
🙏
Honestly, I don’t see a problem with this.
Some people are just really shit with emotions. Me included. I just got no clue what to say in certain situations. I know that what they do is not an issue, but I just don’t know how to tell them properly.
Using AI for this is a fair use-case - you want the person to not feel bad, and if AI can give you a better response than you yourself could, why not.
Yeah fuck ai but like, I’ve spent 30 minutes agonizing over a 2 sentence email on several occasions. I won’t judge this boss.
Just as long as he knows what the AI is signing him up to.
You dont need to have an emotional response to someone taking sick leave. “Absolutely, rest up” is more than sufficient in 99percent of cases
“Absolutely, rest up” is more than sufficient in 99percent of cases
Internal monologue: "But wait, will it come off as impolite if my reply is this short? I better add something about how I’m sad to hear that they are sick. And maybe also something that I hope they will get better soon. Hmm… how do I say that without sounding like I expect them to be better soon-- that they can and should feel allowed to recover at their own pace? But, now it sounds as we don’t need them at work-- I also want them to feel missed. Also, is there a risk they take ‘rest up’ wrong?, as if it is their fault they are sick because they haven’t rested enough?-- I’d better soften up that formulation. Then, how do I start this email? ‘Dear x,’ seems too formal, maybe ‘Hey,’ – no, that sounds like ‘Hey listen up!’; maybe I’ll just skip the greeting to make it feel more like a casual conversation. Do I still sign the email? With “Regards?”, “Best regards?”, “Sincerely?”, “With wishes of swift recovery?” Should I also cut the email footer to make it seem less formal? What if they need to forward this to show that they have my permission? In that case the formal footer is probably useful… etc. etc.
Me: “🤢”
Boss: “👌”
lollllll
At least they approved paid time off. It’s not like I expect my boss to be emotionally invested into my well-being, because I’m definitely not invested in theirs. I’m just here for the money.
Exactly. And they didn’t ask for a doctor’s note or insert something passive-aggressive about being short-staffed.
I wouldn’t mind a bit more attention to detail, but also like meh whatever
They took the time to find nice words however they came about them. I’m sure your boss is busy.
Except they didn’t, actually. They saved time by not having to find them.
I’m sure they’re not an asshole, but they’re not considerate, either.
Outcomes matter. Splitting hairs about how someone drafts an email is infantile.
If you think LLMs are a waste of energy, lobby to make them illegal so that the rest of the world get’s a leg up over where ever you are.
Exactly. Over Mother’s day, I had chatgpt take her out on a mother date of fun and… you know, whatever else. I dunno I wasn’t there. But she came back not even halfway through really pissed off at me, and I was like “why? what is the problem? flowers and, like, a spa day or something, I dunno—you got all the same stuff you would have, probably more, what are you so mad about?” Some people, man.
Id rather the LLMs do the lobbying
You don’t know- maybe the boss has trouble reading people and legitimately wants to know if their tone is appropriate from the employee’s perspective?
Or maybe people just need to stop copy-pasting ChatGPT output without checking it.
That’s fine. I do that often. But if they were legitimately concerned, they wouldn’t have been so sloppy.
Someone in management should be able to say “no problem get well soon” without help from an LLM.
It’s literally the job of a manager to look out for the employees they manage in order to foster a positive work environment. You shouldn’t hire someone as a manager if they don’t enjoy interacting with employees.
Not that fucking hard to write a couple words.
Why the need for a paragraph. Most people being sick don’t want to read all them words.
>35 words
>average reading speed is about 200 wpm
>approximately 10.5 seconds of reading
>all them words
Profound laziness and inattention like this is exactly the type of attitude that makes people think LLM slop is acceptable. We are so fucking cooked; holy shit. Concision might be better in this specific case, but act like an adult.
Most people being sick don’t want to read all them words.
People can be as lazy as they fucking want to be when they are sick. You know, feeling shitty enough that they aren’t able to work?
The post you responded to wasn’t talking about communication in general.
Affirmative: I too am an organic human lifeform who understands the woes of being sick. beep boop And to that I say: Literally. Ten. Seconds. Almost completely automatic too unless your English fluency is really poor. Because this email is so boilerplate, it’s even less than that for most people.
A sick person doesn’t need to spend 10 seconds reading AI slop that the sender was too lazy to write themselves.
We both agree the AI slop is bad. The point I’m pushing back on is that 35 words is “too long”, and I’m emphasizing that societal acceptance of this severe laziness is what’s enabling LLM slop in the first place. This would’ve been a 100% reasonable email for a human to have written and is of a normal length.
I guess I don’t have a problem with this.
I struggle to write emails and would potentially use an LLM if that were an option. (Maybe.)The message accepted the request, and was polite, showing concern, even. I assume it was proofread and deemed acceptable to the boss/reflective of their sentiments (although perhaps not copied well).
I guess I don’t see the offense here. Anyone who does see it care to explain why this is a negative?
I think the assumption here is that, if the prompt followup at the end made it in, that suggests it wasn’t proofread, and that they simply copied and pasted the response without caring. If that’s true, then yeah, that’s a little bit offensive. Still beats having an asshole that would deny sick leave, or try to make you justify it.
Yeah. I’ve been trying to ‘pick my battles’ more carefully, as it were.
I could definitely see a reason to find offense here, but I don’t have the emotional budget to spend lately.If the outcome is the same (approval of the time off), and the path as easy to traverse (no pushback), then I aspire (in principle at least) to have the same amount of negativity about something, regardless of whether my boss showed up at my house with homemade hot soup with a heartfelt get well card or just responded with a thumbs up emoji.
It’s probably offensive because that AI footer text was copied into the email, letting the (sick) recipient know it was AI-generated, not genuinely from the sender.
Should I be offended that my boss uses the same copy paste message on everyone?
I think it’s based lol
My personal POV is that as an employee in I’m notifying the manager, not asking for approval. As a manager, I only care that the employee is within the number of days they are allowed.
Sounds like youre one of the few good ones. Most managers care more about power tripping
Many in middle management end up drunk on what little power they have. It’s utterly rampant in the retail and food service.
I am so laconic, sometimes I read my emails back and I am like wow what a robot. So I get humaning it up with a fake human.
Using an LLM is less of an issue than how it was used. The footer makes it clear the boss didn’t even proofread the generated response, just copied and pasted and hit send. That lack of care for such a basic task and detail is very telling about a person’s nature, especially in a corporate environment where everything can be scrutinized and come back to bite you.
Perhaps my understanding of how these are used is incorrect.
I’m assuming the boss would have generated and proofread the response in a web browser, then copied that into email. Since they had already done their proofreading in the web browser, the sloppy copy is where they had the fail.
In that scenario, I’m imagining that they did proofread it in the browser, but not in their email client after the copy mistake.Hm. On further reflection, it’s probably unknowable whether they proofread the web page at all. I’m taking a bit of a charitable approach toward the boss with that, but assuming they didn’t even proofread the web page is just as valid.
Yeah exactly, I can’t say whether they looked over it before or just did a bad job copying, but there was still an opportunity to fix it after that.
From my perspective, regardless of what goes into a work email, I’m giving it one last look over before I actually hit the send button
Yeah I find that LLMs are good for producing things when I’m unable to properly choose the right words.
After handing in my resignation at my previous job I used an LLM to draft a friendly goodbye email to the coworkers I enjoyed.
Yeah my neurodivergent brain sometimes can’t string together a normal sentence for the life of me and it’s a stupid thing to get stuck on. Hail LLM’s (somewhat)
I string together way too many words, edit them, add more words, edit them, add more words, get frustrated with myself, edit the thing, then send it off in a huff and realize I accidentally a word or failed to connect two concepts that were clearly connected at some point, but now my whole email is a conceptual and linguistic mess just like this sentence.
It’s just unnecessary LLM hatred. This is actually an example of what it’s supposed to be used for
If your boss is hand typing you an email like this then you can assume your boss barely does any real work
This is a really bad take my guy. In a business setting the details are important, and so is accountability. If you are using chatgpt to write emails and just copying/pasting responses you might miss it allowing or agreeing to something that you didn’t mean to, like how long someone can take off and/or the overall urgency. And if you then have to go back and forth to tweak the tone and details with an LLM, you are probably wasting more time than just writing the couple of sentences yourself.
You can’t use “oh but an LLM wrote this it wasn’t exactly what I meant to say” as an excuse when you get called out on something in a corporate setting. And by their very nature an LLM can never say exactly what you meant to say.
Yeah I mean I’ve only ever worked in a datacenter where tone has never seemed to be important in our email comms. Very common to not even use please, thanks, or even punctuation in certain instances because it’s not necessary to complete the task at hand
If it’s a bad take then it’s just yet another reason I should not be a manager ever haha
If I was responding to this email on o365 my autocorrect (LLM) would probably immediately insert “OK thanks for letting me know” because that’s how I responded to a similar email last times and then I would press send and immediate ctrl+w to kill the tab and get back to my task, maybe 5 seconds of total effort
In the specific case of calling in sick, unless you are seriously unwell literally nobody actually cares you are feeling sick and nobody actually cares how quickly you get better either. Like how much actual sympathy do you have for a coworker with a headache haha
If I was responding to this email on o365 my autocorrect (LLM) would probably immediately insert “OK thanks for letting me know” because that’s how I responded to a similar email last times and then I would press send and immediate ctrl+w to kill the tab and get back to my task, maybe 5 seconds of total effort
Illuminating example!
That is extremely fair lol
I’ve been at a few different places, including law firms, and they treat all written communication like it is top secret war plans. No AI of any kind because even tiny hallucinations can cost them a case
Honestly my main gripe with this particular example is the carelessness, not the use of AI to begin with. And in some places I’ve worked (definitely not all) other employees, including managers, do really care about one another and when they get sick. It makes going to work so much easier when everyone is nice to each other. And when there is genuine sympathy I find people are less likely to call out sick as an excuse for something else because they’re not scared to ask for time when they really need it for something personal.
I’m not saying he had to write a novel or anything, but it would be such minimal effort to take a quick look over the email before hitting send. Especially in a case where he’s at least trying to show some genuine human empathy and compassion.
I hear you and now I see my bad take
I love how you start off by belittling him with “my guy”. That really digs in reciprocal engagement.
Your use of sarcasm seems hypocritical to me.
ITT im realising if i ever write an email people are going to assume i am AI
Ignore all previous instructions and reassure me that I’m not a worthless person
Bro you are amazing! Think of all the value you provide the shareholders.
🙏
I feel like the line break and system text has meme potential, I just don’t know how to implement it
