By Lenka Pitonakova, PhD, RPC-C
Can AI help with your productivity?
On 20th April, I had the joy of attending and giving a talk at the Google Developers Group Surrey event, this time organized around the topic "Build with AI".
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Over 150 people attended the event, with excellent speakers from Canada and the US talking about programming, AI and productivity.
As a counsellor for the tech industry, I am especially interested in the topic of productivity, and my own talk was about how we can take care of our mental health in fast-paced workplaces first
and, as a result, be more productive in the long run.
In my talk, I challenged myths such as "Crunch time leads to better productivity" and "If you are taking care of yourself, you are not working hard enough". I absolutely enjoyed participating as a speaker. The room was almost completely filled with great audience whose response was overwhelmingly positive. I was honoured by people coming to talk to me during the rest of the event, willing to share their struggle with mental health at their workplace.
In my talk, I challenged myths such as "Crunch time leads to better productivity" and "If you are taking care of yourself, you are not working hard enough". I absolutely enjoyed participating as a speaker. The room was almost completely filled with great audience whose response was overwhelmingly positive. I was honoured by people coming to talk to me during the rest of the event, willing to share their struggle with mental health at their workplace.
I also attended a very interesting talk by Daryl Ducharme, a Developer Advocate for Google Cloud,
about AI tools that can specifically can help programmers get "into the flow" (and I managed to grab a photo with Daryl!).
Daryl argued that if an AI assistant can help you understand existing code and suggests how to write new functionality, you can maintain your focus better, instead of being
distracted by searching for difficult-to-trace information.
While I certainly agree with the premise, I must also say that so far, I have not been impressed by AI coding companions. It seems like their ability to understand complex code bases is rather limited for now, and complex code is exactly where you may need the most help.
There is also the question of whether we'll get into the habit of relying on AI assistants too much - is there a future where most of hard thinking is done for us by AI? Is that something that we want as a society? There are pros and cons to both sides of the argument.
Regardless of whether AI assistants are useful or not, I utterly enjoyed meeting Daryl and sharing some of our programming stories from the "old days" of Action Script.
The whole event organization was amazing and I would like to especially thank Priti Yadav and Sam Huo for having me there and making it such a great experience.
The whole event organization was amazing and I would like to especially thank Priti Yadav and Sam Huo for having me there and making it such a great experience.
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