AI
Research: The Hidden Penalty of Using AI at Work
The researchers included over 28K software engineers at a company and found that, despite rolling out a state-of-the-art AI coding assistant, only 41% had used it and fewer older engineers (39%) and women (31%) used it. There was another experiment where 1,096 engineers were asked to evaluate the same snippet of Python code — one group was told it was AI-assisted, and the other was not. The reviewers believed the engineers assisted with AI had 9% less competence despite reviewing identical work; 13% less competent for female and 6% less for male. The competence-penalty cost is when the “reluctance to use new tools actually reflects rational self-preservation.” Social identity threat is when members of stereotyped groups use AI, which reinforces existing doubts about their competence. Solutions include: finding your organizations penalty hotspots, converting influential skeptics (usually the same demographics facing the highest penalties), and not flagging work as “AI-assisted.”
Culture
Why Kindness Isn’t a Nice to Have
- Kindness is “the proactive effort to support someone else’s growth, well-being, or success; it is a set of observable, intentional actions.”
- “Niceness is about avoiding discomfort, staying agreeable, sidestepping hard conversations, and letting things slide. Kindness means the opposite.”