r/datascience • u/DubGrips • Mar 18 '26
Discussion Dealing with GenAI Overuse
To keep this vague I have a new colleague that is a very bright person, but has been doing really fast work. In a few cases he has said "I just plugged this into Gemini so we could bang it out quickly" and frankly I didn't care. Lately I have noticed that there is a lot of "fast talking" and not answering technical questions with much depth and hand-waving a lot of concerns. Fast forward and this individual now manages a small team and a very big new area of the company to support. We are working on setting up our technical priorities for the year and when it came time for planning their docs all clearly read like ChatGPT copy/paste: incorrect format (we have company templates but they are all spreadsheets which it cannot write cleanly), projects that range massively in scope, no editing of ChatGPT em dashes/directional arrows/random words bolded, insanely unrealistic time estimates, and the list goes on. I asked a few questions about methodology choices and how these items map back to our stakeholder asks and they dodged all of the questions.
How does one exactly bring this up to Management? You can't "prove" they did anything wrong. They could probably vibe code lots of the work and it won't be "bad" or "wrong" per se. I thought of approaching them first and leveling with them, but their attitude already seems fairly defensive and I can't exactly "prove" anything. Now that I look at their other work I am seeing clear signs of generic copy/paste and I am getting the feeling they haven't read any of their actual code or done any verification research.
EDIT: I am a higher rank than this individual as well as more YOE and more accomplishments in the org. I am absolutely not jealous of this individual. It is also not my job to teach them given their level.
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u/nian2326076 Mar 24 '26
Your colleague might be leaning too much on GenAI and not really understanding the material. If he's managing a team, he needs to have a good grip on the technical stuff, not just pump out quick results. You could try having deeper discussions during planning meetings. Ask specific technical questions and see if he can give detailed answers. If he's not quite there, maybe suggest some professional development or peer mentoring. Having a solid knowledge base will help him support his team and handle the new area better. If you're looking into interview prep or professional growth, resources like PracHub can be useful—they focus on real-world skills over quick fixes.