“Have any of you realized how much money we spent on this?!”
“But the results are objectively much worse than if I just did it myself, sir!”
You have 10 minutes to clear your desk and get out. Not a team player!
American employers don’t even give you this anymore. You are escorted away by security and someone else empties your shit into a box and hands it to you in the lobby. They are very afraid of sabotage.
Seems like in the USA everyone gets treated badly all of the time, except the very richest.
Either that, or you make yourself indispensable. What the C-Suites do all day, I have no idea. Whatever it is isn’t working though.
When did they ever? I remember when one of my parents got fired in the 90s, they sent the stuff from the desk in a box. Including the company desk phone!
“No one cares about the quality of your work, only the quantity!”
Someone has to generate the bugs we pay you to fix.
“You’re firing me for using AI to read and respond to your email?”
Basically, yeah.
Its to use the employees to train AI to replace them and they know it.
Nah its just part of the MLM scheme that is “AI”. Its useful because they said it would be useful. Its worth the investment because it cost a lot of money. Once you realize that all these companies care about is revenue and “growth” then it all clicks. It doesnt have to work or be profitable, it just needs to look good to investers.
They will even go as far as firing loads of workers and saying publicly that they “replaced them with AI” while in reality those workers were just doing something that the company was willing to sacrifice. They just replaced something with nothing to make it look like their magic AI can actually do things.
Cory Doctorow put it better than i ever could: https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/07/rah-rah-rasputin/
The whole post is good but i will just quote this section.The “boy genius” story is an example of Silicon Valley’s storied “reality distortion field,” pioneered by Steve Jobs. Like Jobs, Zuck is a Texas marksman, who fires a shotgun into the side of a barn and then draws a target around the holes. Jobs is remembered for his successes, and forgiven his (many, many) flops, and so is Zuck. The fact that pivot to video was well understood to have been a catastrophic scam didn’t stop people from believing Zuck when he announced “metaverse.”
Zuck lost more than $70b on metaverse, but, being a boy genius Texas marksman, he is still able to inspire confidence from credulous investors. Zuck’s AI initiatives generated huge interest in Meta’s stock, with investors betting that Zuck would find ways to keep Meta’s growth going, despite the fact that AI has the worst unit economics of any tech venture in living memory. AI is a business that gets more expensive as time goes on, and where the market’s willingness to pay goes down over time. This makes the old dotcom economics of “losing money on every sale, but making it up in volume” look positively rosy.
Ai definitely can’t replace many (if any) microsoft employees.
I think shouldn’t is better to say than can’t. They are definitely going to try.
Their hope is probably that AI can let current employees bear a greater workload so they can downsize.
Ding! Any gains in productivity will mean more work for less people.
Anyone who can’t see this coming - I have several bridges for sale.
Yeah and what it should mean is the same productivity (or slightly higher) over fewer hours worked. So everyone can get more of their lives back to go be happy and spend time with their friends and families. Or literally whatever else people would rather being doing besides working all the damn time.
This is the material explanation. They expect increased productivity and therefore higher output and therefore higher profits from the same workforce. Not necessarily to downsize. Downsizing or upsizing would be dictated by a combination of the realized productivity gains and the uptake of their products by the market.
Microsoft support was already mostly useless. So, yeah, a useless AI probably could replace that, but it would also probably be more expensive.
Not even the guys who call me on the phone to tell me that I have a virus on my computer?
suits have been replacing long term essential employees with outsourced trash even before in name of global redundancy and efficiency. now they will just the ai buzz word to hide behind.
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Sam Altman makes money from people believing this.
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Right now at least, AI is being more of a headache than anything in coding. Microsoft itself was responsible for one such gaffe in May, as an actual coder had to tell the AI to fix an error, again and again, as each time it’d make a different mistake
I use ChatGPT to write code fairly often. Because I don’t know how. ChatGPT never gets it right the first time, usually doesn’t get it right by the 10th try, and will never stop going down a robot hole of inaccuracy until I give up. The only success I have had in recent memory was getting some custom commands written in Karabiner for my desktop mice.
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Lol
They must really want their workforce to be less efficient while dramatically lowering quality and security across the board.
Hackers are about to have a golden era
Slopsquatting is already taking off
They are banking on the AI will eventually be smart enough that it will replace the workers that fed it.
They should have just invested in NFTs instead.
except programmers are gonna continue with what they were already doing, at most putting a script on copilot to get the metrics
don’t forget that if you don’t turn in the project in time you’re fired, the issues always get thrown at the coder, it’s never the company’s fault
Company I’m at also does the forced AI and it’s all but mandatory now. Problem is as code monkeys we’re past the point of heading down to the Winchester for a pint until it blows over. They’re pushing so hard in order to “not fall behind” that you literally can’t escape it. I think even malicious compliance won’t cut it. And when 8/10 companies that dictate the market say that “this is the future”, then this is the future they’ll make whether we like it or not.
Edit: the silver lining is that we’re working with tools that are better than copilot at generating menial work like generating boilerplate code, unit tests, release notes, walls of text for app documentation etc.
release notes and app documentation:
memes aside, are they blaming the coders or the ai on the slower project turnout?
We’re in the honeymoon phase, shit didn’t hit the fan yet. Problem is we devs are fucked either way. If productivity does increase, then workforce demand will go down especially for entry level devs and seniors will be relegated to vibe coding and fixing AI bugs. If it all goes south then layoffs, because line must go up!
This is ridiculous. Have people seen the recent AI code review from Audacity?? This whole AI bubble needs to burst already.
Got me curious, spill the tea sister!
To sum up, its the tale as old as time (~2023), an llm being entirely useless for a task that could be done by other tooling perfectly.
Edit: a word
Did AI tell you to use “tail” there?
No, that was good old fashioned human stupidity, fixing.
Same at my company. The frustrating part is they want us to use coding assistance, which is fine, but I really don’t code that much. I spend most of my time talking to other teams and vendors, reading docs, filing tickets, and trying to assign tasks to Jr devs. For AI to help me with that I need to either type all of my thoughts into the LLM which isn’t efficient at all or I need it to integrate with systems I’m not allowed to integrate with because there are SLOs that need to be maintained (i.e. can’t hammer the API and make others experience worse).
So it’s pretty much the same as it’s always been. Instead of making a gallon of lemonade out of one lemon I need to use this “new lemonade machine” to start a multinational lemonade business.
The key highlight being: you don’t need more than a gallon of lemonade. I for once wished big corps heard their engineers and domain experts over wall street loving exec’s.
Why would they do that? If they’re making better quarterly results by listening to Wall St, that’s what the system tells them to do.
Apparently no longer optional for their customers either, based on how hard they are pushing it in Office 365, sorry Microsoft 365, no sorry Microsoft 365 Copilot.
The latest change of dumping you into a Copilot chat immediately on login and hiding all the actually useful stuff is just desperation incarnate.
The process to log in to the online portal of Outlook is so bad it’s crossed into comical territory. So much friction, only to shunt you to a full screen
clippycopilot page.I’d be curious to know what the usage statistics are for that page. Like, what could a person possibly accomplish there?
How very corporate of them: people don’t want to do something? Screw finding out why, let’s make it mandatory and poof, problem solved!
At your next job interview ask them if they are results driven or methodology driven. “If I were to take twice as long to do something by using a poorly designed tool will I be rewarded or punished?”
Using AI isn’t optional? How about you review me on the results I produce instead of the tools I use to produce them?
That doesn’t help pump up the Ai bubble unfortunately.
My mistake. Please forgive me. I’ll pray to Supreme Gates and focus on my KPIs.
As if people coding things make ms any money, it’s pure extraction through windows and office and they need ai to be next.
Results are nice, but shortsightedly juicing the appearance of shareholder value for a single quarter is forever… Somehow.
Malicious compliance and use it solely for internal emails.
can i send an AI bot to all my Teams meetings? THAT would actually increase my productivity.
Microsoft is in the process of downsizing to the tune of 3% of its global workforce and rising.
Could be they really are unironically cruising towards a CEO overseeing a bunch of spam bot email accounts they’re treating as headcount.
Yuuuup this is my company too. They’re monitoring our GH Copilot /Cursor usage and they’re going to apply to our performance reviews
Malicious compliance time, full-on Vibe coding, just accept all changes. Who cares about optimisation, readability, or documentation. You’re using AI anything goes.
In the list of things nobody cares about, you forgot “actually do what’s asked”. Use these tool for a very short while and be amazed at how bad it is to do things that are extremely well known and documented.
Really fascinating how this is happening in coordination all of a sudden. I’m practically certain that this is all coming from a small group of investors (maybe even just a couple) who are trying to influence companies as hard as they can into making everyone to start using it.
Corporate monopoly with overpriced products doing corporate shit
It’s called dog-slopping
Dog-fooding, but instead of food, it’s a dog eating its own vomit.
Fine do whatever you want to your shit company stop forcing me to use copilot on everything. This is worse than the failed clippy
Being judged by a fancy magic 8 ball, the future keeps getting better and better.
