16 ms·

Serious question: if I were to use this, would Microsoft collect analytics on me (code written, keystrokes, mouse movements, sleep/work schedule, productivity m

by bogwog 5y ago

Serious question: if I were to use this, would Microsoft collect analytics on me (code written, keystrokes, mouse movements, sleep/work schedule, productivity metrics, etc) and monetize that data by using it to build some AI product like Copilot, or build a productivity dashboard so managers can fire people for not being productive enough (like Xsolla did), use it to serve me ads, or do some stupid/irresponsible/unethical thing with it that will ultimately end up hurting me in the long run? Because I feel like the answer to that is yes, and I can already see myself in the future writing something angry in the comments section of an article on HN that exposes some evil/stupid shit Microsoft did with this, or happened as a result of this. I'm not against the concept of using a thin client for development, but it just doesn't seem smart to me do it in such a way where you have to place trust in a company that, throughout their entire existence, has consistently proven that you should not trust them, because they have no incentive to (and thus never will) act in your best interests. It's like if Facebook released their own web browser and "promised" to respect your privacy; you'd be an idiot to believe them.

vxNsr 5y ago
> It's like if Facebook released their own web browser and "promised" to respect your privacy; you'd be an idiot to believe them. Is this satire? A little too on the nose, you know cause Google…
q-rews 5y ago
I’m surprised Facebook hasn’t yet. I kinda assume that Facebook isn’t a browser on iOS simply because that’d make it a 18+ app.
donny2018 5y ago
I don’t know if this is a good indicator or not, but Codespaces costs money. So there is a non-zero probability that you are not the product.
- sneak 5y ago
  Windows also costs money and is chock full of spyware.
- SamuelAdams 5y ago
  Businesses can both charge money for a service and sell / analyze user data. The two aren’t mutually exclusive.
  - donny2018 5y ago
    I agree. But as a rule of thumb, if someone gives you the service for free, they have no choice but to collect value from you by other means. Whereas when you pay money for the service, the business does have a choice not to sell your data. Either way, I guess we need to read the terms to be sure.
    - tshaddox 5y ago
      If a company has a certain type of investors or shareholders, they may have no choice but to collect value from you all means possible regardless of how much value they are already collecting.
      - munk-a 5y ago
        One very underrated (or overrated depending on your pessimism) way to deliver value to customers is by offering privacy as one of the products you deliver. The issue is that privacy is hard to prove and so most claims of privacy are accepted at face value and many proclaimed privacy minded services are very much the opposite under the hood. This, I think, is a place where we need some regulation to codify some different forms of privacy and give the government a big stick to bop companies over the head when they violate those definitions. We could potentially manage the definitions as an industry group - but we'd need the government to get the big stick.
        Willish42 5y ago
        > This, I think, is a place where we need some regulation to codify some different forms of privacy and give the government a big stick to bop companies over the head when they violate those definitions. I 100% agree with you, but doubt this will ever happen in a heavily pro-surveillance government in an effective corporatocracy. Therefore, I think open source can and needs to do better in providing free competition against potentially-dystopian closed-source alternatives
- bogwog 5y ago
  Unfortunately, that rule doesn't apply to Microsoft and the other tech giants.
- gtyras2mrs 5y ago
  > Codespaces costs money. It's going to be paid by your employer which leads to GP's concern about, > or build a productivity dashboard so managers can fire people for not being productive enough (like Xsolla did) Which is more likely. If your employer sets something like this up - will they use it to calculate a productivity score and use that for lay offs? Seems rather probable to me.
  - heleninboodler 5y ago
    My company is stupid, but not that stupid. We already have vast amounts of data about checkins that could, in the hands of a stupid person, be used to create stupid developer metrics for performance evaluation, and yet I've never once in my many cross-team performance ranking meetings heard a manager who had the gall to trot out "lines of code" as a serious metric for comparing people. And I'm at a FAAMNG. ;)
- EMM_386 5y ago
  Businesses rarely ever leave money on the table. If they can sell the product AND sell developer productivity metrics to management, they will.
- vanpythonista 5y ago
  Microsoft Outlook/Office 365 costs money, but they still analyze your activity and report so called "productivity score". Maybe not sell, but I have no doubt they will analyze the data if they can.
yellowbanana 5y ago
The fact that they will be able to do it, is problem, we should not put ourselves in position to rely on their future morality. Github at this point needs to be open source, atleast then they would be an easier way out.
- anthony_r 5y ago
  Lol, like Microsoft paid the billions to give it out now for free. Besides, do you want your index funds to do well? Because that's exactly where the proceeds go to.
  - greyhair 5y ago
    More than that, github was floundering economically, and Microsoft bought them to ensure continuity, because Microsoft was the single largest user. Don't want to rely on Microsoft for GitHub? The underlying 'git' is open source. Just deal with your git repos raw. No one is forcing you to use github.
    - anthony_r 5y ago
      > More than that, github was floundering economically I do not think we actually know that. Was there any release of any financial data? Also, part of the "beauty" of the modern "tech" giants is that they manage to find alternative sources of revenue, in some cases (notably Google and Facebook) completely replacing the old school user subscription revenue. By and large people seem to be OK selling their data for either a price reduction or complete price removal for services. It is what it is.
    - bastardoperator 5y ago
      This is completely false. Microsoft bought GitHub to appeal to developers. They had TFS and Azure DevOps with Git for years before the purchase. I'm also 100% certain Microsoft was/is not GitHub's largest customer.
    - hypothesis 5y ago
      >More than that, github was floundering economically, and Microsoft bought them to ensure continuity, because Microsoft was the single largest user. Was it a common knowledge at the time? I don’t recall seeing info about MS being largest user and unfortunately their newspost on acquisition returns an error… [1] https://news.microsoft.com/2018/06/04/microsoft-to-acquire-github-for-7-5-billion/ https://news.microsoft.com/2018/06/04/microsoft-to-acquire-g...
kjksf 5y ago
If they do, the competition is just a click away: https://www.gitpod.io/ https://www.gitpod.io/
- theturtletalks 5y ago
  Stackblitz Webcontainers[0] look promising too. I read the creators plan on open-sourcing the underlying tech once more mature. 0. https://blog.stackblitz.com/posts/introducing-webcontainers/ https://blog.stackblitz.com/posts/introducing-webcontainers/
- onemoresoop 5y ago
  Yes for all of us but all corporate clients will flock to github to benefit from those surveillance capabilities.
- nextaccountic 5y ago
  Unfortunately it's your company that signs up to this sort of thing, not you.
- Buttons840 5y ago
  How about moving all our code off GitHub while we're at it? In this worst case scenario (which hasn't happened yet), I'm sure GitHub would expect the good will of open source projects and contributors while simultaneously being the boot on their face in the workplace.
  - endgame 5y ago
    I've been on sourcehut for a while now. It's great.
  - FpUser 5y ago
    I have projects on github because some of my clients requested it. My own projects stay off. Other than renting physical servers I do not use a single piece of software for my own business that forces me to subscribe and be online.
slownews45 5y ago
If a business is paying for this product, then THEY (not you) are the customer. And in that context - yes, Microsoft may be asked or build a product for managers to manage their workforce, particularly if remote. This could involve presence tracking, engagement tracking (ie, do you open alerts / read your bug reports) etc. One approach would be to monitor what management considers productive / successful employees and also on employees who have gone on PIP's - then train the AI on that data set. You'd then be able to drive various alerts to manager and HR dashboards (ie, if a manager was failing to address alerts / manager their team it would be surfaced up a level). Dystopia may be coming indeed. Remember, usually the key issue is not if product is a paid product, but are YOU paying for it. If not - someone else is the revenue source, and Microsoft et al will serve them. Maybe the individual licenses will not have this "management" layer add-on as an option. But I think a very real chance of something like this occurring! If not right now eventually. In Sci-fi this is an inevitability (monitored through a smart watch or something etc).
- tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
  I really hope that if this happens, DPAs bring the hammer down on everyone involved (both MS and companies using it) in a useful timeframe (i.e. before it has become socially acceptable because "everyone is doing it" and there are no consequences).
  - atsaloli 5y ago
    What’s a DPA, please?
    - paulrjones 5y ago
      Data Protection Authority
    - jabo 5y ago
      Data Processing Agreement: https://gdpr.eu/data-processing-agreement/ https://gdpr.eu/data-processing-agreement/
politelemon 5y ago
Context is hugely important, and equally important is not to get sucked in by the HN echo chamber - that is, consider the MS of _now_ as opposed to that of 15 years ago which HN likes to bash (and give a free pass to other companies doing nefarious things). The FB example is considering the FB of _now_ and not 15 years ago. In terms of the biggest companies in the sector, MS has been doing much more for developers and developer productivity than others. At the same time it's not a monolith and so you should not expect boyscout behavior either. Privacy is a concern, and the onus is on you the user to ensure that you remain in control of your data. When using a service (any service), the answer is to always be ready to bail at a moment's notice. That means using source control and not tying yourself to a specific ecosystem.
- leppr 5y ago
  The MS that's killing their own single most popular product, Windows, with anti-user features, is the MS of now. Releasing VS code and WSL doesn't redeem their sins.
  - Barrin92 5y ago
    is this not another example of the 'HN echo chamber'? Is Windows market share budging? Windows currently is by far not the worst iteration of the OS and nobody gives a crap about anti-user features which everyone has had to deal with for literally decades
    - scraptor 5y ago
      The fact that microsoft's user hostile moves haven't affected windows' market share does very little to reassure people that they won't pull similar shit with any other product.
    - jorams 5y ago
      > nobody gives a crap about anti-user features which everyone has had to deal with for literally decades The one thing that used to set Microsoft apart from the likes of Google and Facebook was that their main product, Windows, was not anti-user. No matter what you thought about the OS or Microsoft's business practices, it was a paid piece of software that worked for the user. Windows now is filled with user-hostile features and it works for MS instead. And they don't even grant us the courtesy of giving it away for free. Market share or the fact that the public at large isn't punishing them for it doesn't mean anything. It was already clear that most people are willing to walk headfirst into a dystopia.
MichaelRust 5y ago
You think? I'm just completely drained and I want Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook, to get off my lawn. https://rentry.co/areweweloveopensauceyet https://rentry.co/areweweloveopensauceyet
jmartrican 5y ago
I would like for MS to collect information that would make the product better. If there is a feature that I am always using, i want them to know it so that they can either improve it or not get rid of it.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Davertron 5y ago
So, maybe? But these products already exist. Your company doesn't need to pay Microsoft to get that data, they can install stuff on your work machine and get all that info right now.
908B64B197 5y ago
> code written, keystrokes, mouse movements, sleep/work schedule, productivity metrics, etc That's not the most valuable info at all. What would be valuable is to know which ecosystem, languages and tech people are investing time and resources into. These are the ones you need to prioritize for your dev tools. For instance, Microsoft decided to invest in supporting Rust https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dev-environment/rust/rust-for-windows https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dev-environment/rus... as well as making sure .NET works on all OS. > or build a productivity dashboard so managers can fire people for not being productive enough (like Xsolla did) When a competitor decides to start using these, it's awesome. You get a nice window of opportunity to poach high performers.
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
As slownew45 points out, Github does not make money from individuals who use it for free. Of course such use will become increasingly difficult over time for Microsoft pinheads to justify from a business perspective. Telemetry, full-on surveillance and ultimately subtle manipulation of individual software authors seems an obvious choice to try to justify why Github should continue to allow non-paying individuals to use their repository. The Facebook web browser. Never say never. If we knew what we know today about privacy, we would have pointed out the idiocy of anyone choosing to use a web browser released by Google.
- laumars 5y ago
  > The Facebook web browser. Never say never. If we knew what we know today about privacy, we would have pointed out the idiocy of anyone choosing to use a web browser released by Google. Google were already making money off targeted ads at that point. There was even an outcry about GMail scanning people’s emails several years before Chrome was released. But you could probably argue that we didn’t fully appreciate just how bad things would get at that stage. Many of us were just happy to see Microsoft get some competition.
- Cyberdog 5y ago
  > we would have pointed out the idiocy of anyone choosing to use a web browser released by Google. I still try to, but it’s a lost battle already. (Don’t use Chrome, BTW.)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
resters 5y ago
Yes, and that is how they will train the AI that will replace us all. It's a brilliant strategy, so I can't help but play along.
MichaelMoser123 5y ago
If your employer decides that they need such an analytics dashboard, one that is spying on every keystroke, then they will have one. That one doesn't depend on you working on a laptop, or in a remote environment - the company owns and is administrating that laptop, and they can install everything they regard as necessary. Therefore the real question is if Codespaces is helping to get your job done; I guess that depends on the complexity and structure of the code, the complexity of the build environment/how you work with the CI environment and how the project is being deployed. I guess that this complex of issues will increasingly dictate how things will get done - if these are too complex, then you are better off with a remote environment.
- MichaelMoser123 5y ago
  On second thought, the move to remote environments may have an interesting side effect: if people are no longer familiar with setting up their local development environments, then it will be a bit harder to set up their own side projects to tinker and try out new stuff; in a reality where everyone is working on a remote/preset environment, we will have just another small, but very significant inhibition to deal with our own side projects. now there is a bit of an irony - github helped open source, now this development will be very helpful to corporate software developers, but might turn out to be harmful to open source as such.
- MichaelMoser123 5y ago
  Upon re-examination: if github/microsoft is owning the analytics data gathered from monitoring the keystrokes, then they are a third party, and could possibly make that data available across time; so that a prospective employer can get a view on past performance of a candidate, or the new employer will have access to analytics data gathered on you while working at a previous company. Now that one has the potential to make the whole thing much more sinister. There might be a big difference between the situation where your current employer has a keylogger on you, as compared to the keylogger sitting in the cloud. Grandparent poster Bogwog has a solid argument here. It all depends if the industry will act this way or not, I still hope that there is some level of desency left somewhere, because being too paranoid about all of it will not get me anyway either. Also the utility of all this analytics data is limited, for example they could possible get the 'number of lines of code' written by someone, but it is impossible to judge how essential all these lines of code were to the business. Also there would be a significant backlash, if they get too invasive on the privacy of developers. (that's the moment for the video where Steve Balmer is flipping out on stage and shouting 'developers' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I14b-C67EXY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I14b-C67EXY )
_eko_f_3324 5y ago
They already do with Teams. Of course they will do it here sooner or later as well.
baby 5y ago
Top comments always have to be so negative every time there’s something cool on the front page…
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  That's because people here have grown up and see the world for what it is, how products like these play out, how incentives around them are structured. Most of the cool things like this are bait. Seriously. It takes extreme naivety to take a SaaS business at face value today. Patterns of exploitation are well-established and easy to spot. Once you see this a couple of times, including in offerings you got so excited about - or worse, you get burned by them personally - it's hard to be anything but bitchy about tech. The comments may be negative, but the bigger problem is that they're also not wrong.
- raxxorrax 5y ago
  Look how tech is employed against lower wage workers. It is a good idea to be extremely vigilant about anything "reporting". I think people working in tech have a responsibility to not behave like 14-year old fangirls.
thayne 5y ago
> It's like if Facebook released their own web browser and "promised" to respect your privacy; you'd be an idiot to believe them. Replace Facebook with another major ad company, and you are basically describing the most popular browser right now.
thih9 5y ago
Semi serious answer: couple of years ago we devs used to joke about putting ourselves out of business by teaching AIs how to code. I guess the joke's no longer funny; I also guess current situation shouldn't be a surprise.
raxxorrax 5y ago
The business incentive is quite easy. It is to evaluate code monkeys and to quantify development efficiency in the eyes of a salesmen, those that approve projects at Microsoft and possibly GitHub. They want to offer services to large corporate entities and they deem this valuable. Call it collaborative and something-cloud and you have your green-lit project. The road is to quantify the work in small packages is a decent one though, dissect a problem until only trivial tasks remain. Still, I think your intuition is pretty much on point. But with anything, just take the features you like. If your business can dictate this for you, search for other businesses. Contrary to popular belief, there are a lot of those, although pay might indeed be a bit lower.
_pmf_ 5y ago
Of course.

by bogwog 5y ago

vxNsr 5y ago

> It's like if Facebook released their own web browser and "promised" to respect your privacy; you'd be an idiot to believe them. Is this satire? A little too on the nose, you know cause Google…

q-rews 5y ago

I’m surprised Facebook hasn’t yet. I kinda assume that Facebook isn’t a browser on iOS simply because that’d make it a 18+ app.

donny2018 5y ago

I don’t know if this is a good indicator or not, but Codespaces costs money. So there is a non-zero probability that you are not the product.

sneak 5y ago
Windows also costs money and is chock full of spyware.
SamuelAdams 5y ago
Businesses can both charge money for a service and sell / analyze user data. The two aren’t mutually exclusive.
- donny2018 5y ago
  I agree. But as a rule of thumb, if someone gives you the service for free, they have no choice but to collect value from you by other means. Whereas when you pay money for the service, the business does have a choice not to sell your data. Either way, I guess we need to read the terms to be sure.
  - tshaddox 5y ago
    If a company has a certain type of investors or shareholders, they may have no choice but to collect value from you all means possible regardless of how much value they are already collecting.
    - munk-a 5y ago
      One very underrated (or overrated depending on your pessimism) way to deliver value to customers is by offering privacy as one of the products you deliver. The issue is that privacy is hard to prove and so most claims of privacy are accepted at face value and many proclaimed privacy minded services are very much the opposite under the hood. This, I think, is a place where we need some regulation to codify some different forms of privacy and give the government a big stick to bop companies over the head when they violate those definitions. We could potentially manage the definitions as an industry group - but we'd need the government to get the big stick.
      - Willish42 5y ago
        > This, I think, is a place where we need some regulation to codify some different forms of privacy and give the government a big stick to bop companies over the head when they violate those definitions. I 100% agree with you, but doubt this will ever happen in a heavily pro-surveillance government in an effective corporatocracy. Therefore, I think open source can and needs to do better in providing free competition against potentially-dystopian closed-source alternatives
bogwog 5y ago
Unfortunately, that rule doesn't apply to Microsoft and the other tech giants.
gtyras2mrs 5y ago
> Codespaces costs money. It's going to be paid by your employer which leads to GP's concern about, > or build a productivity dashboard so managers can fire people for not being productive enough (like Xsolla did) Which is more likely. If your employer sets something like this up - will they use it to calculate a productivity score and use that for lay offs? Seems rather probable to me.
- heleninboodler 5y ago
  My company is stupid, but not that stupid. We already have vast amounts of data about checkins that could, in the hands of a stupid person, be used to create stupid developer metrics for performance evaluation, and yet I've never once in my many cross-team performance ranking meetings heard a manager who had the gall to trot out "lines of code" as a serious metric for comparing people. And I'm at a FAAMNG. ;)
EMM_386 5y ago
Businesses rarely ever leave money on the table. If they can sell the product AND sell developer productivity metrics to management, they will.
vanpythonista 5y ago
Microsoft Outlook/Office 365 costs money, but they still analyze your activity and report so called "productivity score". Maybe not sell, but I have no doubt they will analyze the data if they can.

yellowbanana 5y ago

The fact that they will be able to do it, is problem, we should not put ourselves in position to rely on their future morality. Github at this point needs to be open source, atleast then they would be an easier way out.

anthony_r 5y ago
Lol, like Microsoft paid the billions to give it out now for free. Besides, do you want your index funds to do well? Because that's exactly where the proceeds go to.
- greyhair 5y ago
  More than that, github was floundering economically, and Microsoft bought them to ensure continuity, because Microsoft was the single largest user. Don't want to rely on Microsoft for GitHub? The underlying 'git' is open source. Just deal with your git repos raw. No one is forcing you to use github.
  - anthony_r 5y ago
    > More than that, github was floundering economically I do not think we actually know that. Was there any release of any financial data? Also, part of the "beauty" of the modern "tech" giants is that they manage to find alternative sources of revenue, in some cases (notably Google and Facebook) completely replacing the old school user subscription revenue. By and large people seem to be OK selling their data for either a price reduction or complete price removal for services. It is what it is.
  - bastardoperator 5y ago
    This is completely false. Microsoft bought GitHub to appeal to developers. They had TFS and Azure DevOps with Git for years before the purchase. I'm also 100% certain Microsoft was/is not GitHub's largest customer.
  - hypothesis 5y ago
    >More than that, github was floundering economically, and Microsoft bought them to ensure continuity, because Microsoft was the single largest user. Was it a common knowledge at the time? I don’t recall seeing info about MS being largest user and unfortunately their newspost on acquisition returns an error… [1] https://news.microsoft.com/2018/06/04/microsoft-to-acquire-github-for-7-5-billion/ https://news.microsoft.com/2018/06/04/microsoft-to-acquire-g...

kjksf 5y ago

If they do, the competition is just a click away: https://www.gitpod.io/ https://www.gitpod.io/

theturtletalks 5y ago
Stackblitz Webcontainers[0] look promising too. I read the creators plan on open-sourcing the underlying tech once more mature. 0. https://blog.stackblitz.com/posts/introducing-webcontainers/ https://blog.stackblitz.com/posts/introducing-webcontainers/
onemoresoop 5y ago
Yes for all of us but all corporate clients will flock to github to benefit from those surveillance capabilities.
nextaccountic 5y ago
Unfortunately it's your company that signs up to this sort of thing, not you.
Buttons840 5y ago
How about moving all our code off GitHub while we're at it? In this worst case scenario (which hasn't happened yet), I'm sure GitHub would expect the good will of open source projects and contributors while simultaneously being the boot on their face in the workplace.
- endgame 5y ago
  I've been on sourcehut for a while now. It's great.
- FpUser 5y ago
  I have projects on github because some of my clients requested it. My own projects stay off. Other than renting physical servers I do not use a single piece of software for my own business that forces me to subscribe and be online.

slownews45 5y ago

If a business is paying for this product, then THEY (not you) are the customer. And in that context - yes, Microsoft may be asked or build a product for managers to manage their workforce, particularly if remote. This could involve presence tracking, engagement tracking (ie, do you open alerts / read your bug reports) etc. One approach would be to monitor what management considers productive / successful employees and also on employees who have gone on PIP's - then train the AI on that data set. You'd then be able to drive various alerts to manager and HR dashboards (ie, if a manager was failing to address alerts / manager their team it would be surfaced up a level). Dystopia may be coming indeed. Remember, usually the key issue is not if product is a paid product, but are YOU paying for it. If not - someone else is the revenue source, and Microsoft et al will serve them. Maybe the individual licenses will not have this "management" layer add-on as an option. But I think a very real chance of something like this occurring! If not right now eventually. In Sci-fi this is an inevitability (monitored through a smart watch or something etc).

tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
I really hope that if this happens, DPAs bring the hammer down on everyone involved (both MS and companies using it) in a useful timeframe (i.e. before it has become socially acceptable because "everyone is doing it" and there are no consequences).
- atsaloli 5y ago
  What’s a DPA, please?
  - paulrjones 5y ago
    Data Protection Authority
  - jabo 5y ago
    Data Processing Agreement: https://gdpr.eu/data-processing-agreement/ https://gdpr.eu/data-processing-agreement/

politelemon 5y ago

Context is hugely important, and equally important is not to get sucked in by the HN echo chamber - that is, consider the MS of _now_ as opposed to that of 15 years ago which HN likes to bash (and give a free pass to other companies doing nefarious things). The FB example is considering the FB of _now_ and not 15 years ago. In terms of the biggest companies in the sector, MS has been doing much more for developers and developer productivity than others. At the same time it's not a monolith and so you should not expect boyscout behavior either. Privacy is a concern, and the onus is on you the user to ensure that you remain in control of your data. When using a service (any service), the answer is to always be ready to bail at a moment's notice. That means using source control and not tying yourself to a specific ecosystem.

leppr 5y ago
The MS that's killing their own single most popular product, Windows, with anti-user features, is the MS of now. Releasing VS code and WSL doesn't redeem their sins.
- Barrin92 5y ago
  is this not another example of the 'HN echo chamber'? Is Windows market share budging? Windows currently is by far not the worst iteration of the OS and nobody gives a crap about anti-user features which everyone has had to deal with for literally decades
  - scraptor 5y ago
    The fact that microsoft's user hostile moves haven't affected windows' market share does very little to reassure people that they won't pull similar shit with any other product.
  - jorams 5y ago
    > nobody gives a crap about anti-user features which everyone has had to deal with for literally decades The one thing that used to set Microsoft apart from the likes of Google and Facebook was that their main product, Windows, was not anti-user. No matter what you thought about the OS or Microsoft's business practices, it was a paid piece of software that worked for the user. Windows now is filled with user-hostile features and it works for MS instead. And they don't even grant us the courtesy of giving it away for free. Market share or the fact that the public at large isn't punishing them for it doesn't mean anything. It was already clear that most people are willing to walk headfirst into a dystopia.

MichaelRust 5y ago

You think? I'm just completely drained and I want Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook, to get off my lawn. https://rentry.co/areweweloveopensauceyet https://rentry.co/areweweloveopensauceyet

jmartrican 5y ago

I would like for MS to collect information that would make the product better. If there is a feature that I am always using, i want them to know it so that they can either improve it or not get rid of it.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Davertron 5y ago

So, maybe? But these products already exist. Your company doesn't need to pay Microsoft to get that data, they can install stuff on your work machine and get all that info right now.

908B64B197 5y ago

> code written, keystrokes, mouse movements, sleep/work schedule, productivity metrics, etc That's not the most valuable info at all. What would be valuable is to know which ecosystem, languages and tech people are investing time and resources into. These are the ones you need to prioritize for your dev tools. For instance, Microsoft decided to invest in supporting Rust https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dev-environment/rust/rust-for-windows https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dev-environment/rus... as well as making sure .NET works on all OS. > or build a productivity dashboard so managers can fire people for not being productive enough (like Xsolla did) When a competitor decides to start using these, it's awesome. You get a nice window of opportunity to poach high performers.

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

As slownew45 points out, Github does not make money from individuals who use it for free. Of course such use will become increasingly difficult over time for Microsoft pinheads to justify from a business perspective. Telemetry, full-on surveillance and ultimately subtle manipulation of individual software authors seems an obvious choice to try to justify why Github should continue to allow non-paying individuals to use their repository. The Facebook web browser. Never say never. If we knew what we know today about privacy, we would have pointed out the idiocy of anyone choosing to use a web browser released by Google.

laumars 5y ago
> The Facebook web browser. Never say never. If we knew what we know today about privacy, we would have pointed out the idiocy of anyone choosing to use a web browser released by Google. Google were already making money off targeted ads at that point. There was even an outcry about GMail scanning people’s emails several years before Chrome was released. But you could probably argue that we didn’t fully appreciate just how bad things would get at that stage. Many of us were just happy to see Microsoft get some competition.
Cyberdog 5y ago
> we would have pointed out the idiocy of anyone choosing to use a web browser released by Google. I still try to, but it’s a lost battle already. (Don’t use Chrome, BTW.)

deleted 5y ago

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resters 5y ago

Yes, and that is how they will train the AI that will replace us all. It's a brilliant strategy, so I can't help but play along.

MichaelMoser123 5y ago

If your employer decides that they need such an analytics dashboard, one that is spying on every keystroke, then they will have one. That one doesn't depend on you working on a laptop, or in a remote environment - the company owns and is administrating that laptop, and they can install everything they regard as necessary. Therefore the real question is if Codespaces is helping to get your job done; I guess that depends on the complexity and structure of the code, the complexity of the build environment/how you work with the CI environment and how the project is being deployed. I guess that this complex of issues will increasingly dictate how things will get done - if these are too complex, then you are better off with a remote environment.

MichaelMoser123 5y ago
On second thought, the move to remote environments may have an interesting side effect: if people are no longer familiar with setting up their local development environments, then it will be a bit harder to set up their own side projects to tinker and try out new stuff; in a reality where everyone is working on a remote/preset environment, we will have just another small, but very significant inhibition to deal with our own side projects. now there is a bit of an irony - github helped open source, now this development will be very helpful to corporate software developers, but might turn out to be harmful to open source as such.
MichaelMoser123 5y ago
Upon re-examination: if github/microsoft is owning the analytics data gathered from monitoring the keystrokes, then they are a third party, and could possibly make that data available across time; so that a prospective employer can get a view on past performance of a candidate, or the new employer will have access to analytics data gathered on you while working at a previous company. Now that one has the potential to make the whole thing much more sinister. There might be a big difference between the situation where your current employer has a keylogger on you, as compared to the keylogger sitting in the cloud. Grandparent poster Bogwog has a solid argument here. It all depends if the industry will act this way or not, I still hope that there is some level of desency left somewhere, because being too paranoid about all of it will not get me anyway either. Also the utility of all this analytics data is limited, for example they could possible get the 'number of lines of code' written by someone, but it is impossible to judge how essential all these lines of code were to the business. Also there would be a significant backlash, if they get too invasive on the privacy of developers. (that's the moment for the video where Steve Balmer is flipping out on stage and shouting 'developers' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I14b-C67EXY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I14b-C67EXY )

_eko_f_3324 5y ago

They already do with Teams. Of course they will do it here sooner or later as well.

baby 5y ago

Top comments always have to be so negative every time there’s something cool on the front page…

TeMPOraL 5y ago
That's because people here have grown up and see the world for what it is, how products like these play out, how incentives around them are structured. Most of the cool things like this are bait. Seriously. It takes extreme naivety to take a SaaS business at face value today. Patterns of exploitation are well-established and easy to spot. Once you see this a couple of times, including in offerings you got so excited about - or worse, you get burned by them personally - it's hard to be anything but bitchy about tech. The comments may be negative, but the bigger problem is that they're also not wrong.
raxxorrax 5y ago
Look how tech is employed against lower wage workers. It is a good idea to be extremely vigilant about anything "reporting". I think people working in tech have a responsibility to not behave like 14-year old fangirls.

thayne 5y ago

> It's like if Facebook released their own web browser and "promised" to respect your privacy; you'd be an idiot to believe them. Replace Facebook with another major ad company, and you are basically describing the most popular browser right now.

thih9 5y ago

Semi serious answer: couple of years ago we devs used to joke about putting ourselves out of business by teaching AIs how to code. I guess the joke's no longer funny; I also guess current situation shouldn't be a surprise.

raxxorrax 5y ago

The business incentive is quite easy. It is to evaluate code monkeys and to quantify development efficiency in the eyes of a salesmen, those that approve projects at Microsoft and possibly GitHub. They want to offer services to large corporate entities and they deem this valuable. Call it collaborative and something-cloud and you have your green-lit project. The road is to quantify the work in small packages is a decent one though, dissect a problem until only trivial tasks remain. Still, I think your intuition is pretty much on point. But with anything, just take the features you like. If your business can dictate this for you, search for other businesses. Contrary to popular belief, there are a lot of those, although pay might indeed be a bit lower.

_pmf_ 5y ago

Of course.