4 ms·

Depends on team but seems management is pushing it from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44031432 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44031432 "From talk

by mtmail 1y ago

Depends on team but seems management is pushing it from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44031432 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44031432 "From talking to colleagues at Microsoft it's a very management-driven push, not developer-driven. Friend on an Azure team had a team member who was nearly put on a PIP because they refused to install the internal AI coding assistant. Every manager has "number of developers using AI" as an OKR, but anecdotally most devs are installing the AI assistant and not using it or using it very occasionally. Allegedly it's pretty terrible at C# and PowerShell which limits its usefulness at MS." "From reading around on Hacker News and Reddit, it seems like half of commentators say what you say, and the other half says "I work at Microsoft/know someone who works at Microsoft, and our/their manager just said we have to use AI", someone mentioned being put on PIP for not "leveraging AI" as well. I guess maybe different teams have different requirements/workflows?"

4ggr0 1y ago
you can directly link to comments, by the way. just click on the link which displays how long ago the comment was written and you get the URL for the single comment. (just mentioning it because you linked a post and quoted two comments, instead of directly linking the comments. not trying to 'uhm, actually'.)
lovehashbrowns 1y ago
All of that is working, at least, because the very small company I work for with a limited budget is working on getting an extremely expensive copilot license. Oh no, I might have to deal with this soon..
diggan 1y ago
> Depends on team but seems management is pushing it The graphic "Internal structure of tech companies" comes to mind, given if true, would explain why the process/workflow is so different between the teams at Microsoft: https://i.imgur.com/WQiuIIB.png https://i.imgur.com/WQiuIIB.png Imagine the Copilot team has a KPI about usage, matching the company OKRs or whatever about making sure the world is using Microsoft's AI enough, so they have a mandate/leverage to get the other teams to use it regardless of if it's helping or not.
- linza 1y ago
  Well, what you describe is not terrible way to run things. Eat your own dogfood. To get better at it you need to start doing it.
  - sgarland 1y ago
    Sure, but if the product in question is at best tangential to your core products, it sucks, and makes your work flow slow to a crawl, I don’t blame employees for not wanting to use it. For example, if tomorrow my company announced that everyone was being switched to Windows, I would simply quit. I don’t care that WSL exists, overall it would be detrimental to my workday, and I have other options.
    - linza 1y ago
      True. i didn't mean "not terrible for employees" i meant "not terrible for company goals". Yes, these are intertwined, but assuming not everyone quits over introducing AI workflows it could make Microsoft a leader in that space. Personally i would also not particularly like it.
pydry 1y ago
It kinda makes sense for management to push it. Nothing else has a hope of preventing MSFT's stock price from collapsing into bluechip territory.
egorfine 1y ago
> management is pushing it Why?
- srean 1y ago
  To validate the huge investment in openai - otherwise the leadership would appear to have overpaid and overplayed.
  - egorfine 1y ago
    There are other options to do just that instead of ruining developers' life and hence drastically lowering the performance of teams.
    - srean 1y ago
      In companies this large and old, the answer most often is a 'no'. The under-performers can now be justifiable laid off with under-performers worthy severance, till morale improves.
- MonkeyClub 1y ago
  On the surface, because they're told to push it. Further down, so that developers are used to train the AI that would replace both developers and managers. It's a situation like this: Mgr: Go dig a six-foot-deep rectangular hole. Eng: What should the rectangle's dimensions be? Mgr: How tall and wide are you?
- jsheard 1y ago
  Management is pushing it because the execs are pushing it, and the execs are pushing it because they already spent 50 billion dollars on these magic beans and now they really really really need them to work.
- dboreham 1y ago
  Money.
- rchaud 1y ago
DebtDeflation 1y ago
The question is who is setting these OKRs/Metrics for management and why? It seems to me to be coming from the CEO echo chamber (the rumored group chats we keep hearing about). The only way to keep the stock price increasing in these low growth high interest rate times is to cut costs every quarter. The single largest cost is employee salaries. So we have to shed a larger and larger percentage of the workforce and the only way to do that is to replace them with AI. It doesn't matter whether the AI is capable enough to actually replace the workers, it has to replace them because the stock price demands it. We all know this will eventually end in tears.
- diggan 1y ago
  > the only way to do that is to replace them with AI I guess money-wise it kind of makes sense when you're outsourcing the LLM inference. But for companies like Microsoft, where they aren't outsourcing it, and have to actually pay the cost of hosting the infrastructure, I wonder if the calculation still make sense. Since they're doing this huge push, I guess someone somewhere said it does make sense, but looking at the infrastructure OpenAI and others are having to build (like Stargate or whatever it's called), I wonder how realistic it is.
- MatthiasPortzel 1y ago
  Yep. I heard someone at Microsoft venting about management constantly pleading with them to use AI so that they could tell investors their employees love AI, while senior (7+ year) team members were being “randomly” fired.
- ParetoOptimal 1y ago
  > The question is who is setting these OKRs/Metrics for management and why? Idiots.
- dboreham 1y ago
  > The question is who is setting these OKRs/Metrics for management and why? Masters of the Universe, because they think they will become more rich or at least more masterful.
xnorswap 1y ago
> Allegedly it's pretty terrible at C# In my experience, LLMs in general are really, really bad at C# / .NET , and it worries me as a .NET developer. With increased LLM usage, I think development in general is going to undergo a "great convergence". There's a positive(1) feedback loop where LLM's are better at Blub, so people use them to write more Blub. With more Blub out there, LLMs get better at Blub. The languages where LLMs struggle, with become more niche, leaving LLMs struggling even more. C# / .NET is something LLMs seem particularly bad at, and I suspect that's partly caused by having multiple different things all called the same name. EF, ASP, even .NET itself are names that get slapped on a range of different technologies. The EF API has changed so much that they had to sort-of rename it to "EF Core". Core also gets used elsewhere such as ".NET core" and "ASP.NET Core". You (Or an LLM) might be forgiven for thinking that ASP.NET Core and EF Core are just those versions which work with .NET Core (now just .NET ) and the other versions are those that don't. But that isn't even true. There are versions of ASP.NET Core for .NET Framework. Microsoft bundle a lot of good stuff into the ecosystem, but their attitude when they hit performance or other issues is generally to completely rewrite how something works, but then release the new thing under the old name but with a major version change. They'll make the new API different enough to not work without work porting, but similar enough to confuse the hell out of anyone trying to maintain both. They've made things like authentication, which actually has generally worked fine out-of-the-box for a decade or more, so confusing in the documentation that people mostly tended to run for a third party solution just because at least with IdentityServer there was just one documented way to do it. I know it's a bit of a cliche to be an "AI-doomer", and I'm not really suggesting all development work will go the way of the dinosaur, but there are specific ecosystem concerns with regard to .NET and AI assistance. (1) Positive in the sense of feedback that increased output increases output. It's not positive in the sense of "good thing".
- fabian2k 1y ago
  My impression is also that they are worse at C# than some other languages. In autocomplete mode in particular it is very easy to cause the AI tools to write terrible async code. If you start some autocomplete but didn't put an await in front, it will always do something stupid as it can't add the await itself at that position. But also in other cases I've seen Copilot write just terrible async code.
thraway2079081 1y ago
Using a throwaway for obvious reasons. I work at a non-tech megacorp that you've heard of. This company's (I will not say "our"!) CEO is very close to Nadella, they meet regularly. Management here is also pushing Github Copilot onto devs, aggressively, and including it in their HR reviews. Dev-adjacent roles (product, QA, BAs) are also seeing aggressive push. This feels like it will end badly.

by mtmail 1y ago

4ggr0 1y ago

you can directly link to comments, by the way. just click on the link which displays how long ago the comment was written and you get the URL for the single comment. (just mentioning it because you linked a post and quoted two comments, instead of directly linking the comments. not trying to 'uhm, actually'.)

lovehashbrowns 1y ago

All of that is working, at least, because the very small company I work for with a limited budget is working on getting an extremely expensive copilot license. Oh no, I might have to deal with this soon..

diggan 1y ago

> Depends on team but seems management is pushing it The graphic "Internal structure of tech companies" comes to mind, given if true, would explain why the process/workflow is so different between the teams at Microsoft: https://i.imgur.com/WQiuIIB.png https://i.imgur.com/WQiuIIB.png Imagine the Copilot team has a KPI about usage, matching the company OKRs or whatever about making sure the world is using Microsoft's AI enough, so they have a mandate/leverage to get the other teams to use it regardless of if it's helping or not.

linza 1y ago
Well, what you describe is not terrible way to run things. Eat your own dogfood. To get better at it you need to start doing it.
- sgarland 1y ago
  Sure, but if the product in question is at best tangential to your core products, it sucks, and makes your work flow slow to a crawl, I don’t blame employees for not wanting to use it. For example, if tomorrow my company announced that everyone was being switched to Windows, I would simply quit. I don’t care that WSL exists, overall it would be detrimental to my workday, and I have other options.
  - linza 1y ago
    True. i didn't mean "not terrible for employees" i meant "not terrible for company goals". Yes, these are intertwined, but assuming not everyone quits over introducing AI workflows it could make Microsoft a leader in that space. Personally i would also not particularly like it.

pydry 1y ago

It kinda makes sense for management to push it. Nothing else has a hope of preventing MSFT's stock price from collapsing into bluechip territory.

egorfine 1y ago

> management is pushing it Why?

srean 1y ago
To validate the huge investment in openai - otherwise the leadership would appear to have overpaid and overplayed.
- egorfine 1y ago
  There are other options to do just that instead of ruining developers' life and hence drastically lowering the performance of teams.
  - srean 1y ago
    In companies this large and old, the answer most often is a 'no'. The under-performers can now be justifiable laid off with under-performers worthy severance, till morale improves.
MonkeyClub 1y ago
On the surface, because they're told to push it. Further down, so that developers are used to train the AI that would replace both developers and managers. It's a situation like this: Mgr: Go dig a six-foot-deep rectangular hole. Eng: What should the rectangle's dimensions be? Mgr: How tall and wide are you?
jsheard 1y ago
Management is pushing it because the execs are pushing it, and the execs are pushing it because they already spent 50 billion dollars on these magic beans and now they really really really need them to work.
dboreham 1y ago
Money.
rchaud 1y ago

DebtDeflation 1y ago

The question is who is setting these OKRs/Metrics for management and why? It seems to me to be coming from the CEO echo chamber (the rumored group chats we keep hearing about). The only way to keep the stock price increasing in these low growth high interest rate times is to cut costs every quarter. The single largest cost is employee salaries. So we have to shed a larger and larger percentage of the workforce and the only way to do that is to replace them with AI. It doesn't matter whether the AI is capable enough to actually replace the workers, it has to replace them because the stock price demands it. We all know this will eventually end in tears.

diggan 1y ago
> the only way to do that is to replace them with AI I guess money-wise it kind of makes sense when you're outsourcing the LLM inference. But for companies like Microsoft, where they aren't outsourcing it, and have to actually pay the cost of hosting the infrastructure, I wonder if the calculation still make sense. Since they're doing this huge push, I guess someone somewhere said it does make sense, but looking at the infrastructure OpenAI and others are having to build (like Stargate or whatever it's called), I wonder how realistic it is.
MatthiasPortzel 1y ago
Yep. I heard someone at Microsoft venting about management constantly pleading with them to use AI so that they could tell investors their employees love AI, while senior (7+ year) team members were being “randomly” fired.
ParetoOptimal 1y ago
> The question is who is setting these OKRs/Metrics for management and why? Idiots.
dboreham 1y ago
> The question is who is setting these OKRs/Metrics for management and why? Masters of the Universe, because they think they will become more rich or at least more masterful.

xnorswap 1y ago

> Allegedly it's pretty terrible at C# In my experience, LLMs in general are really, really bad at C# / .NET , and it worries me as a .NET developer. With increased LLM usage, I think development in general is going to undergo a "great convergence". There's a positive(1) feedback loop where LLM's are better at Blub, so people use them to write more Blub. With more Blub out there, LLMs get better at Blub. The languages where LLMs struggle, with become more niche, leaving LLMs struggling even more. C# / .NET is something LLMs seem particularly bad at, and I suspect that's partly caused by having multiple different things all called the same name. EF, ASP, even .NET itself are names that get slapped on a range of different technologies. The EF API has changed so much that they had to sort-of rename it to "EF Core". Core also gets used elsewhere such as ".NET core" and "ASP.NET Core". You (Or an LLM) might be forgiven for thinking that ASP.NET Core and EF Core are just those versions which work with .NET Core (now just .NET ) and the other versions are those that don't. But that isn't even true. There are versions of ASP.NET Core for .NET Framework. Microsoft bundle a lot of good stuff into the ecosystem, but their attitude when they hit performance or other issues is generally to completely rewrite how something works, but then release the new thing under the old name but with a major version change. They'll make the new API different enough to not work without work porting, but similar enough to confuse the hell out of anyone trying to maintain both. They've made things like authentication, which actually has generally worked fine out-of-the-box for a decade or more, so confusing in the documentation that people mostly tended to run for a third party solution just because at least with IdentityServer there was just one documented way to do it. I know it's a bit of a cliche to be an "AI-doomer", and I'm not really suggesting all development work will go the way of the dinosaur, but there are specific ecosystem concerns with regard to .NET and AI assistance. (1) Positive in the sense of feedback that increased output increases output. It's not positive in the sense of "good thing".

fabian2k 1y ago
My impression is also that they are worse at C# than some other languages. In autocomplete mode in particular it is very easy to cause the AI tools to write terrible async code. If you start some autocomplete but didn't put an await in front, it will always do something stupid as it can't add the await itself at that position. But also in other cases I've seen Copilot write just terrible async code.

thraway2079081 1y ago

Using a throwaway for obvious reasons. I work at a non-tech megacorp that you've heard of. This company's (I will not say "our"!) CEO is very close to Nadella, they meet regularly. Management here is also pushing Github Copilot onto devs, aggressively, and including it in their HR reviews. Dev-adjacent roles (product, QA, BAs) are also seeing aggressive push. This feels like it will end badly.