3 ms·

> The PMs are completely asleep at the wheel or, everyone has career aspirations for which they need to demonstrate impact, relevance and in shipping products.

by chii 9mo ago

> The PMs are completely asleep at the wheel or, everyone has career aspirations for which they need to demonstrate impact, relevance and in shipping products. Since the current hype is AI, making and being part of the AI hype means career advancement (at the time).

kakacik 9mo ago
Well if its done in a dumb-as-a-fuck hostile style that whole world complaints for years, such effort and PM is utter failure and their CV should be tarnished with this for next 2 decades. And its up to us as a IT community to make it happen. They harmed massively their own company, and failed at the most core reason why they were hired - add long term value to the company. Its a bit the equivalent of architect building huge bridge that then falls, no souls harmed. Such person would have issue finding any other work. Lets do the same, name and shame shouldnt be that hard.
- 3D30497420 9mo ago
  I saw a presentation awhile back which included the slide (roughly): "Give a PM a numerical goal, and they will burn the company down to hit it." As someone who has worked in big tech and seen decision-making in action, I 100% believe it. This is how incentives are structured.
  - boltzmann-brain 9mo ago
    That's a dramatic but fitting characterization of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
  - WorldMaker 9mo ago
    The mandate/goal went pretty far up the chain, too. Windows got moved from being under Azure to under "CoreAI" in the org structure. Incentive structures usually reflect org structure. In this case the fingers can point pretty far up on why incentives shifted the way that they did.
  - ahartmetz 9mo ago
    Human paperclip optimizers...
- mapt 9mo ago
  Their shareholders did not want them to add long term value to the company. Their shareholders wanted AI.
  - atlasduo 9mo ago
    Their shareholders never wanted AI. Their shareholders wanted MSFT stock price to go up.
  - bonesss 9mo ago
    Thinking hard about how CoPilot fits into the MS ecosystem (Power BI, SharePoint, Dynamics, Office entrenchment, etc), and how their consultant mills work, I’m convinced there’s a meaningful space for unnecessary, unpopular, or suboptimal LLM solutions that can still be wildly profitable for MS. Like, just because the outcome sucks and the solutions are user-hostile, let’s not assume the decision makers are dummies. I see profit motives as the likely delta between their decisions and our userland expectations. Let me run the MS LLM department and I could easily explain to the board why we’re about to see a big upsurge Azure, office 365 integrated, and MCP-based solution spending… hint: it’s because the machine god will tell the consultants AND the customer those solutions are what’s SmartGood. We’ll sell ‘em a box that tells ‘em what to buy (lul, subscribe to!), the profitability part kinda writes itself.
- orochimaaru 9mo ago
  You shouldn’t name and shame for following corporate policy. Your suggestion is ridiculous. If the decision has come down from the product leadership you are expected to follow it. Knowing who the windows product leadership is should be easy. Find them on linked in. But even they may not be responsible if the direction came from the ceo or the cto. We know who those are. Quit calling for naming and shaming of individuals just trying to make a living.
  - kakacik 9mo ago
    Thats ridiculous. Shielding folks that do amoral work that harms us all (while well aware of this) - why, because 'they are just following the orders' ? Thats pretty weak argument. Why are you so afraid that folks are to be held accountable for amoral work they do? Its pretty fair approach in these greedy times. And I mentioned PMs but realistically its whatever decision makers that decide these, PM can be a middle manager cog with no real power or somebody adequately high. I know I myself won't affect some hiring of some CTO but somebody here eventually might. Thats a good start. I am fed up with uncritical celebration of people who make this world a worse place and harm us all. Perfect execution of amoral goal is still purely a shit in negative sphere (this goes straight to worship of mr musk but thats another topic)
giancarlostoro 9mo ago
If they want AI hype they should be building up .NET to be completely versatile for AI, not just ONNX, but the full pipeline. Make your strengths a key indicator that Windows is the place for AI, stop using up 50% of my RAM for no reason, I need it for real work. Till then Linux has been my new permanent home for about 5 years now or so.
- pjmlp 9mo ago
  Have you lost sight of how much AI is being shoved down .NET tooling? See AI components for Blazor, Aspire AI dashboards, Aspire CLI with AI, Powershell AI, aspire.dev web site proudly written with AI, .NET Upgrade tool is now AI driven,....?
  - giancarlostoro 9mo ago
    None of those sound like the tooling I'm talking about. I'm thinking of libraries like ML.NET, training and inference, compared to Python its nowhere near, a lot of .NET projects wind up calling out to Python itself. I don't see why Microsoft couldn't do more in this area, if they're truly betting on AI they're betting on it the wrong way. What pure C# inference tooling is out there? I know they have a solid ONNX engine, but not everything runs on ONNX. I say this as both a Python and .NET developer mind you, but if Microsoft actually built up .NET more seriously to power AI infrastructure, I could see it making a big difference for them. Look at how many game engines use C# as opposed to literally any other programming language. C# could have been a #2 language for AI by now.
    - pjmlp 9mo ago
      You have the great Windows ML experience. :) Guess why Microsoft hired Guido and other Python devs, who gets the whole Python experience on VSCode, or introduced Python as better option to Excel, in detriment of .NET addins. People forget that nowadays .NET is only yet another language on DevDiv, check the developer blogs for all languages. That was F# failure as well, trying to cater to data science for its relevance, while other Microsoft departments double down on Python.

by chii 9mo ago

kakacik 9mo ago

Well if its done in a dumb-as-a-fuck hostile style that whole world complaints for years, such effort and PM is utter failure and their CV should be tarnished with this for next 2 decades. And its up to us as a IT community to make it happen. They harmed massively their own company, and failed at the most core reason why they were hired - add long term value to the company. Its a bit the equivalent of architect building huge bridge that then falls, no souls harmed. Such person would have issue finding any other work. Lets do the same, name and shame shouldnt be that hard.

3D30497420 9mo ago
I saw a presentation awhile back which included the slide (roughly): "Give a PM a numerical goal, and they will burn the company down to hit it." As someone who has worked in big tech and seen decision-making in action, I 100% believe it. This is how incentives are structured.
- boltzmann-brain 9mo ago
  That's a dramatic but fitting characterization of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
- WorldMaker 9mo ago
  The mandate/goal went pretty far up the chain, too. Windows got moved from being under Azure to under "CoreAI" in the org structure. Incentive structures usually reflect org structure. In this case the fingers can point pretty far up on why incentives shifted the way that they did.
- ahartmetz 9mo ago
  Human paperclip optimizers...
mapt 9mo ago
Their shareholders did not want them to add long term value to the company. Their shareholders wanted AI.
- atlasduo 9mo ago
  Their shareholders never wanted AI. Their shareholders wanted MSFT stock price to go up.
- bonesss 9mo ago
  Thinking hard about how CoPilot fits into the MS ecosystem (Power BI, SharePoint, Dynamics, Office entrenchment, etc), and how their consultant mills work, I’m convinced there’s a meaningful space for unnecessary, unpopular, or suboptimal LLM solutions that can still be wildly profitable for MS. Like, just because the outcome sucks and the solutions are user-hostile, let’s not assume the decision makers are dummies. I see profit motives as the likely delta between their decisions and our userland expectations. Let me run the MS LLM department and I could easily explain to the board why we’re about to see a big upsurge Azure, office 365 integrated, and MCP-based solution spending… hint: it’s because the machine god will tell the consultants AND the customer those solutions are what’s SmartGood. We’ll sell ‘em a box that tells ‘em what to buy (lul, subscribe to!), the profitability part kinda writes itself.
orochimaaru 9mo ago
You shouldn’t name and shame for following corporate policy. Your suggestion is ridiculous. If the decision has come down from the product leadership you are expected to follow it. Knowing who the windows product leadership is should be easy. Find them on linked in. But even they may not be responsible if the direction came from the ceo or the cto. We know who those are. Quit calling for naming and shaming of individuals just trying to make a living.
- kakacik 9mo ago
  Thats ridiculous. Shielding folks that do amoral work that harms us all (while well aware of this) - why, because 'they are just following the orders' ? Thats pretty weak argument. Why are you so afraid that folks are to be held accountable for amoral work they do? Its pretty fair approach in these greedy times. And I mentioned PMs but realistically its whatever decision makers that decide these, PM can be a middle manager cog with no real power or somebody adequately high. I know I myself won't affect some hiring of some CTO but somebody here eventually might. Thats a good start. I am fed up with uncritical celebration of people who make this world a worse place and harm us all. Perfect execution of amoral goal is still purely a shit in negative sphere (this goes straight to worship of mr musk but thats another topic)

giancarlostoro 9mo ago

If they want AI hype they should be building up .NET to be completely versatile for AI, not just ONNX, but the full pipeline. Make your strengths a key indicator that Windows is the place for AI, stop using up 50% of my RAM for no reason, I need it for real work. Till then Linux has been my new permanent home for about 5 years now or so.

pjmlp 9mo ago
Have you lost sight of how much AI is being shoved down .NET tooling? See AI components for Blazor, Aspire AI dashboards, Aspire CLI with AI, Powershell AI, aspire.dev web site proudly written with AI, .NET Upgrade tool is now AI driven,....?
- giancarlostoro 9mo ago
  None of those sound like the tooling I'm talking about. I'm thinking of libraries like ML.NET, training and inference, compared to Python its nowhere near, a lot of .NET projects wind up calling out to Python itself. I don't see why Microsoft couldn't do more in this area, if they're truly betting on AI they're betting on it the wrong way. What pure C# inference tooling is out there? I know they have a solid ONNX engine, but not everything runs on ONNX. I say this as both a Python and .NET developer mind you, but if Microsoft actually built up .NET more seriously to power AI infrastructure, I could see it making a big difference for them. Look at how many game engines use C# as opposed to literally any other programming language. C# could have been a #2 language for AI by now.
  - pjmlp 9mo ago
    You have the great Windows ML experience. :) Guess why Microsoft hired Guido and other Python devs, who gets the whole Python experience on VSCode, or introduced Python as better option to Excel, in detriment of .NET addins. People forget that nowadays .NET is only yet another language on DevDiv, check the developer blogs for all languages. That was F# failure as well, trying to cater to data science for its relevance, while other Microsoft departments double down on Python.