Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft lets bosses spot teams that are dodging Copilot

theregister.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 98 posts

Re: Microsoft lets bosses spot teams that are dodging Copilot

#71

Post by bgwalter »

whiplash451 wrote: post #57
paxys wrote: post #15

Leadership - "All employees are required to use AI and be X% more productive" Employees find that AI tools are useless and don't increase productivity. Leaders say - You are using the tools wrong. Figure it out. Employees now have to work longer hours or risk getting fired. Company does layoffs under the guise of "we replaced workers with AI" and the stock market rewards them for it.

Honestly at this point if you’re a dev and not using a coding assistant at all and in any possible way , you are indeed becoming a liability to your company. Now, Copilot (the assistant, not the GitHub coding one) is hot garbage compared to Claude/ChatGPT but that’s another story.

Is that why any useful software was written before 2023?

I notice that you said "using" though and did not specify useful output. Useful output or even just a GitHub repo is kryptonite for "AI" proponents.

If you mean that Microsoft has to pretend that its employees are using "AI" in order to keep the P/E ratio of roughly 40, then of course an employee who does not participate in the con becomes a liability and you are absolutely right!

Re: Microsoft lets bosses spot teams that are dodging Copilot

#72

Post by phkahler »

whiplash451 wrote: post #57
paxys wrote: post #15

Leadership - "All employees are required to use AI and be X% more productive" Employees find that AI tools are useless and don't increase productivity. Leaders say - You are using the tools wrong. Figure it out. Employees now have to work longer hours or risk getting fired. Company does layoffs under the guise of "we replaced workers with AI" and the stock market rewards them for it.

Honestly at this point if you’re a dev and not using a coding assistant at all and in any possible way , you are indeed becoming a liability to your company. Now, Copilot (the assistant, not the GitHub coding one) is hot garbage compared to Claude/ChatGPT but that’s another story.

>> Honestly at this point if you’re a dev and not using a coding assistant at all and in any possible way, you are indeed becoming a liability to your company.

Honestly, you were probably a liability to your company prior to AI. Now you can at least vibe-code. I don't know anything about your situation, nor do you know mine.

Re: Microsoft lets bosses spot teams that are dodging Copilot

#73

Post by palmotea »

sureglymop wrote: post #65
Lionga wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are submitting AI Slop code or overuse AI then you are a liability. If you don't use AI at all you might be 5 or 10% slower, but quality might well even make up for it.

I would say even more important than quality is just the fact that you will probably understand better. If an issue arises you will already know the intricacies while the AI slop engineer almost has to ask the AI again. They have got themselves stuck in a sort of slop cycle where after some time human understanding is completely out of the picture.

The sad thing is management often just doesn't care about those kinds of things.

For instance: my employer seems actively hostile to maintaining human understanding, even before AI. Ownership of apps moved around without sufficient knowledge transition or training. We've migrated Wiki systems 2 or 3 times over my career, and stuff always gets lost. The last migration (to SharePoint) was downright hostile: it was presented as an opportunity to "clean up," the half-ass automated migration deliberately excluded things more than a year old, and your docs got nuked unless someone was paying attention to save them (not a given). Now that SharePoint is in the cloud, its admins are actively scanning for things to delete, because the priority is minimizing their storage costs, not, you know maintaining knowledge of how things work.

Re: Microsoft lets bosses spot teams that are dodging Copilot

#74

Post by bgwalter »

What are the rumors about the new second CEO of MSFT?

https://technologymagazine.com/news/why-is-microsoft-ceo-sat...

The official narrative is that Nadella wants to focus completely on his misguided "AI" obsession. Could it be that the board forced Nadella to install this second CEO as a backup if Nadella's fantasies fail?

Re: Microsoft lets bosses spot teams that are dodging Copilot

#75

Post by BeFlatXIII »

whiplash451 wrote: post #57
paxys wrote: post #15

Leadership - "All employees are required to use AI and be X% more productive" Employees find that AI tools are useless and don't increase productivity. Leaders say - You are using the tools wrong. Figure it out. Employees now have to work longer hours or risk getting fired. Company does layoffs under the guise of "we replaced workers with AI" and the stock market rewards them for it.

Honestly at this point if you’re a dev and not using a coding assistant at all and in any possible way , you are indeed becoming a liability to your company. Now, Copilot (the assistant, not the GitHub coding one) is hot garbage compared to Claude/ChatGPT but that’s another story.

> you are indeed becoming a liability to your company

A risk that stock price declines for not buying into the hype. Actual productivity is not a concern.

Re: Microsoft lets bosses spot teams that are dodging Copilot

#76

Post by 1718627440 »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #2

They’re so desperate to make it work. > “A source that has seen materials related to sales has confirmed that, as of August 2025, Microsoft has around eight million active licensed users of Microsoft 365 Copilot, amounting to a 1.81% conversion rate across the 440 million Microsoft 365 subscribers.” Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45476045 - October 2025

8 million sold licenses doesn't sound like a failure to me. Why do people assume that the market for Office programs and LLM tools is the same or even comparable?

Re: Microsoft lets bosses spot teams that are dodging Copilot

#77

Post by nosianu »

nxobject wrote: post #16

For context, this is the whole list of metrics measured by their Eye of Sauron tool, Viva Insights – it seems to be split between Outlook, Teams, Office, and Copilot data. The Outlook and Teams stuff seems to relate to time spent on their individual platforms, but the Copilot-by-app stuff is hilarious. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/viva/insights/advanced/ref... I look forward to the equivalent of a mouse jiggler.

The reason I have ignored all attempts from MS to get me to click on something Copilot related, or not click it away, is that I have no idea why I should click. I don't know what it will actually do for me.

I'm using AI for some coding here and there, and I'm using it replacing certain kinds of questions I would previously have googled. So I'm certainly not against using AI at all. (We have a ChatGPT subscription.)

But, as a MS 365 Global Admin for a small business (ca. 50 people), I know what most of the many part of the MS eco system do. I use at least a dozen of their various service sites and tools throughout the week. I know what Entra is and does, Exchange (Admin), Teams, Defender (security website, not the installed tool), I'm not even going to mention the well-known Office apps, Azure, SharePoint, etc.

But when they try to get me to use Copilot, I never know what it is supposed to do for me? It just says "Copilot", and? Yes I could read and check and test what it is about. Maybe I will, some day. For now, every one of the services that I as Unix person had to discover for myself over the last year I had a clear goal before I went there, and I knew why I wanted to use a particular service. That's not true for Copilot, and my general AI background knowledge even as at least daily casual AI user I have no idea what to expect. I'm just not motivated to go there and do all the work of motivating myself myself.

For me, the problem is they market "Copilot" and not a function I want. That is too broad and too vague. If they just used it as part of the regular workflows, like Google did when they introduced AI answers, I would already be using it.

Instead of relying on users desire to use specific functionality, they seem to think users want "AI", what for exactly is secondary. But I want functions first, and don't care how they implement it, as long as it works.

PS: Oh and of course I'm afraid that if I start using any Copilot related stuff I may accidentally add something to our company's monthly bill. Which I only do when I actually need something, e.g. a new Office 365 Business Standard license. I don't want to pay for something I don't feel any need for, since the existing tools are already far more than enough.

Re: Microsoft lets bosses spot teams that are dodging Copilot

#78

Post by saghm »

nxobject wrote: post #16

For context, this is the whole list of metrics measured by their Eye of Sauron tool, Viva Insights – it seems to be split between Outlook, Teams, Office, and Copilot data. The Outlook and Teams stuff seems to relate to time spent on their individual platforms, but the Copilot-by-app stuff is hilarious. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/viva/insights/advanced/ref... I look forward to the equivalent of a mouse jiggler.

Writing a background application to deal with an annoying system so that you can focus on the real work actually sounds like a pretty good thing to have an LLM do, now that you mention it. Maybe Copilot just needs some prompting to keep itself busy, and then they can get back to their real work...

Re: Microsoft lets bosses spot teams that are dodging Copilot

#79

Post by marcosdumay »

recursive wrote: post #64
whiplash451 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly at this point if you’re a dev and not using a coding assistant at all and in any possible way , you are indeed becoming a liability to your company. Now, Copilot (the assistant, not the GitHub coding one) is hot garbage compared to Claude/ChatGPT but that’s another story.

This is crazy. I use copilot completions occasionally, but on average I think it's been productivity neutral so far. Sometimes it helps, but this is roughly offset by fruitless rabbit holes and straight-up wrong information. One of my co-workers never uses any of it. For certain types of problems, he's the most productive member on the team.

Last time somebody asked me at work if I was using it, I had just turned off the Visual Studio normal autocompletion because the setting to disable completion on space, enter, dot, etc disappeared.

MS productivity tools are a serious hindrance.

Re: Microsoft lets bosses spot teams that are dodging Copilot

#80

Post by bigbadfeline »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #5
u5wbxrc3 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point its a sunk cost fallacy

I think it's more nuanced than that. Microsoft is desperate for growth in a growth challenged macro, and Nadella has guided valuations and stock targets that are simply unobtainable without this growth. That's one part of the AI slop shovel. The second part is institutions that are desperate to cut labor costs or find other efficiency gains to maintain historical financial performance targets during ZIRP that are sim…

> institutions that are desperate to cut labor costs...

I wonder if those who resist copilot aren't driven by the nascent feeling they are training their replacement.

> ... to maintain historical financial performance targets during ZIRP that are simply no longer obtainable.

If all else fails, they can ZIRP back to fantasy land and avoid being the losers by shifting it to the public once again.

Post reply on HN