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.
Maybe I could create a grift company that tells other companies why they are using AI wrong. After working for a few weeks at high hourly rate, produce a report. Then grift the next suites.
Isn't it what McKinsley has been doing for the last few years?
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.
Maybe I could create a grift company that tells other companies why they are using AI wrong. After working for a few weeks at high hourly rate, produce a report. Then grift the next suites.
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.
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.) B…
This feels like a self-sabotage by Microsoft. There are things that Copilot does well - a business-context-sensitive LLM that works between Outlook, Teams, Word, and Excel is legitimately bigger than any coding tool for most of the business world. However, once Microsoft leadership made it clear that Copilot their top priority, the rest of the company got busy rebranding whatever the hell they were already doing as "Copilot". Instead of selling a tool that fits a need, (employees at) Microsoft are selling a label that checks off a quarterly metric.
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.
I haven't noticed coding assistance improving quality devs in a positive way outside of perhaps occasionally saving on typing speed... and those opportunities are few and far between
I've found it detrimental to quality because people at my workplace are now submitting code changes in languages they don't really understand (like in multithreaded C++ code). The time they saved is taken from my time having to explain all the problems with their code.
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.
> Redundant meeting hours (lower level) -- Number of meeting hours a person spent in a meeting with both their manager and their skip-level manager present in the meeting.
Food for thought: If Microsoft is already monitoring this, maybe they could help automatically remove the big boss from the meeting?
Microsoft adds features to its products that customers ask for. If these metrics are being included in Viva, its because companies are asking for these metrics.
The company asking for this was Microsoft. This was originally developed internally because Microsoft wanted to make Copilot usage a key performance metric - they needed a tool to measure that. I've been told as much by people at Microsoft pretty close to this tool. Now I'm speculating, but it seems like someone saw an opportunity to take that internal tool and offer it as an add-on, and pad their bonus by doing it. I suspect this release was driven strictly by supply, not by demand.
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.
AI does not save anyone from having to know the fundamentals of software engineering and systems, but that’s orthogonal. If you know them, AI supercharges you. If you don’t, you’re a lost cause no matter what.
> AI does not save anyone from having to know the fundamentals of software engineering and systems
That's kind of my point. There are junior engineers how have to go through a learning phase. Also, you may have this insight, but their managers may not.