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Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

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Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#241
post #85

I find it amusing that people (even here on HN) are expecting a brand new tool (among the most complex ever) to perform adequetely right off the bat. It will require a period of refinement, just as any other tool or process.

Where are the expectations coming from? The major labs continually claim that these models are now PhD level, whatever that even means.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't imagine how the people who have to deal with this are feeling. It's like you have a junior developer except they don't even read what you're telling them, and have 0 agency to understand what they're actually doing. That comparison is awful. I work with quite a few Junior developers and they can be competent. Certainly don't make the silly mistakes that LLMs do, don't need nearly as much handholding, and te…

These GH interactions remind me of one of those offshore software outsourcing firms on Upwork or Freelancer.com that bid $3/hr on every project that gets posted. There's a PM who takes your task and gives it to a "developer" who potentially has never actually written a line of code, but maybe they've built a WordPress site by pointing and clicking in Elementor or something. After dozens of hours billed you will, in f…

>>These GH interactions remind me of one of those offshore software outsourcing firms on Upwork or Freelancer.com that bid $3/hr on every project that gets posted.

This level of smugness is why outsourcing still continues to exist. The kind of things you talk about were rare. And were mostly exaggerated to create anti-outsourcing narrative. None of that led to outsourcing actually going away simply because people are actually getting good work done.

Bad quality things are cheap != All cheap things are bad.

Same will work with AI too, while people continue to crap on AI, things will only improve, people will be more productive with AI, get more and bigger things done for cheaper and better. This is just inevitable given how things are going now.

>>There's a PM who takes your task and gives it to a "developer" who potentially has never actually written a line of code, but maybe they've built a WordPress site by pointing and clicking in Elementor or something.

In the peak of outsourcing wave. Both the call center people and IT services people had internal training and graduation standards that were quite brutal and mad attrition rates.

Exams often went along the lines of having to write whole ass projects without internet help in hours. Theory exams that had like -2 marks on getting things wrong. Dozens of exams, projects, coding exams, on-floor internships, project interviews.

>>After dozens of hours billed you will, in fact, get code where the new file wasn't added to the csproj or something like that, and when you point it out, they will bill another 20 hours, and send you a new copy of the project, where the test always fails. It's exactly like this.

Most IT services billing had pivoted away from hourly billing, to fixed time and material in the 2000s itself.

>>It's exactly like this.

Very much like outsourcing. AI is here to stay man. Deal with it. Its not going anywhere. For like $20 a month, companies will have same capability as a full time junior dev.

This is NOT going away. Its here to stay. And will only get better with time.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a weird comment. I do think for myself. I wasn't even talking about my own personal thoughts on the matter. I can just plainly see that the overwhelming narrative in the public zeitgeist is that AI can do jobs that humans can do. And it's not true.

why does every engineer keep talking about it like it’s more than marketing hype? why do you actually accept this is a real narrative real people believe? have you talked to the executives implementing these strategies? redbull does not give you wings. it’s disconcerting to see the lack of nuance in these discussions around these new tools (and yeah sorry this isn’t really aimed at you, but the zeitgeist, apologies)

Because this “marketing hype” is affecting the way we do our job.

Some of us are being laid off due to the hype; some are assigned to babysit the AI; and some are simply looked down on by higher ups who are eagerly waiting for a day to lay us all off.

You can convince yourself as much as you want that it’s “just a hype”, but regardless of your beliefs are, it has REAL world consequences.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#245

I’m all for AI “writing” large swaths of code, vibe coding, etc. But I think it’s better for everyone if human ownership is central to the process. Like I vibe coded it. I will fix it if it breaks. I am on call for it at 3AM. And don’t even get started on the safety issues if you don’t have clear human responsibility. The history of engineering disasters is riddled with unclear lines of responsibility.

Most of coding methodologies is about reducing the amount and the complexity of code that are written. And that's mostly why, on mature projects, most PRs (aside from refactoring) are tiny, because you're mostly refining an already existing model.

Writing code fast is never relevant to any tasks I've encountered. Instead it's mostly about fast editing (navigate quickly to the code I need to edit and efficiently modify it) and fast feedback (quick linting, compiling, and testing). That's the whole promise of IDEs, having a single dashboard for these.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was looking for exactly this comment. Everybody's gloating, "Wow look how dumb AI is! Haha, schadenfreude!" but this seems like just a natural part of the evolution process to me. It's going to look stupid... until the point it doesn't. And my money's on, "This will eventually be a solved problem."

The question though is what is the time horizon of “eventually”. Very different decisions should be made if it’s 1 year, 2 years, 4 years, 8 years etc. To me it seems as if everyone is making decisions which are only reasonable if the time horizon is 1 year. Maybe they are correct and we’re on the cusp. Maybe they aren’t. Good decision making would weigh the odds of 1 vs 8 vs 16 years. This isn’t good decision making…

Or _never_, honestly. Sometimes things just don't work out. See various 3d optical memory techs, which were constantly about to take over the world but never _quite_ made it to being actually useful, say.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#247
post #47

The real tragedy is the management mandating this have their eyes clearly set on replacing the very same software engineers with this technology. I don’t know what’s more Kafka than Kafka but this situation certainly is!

When tasked to train a technology that deprecates yourself, it’s relatively OK (you’re getting paid handsomely, and many of the developers at Microsoft etc. are probably ready to retire soon anyway). It’s another thing to realize that the same technology will also deprecate your children.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#248
post #143

Malicious compliance should be the order of the day. Just approve the requests without reviewing them and wait until management blinks when Microsoft's entire tech stack is on fire. Then quit your job and become a troubleshooter on x3 the pay.

I know this is meant to sound witty or clever, but who actually wants to behave this way at their job? I'll never understand the antagonistic "us vs. them" mentality people have with their employer's leadership, or people who think that you should be actively sabotaging things or be "maliciously compliant" when things aren't perfect or you don't agree with some decision that was made. To each their own I guess, but I…

>I'll never understand the antagonistic "us vs. them" mentality people have with their employer's leadership

Interesting because "them" very much have an antagonistic mentality vs "us". "Them" would fire you in a fucking heartbeat to save a relatively small amount (10%). "Them" also want to aggressively pay you the least amount for which they can get you to do work for them, not what they "value" you at. "Us" depends on "them" for our livelihoods and the lives of people that depend on us, but "them" doesn't doesn't have any dependency on you that can't be swapped out rather quickly.

I am a capitalist, don't get me wrong, but it is a very one-sided relationship not even-footed or rooted in two-way respect. You describe "them" as "leadership" while "Them" describe you as a "human resource" roughly equivalent to the way toilet paper and plastics for widgets are described.

If you have found a place to work where people respect you as a person, you should really cherish that job, because most are not that way.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI can't, as I understand it, have copyright over anything they do. Nor can it be an entity to sign anything. I assume the "not-copyrightable" issue, doesn't in anyway interfere with the rights trying to be protected by the CLA, but IANAL .. I assume they've explicitly told it not to sign things (perhaps, because they don't want a sniff of their bot agreeing to things on behalf of MSFT).

Are LLM contributions effectively under public domain?

IANAL. It's my understanding that this hasn't been determined yet. It could be under public domain, under the rights of everyone whose creations were used to train the AI or anywhere in-between.

We do know that LLMs will happily reproduce something from their training set and that is a clear copyright violation. So it can't be that everything they produce is public domain.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#250
post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These GH interactions remind me of one of those offshore software outsourcing firms on Upwork or Freelancer.com that bid $3/hr on every project that gets posted. There's a PM who takes your task and gives it to a "developer" who potentially has never actually written a line of code, but maybe they've built a WordPress site by pointing and clicking in Elementor or something. After dozens of hours billed you will, in f…

>>These GH interactions remind me of one of those offshore software outsourcing firms on Upwork or Freelancer.com that bid $3/hr on every project that gets posted. This level of smugness is why outsourcing still continues to exist. The kind of things you talk about were rare. And were mostly exaggerated to create anti-outsourcing narrative. None of that led to outsourcing actually going away simply because people are…

There's no reason why an outsourcing firm would charge less for work of equal quality. If a company outsourced to save money, they'd get one of the shops that didn't get the job done.
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