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

Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

old.reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

461–470 of 580 posts

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#461

Post by beefnugs »

sbarre wrote: post #143
globalise83 wrote: post #21

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…

You dont think its different somehow that the exact tech they are forcing all employees to use, is the same tech to reduce head count and pressure employees to work harder for less money?

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#462

Post by LunaSea »

sbarre wrote: post #143
globalise83 wrote: post #21

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 mean their company (Microsoft) is literally asking them to train their replacement.

So I'm not quite sure why you would not see it as a "us vs. them" situation?

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#463

Post by blibble »

ryandrake wrote: post #383
ecocentrik wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to find anything wrong with your conclusions except that you're leaving out the part where they're trying to automate our contributions to devalue our skills. I'm surprised there isn't a movement to halt the use of AI for certain tasks in software development on the same level as the active resistance from doctors against socialized medicine in the US. These expensive toys will inevitably introduce catastro…

> I'm surprised there isn't a movement to halt the use of AI for certain tasks in software development on the same level as the active resistance from doctors against socialized medicine in the US. This is also shocking to me. Especially here on HN! Every tech CEO on earth is salivating over AI coding because they want it to devalue and/or replace their expensive human software developers. Whether or not that will ac…

> This is also shocking to me. Especially here on HN!

this website is owned and operated by a VC, who build fortunes off exploiting these people

"workers and oppressed peoples of all countries, unite!" is the last thing I'd expect to see here

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#464

Post by sbarre »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #327
sbarre wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a whole lot of assumptions in your statement/question there, don't you think?

Sorry, you are right. I was unnecessarily snarky I read some of your other comments in this thread and I'm not sure what to make of your experience. If you've never felt mistreated or exploited in a 30 year career you are profoundly lucky to have avoided that sort of workplace I've only been working in software for half as long, but I've never had a job that didn't feel unstable in some ways, so it seems impossible t…

I'm sorry to hear that's been your experience.. If it helps, know that it's not like that everywhere..

I have certainly been lucky in my career, I've often acknowledged that. But I do believe luck favours the prepared, and I've worked hard for my accomplishments and to get the jobs I've had.

I'm totally with you on the uncertainty that AI is bringing. I don't think anyone can dispute that change is coming because of AI.

I do think some companies will get it right, but some will get it wrong, when it comes to how best to improve the business using those new tools.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#465

Post by jayGlow »

dmix wrote: post #314
abxyz wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author of that comment, an employee of Microsoft, goes on to say: > It is my opinion that anyone not at least thinking about benefiting from such tools will be left behind. The read here is: Microsoft is so abuzz with excitement/panic about AI taking all software engineering jobs that Microsoft employees are jumping on board with Microsoft's AI push out of a fear of "being left behind". That's not the confidence…

> Microsoft employees are jumping on board with Microsoft's AI push out of a fear of "being left behind" If they weren't experimenting with AI and coding and took a more conservative approach, while other companies like Anthropic was running similar experiments, I'm sure HN would also be critiquing them for not keeping up as a stodgy big corporation. As long as they are willing to take risks by trying and failing on…

exactly ignoring new technologies can be a death sentence for a company even one as large as Microsoft. even if this technology doesn't pay off its still a good idea to at least look into potential uses.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#466

Post by sbarre »

mrguyorama wrote: post #440
sbarre wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Your manager understands it. Their manager understands it. Department heads understand it. The execs understand it. The shareholders understand it. Who does it benefit for the laborers to refuse to understand it? It's not like I hate my job. It's just being realistic that if a company could make more money by firing me, they would, and if you have good m…

What you are describing is not "antagonistic" though..

> antagonism: actively expressed opposition or hostility

I agree with you that everyone should have a clear and realistic understanding of their relationship with their employer. And that is entirely possible in a professional and constructive manner.

But that's not the same thing as being actively hostile towards your place of work.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#468

Post by einsteinx2 »

derektank wrote: post #179
owebmaster wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The promises are indeed large but the speed of progress has been fast And at the same time, absurdly slow? ChatGPT is almost 3 years old and pretty much AI has still no positive economic impact.

OpenAI alone is on track to generate as much revenue as Asus or US Steel this year ($10-$15 billion). I don't know how you can say AI has had no positive economic impact.

Revenue, not profit.

If it costs them even just one more dollar than that revenue number to provide that service (spoiler, it does), then you could say AI has had no positive economic impact.

Considering we know they’re being subsidized by obscene amounts of investment money just like all other frontier model providers, it seems pretty clear it’s still a negative economic impact, regardless of the revenue number.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#469

Post by einsteinx2 »

eterevsky wrote: post #18
margorczynski wrote: post #8

With how stochastic the process is it makes it basically unusable for any large scale task. What's the plan? To roll the dice until the answer pops up? That would be maybe viable if there was a way to automatically evaluate it 100% but with a human in the loop required it becomes untenable.

The plan is to improve AI agents from their current ~intern level to a level of a good engineer.

Without handholding (aka being used as a tool by a competent programmer instead of as an independent “agent”), they’re currently significantly worse than an intern.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#470

Post by smodo »

djhn wrote: post #459
spiffytech wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a third way things might go: on the way to "superpower for everyone", we go through an extended phase where AI is only a superpower in skilled hands. The job market bifurcates around this. People who make strong use of it get first pick of the good jobs. People not making effective use of AI get whatever's left. Kinda like how word processing used to be an important career skill people put on their resumes. A…

To be fair, word processing is a skill that that a majority of professionals continue to lack. Law, civil service, academia and those who learnt enough LaTeX and HTML to understand text documents are in the minority.

Yeah and now people who can’t even write and never put in the effort to learn it are flooding the zone (my inbox) with useless 10 page memo’s.
Post reply on HN