They must really want their workforce to be less efficient while dramatically lowering quality and security across the board.
How very corporate of them: people don’t want to do something? Screw finding out why, let’s make it mandatory and poof, problem solved!
I feel like this is going to cause so many problems in the near future. They’re not ready for it and they don’t even know.
Apparently no longer optional for their customers either, based on how hard they are pushing it in Office 365, sorry Microsoft 365, no sorry Microsoft 365 Copilot.
The latest change of dumping you into a Copilot chat immediately on login and hiding all the actually useful stuff is just desperation incarnate.
It’s called dog-slopping
Corporate monopoly with overpriced products doing corporate shit
At your next job interview ask them if they are results driven or methodology driven. “If I were to take twice as long to do something by using a poorly designed tool will I be rewarded or punished?”
Being judged by a fancy magic 8 ball, the future keeps getting better and better.
Same at my company. The frustrating part is they want us to use coding assistance, which is fine, but I really don’t code that much. I spend most of my time talking to other teams and vendors, reading docs, filing tickets, and trying to assign tasks to Jr devs. For AI to help me with that I need to either type all of my thoughts into the LLM which isn’t efficient at all or I need it to integrate with systems I’m not allowed to integrate with because there are SLOs that need to be maintained (i.e. can’t hammer the API and make others experience worse).
So it’s pretty much the same as it’s always been. Instead of making a gallon of lemonade out of one lemon I need to use this “new lemonade machine” to start a multinational lemonade business.
The key highlight being: you don’t need more than a gallon of lemonade. I for once wished big corps heard their engineers and domain experts over wall street loving exec’s.
I had an interesting conversation today with an acquaintance. He has sent his resumé to dozens of companies now. Most of them, but not all, corporate blobs.
He wondered for a while just why the hell no one is even reaching out (he’s definitely qualified for most of the positions). He then came to the idea to ask a particular commercial Artificial Stupidity software to parse it. Most of those companies use that software, or at least that’s what the vendor says on its website. Turns out, that PoS software gets it all wrong. As in: everything. Positions and companies get mixed up, dates aren’t correctly registered, the job descriptions it claims to have understood only remotely match what he wrote. Read: things even the most junior programmer with two weeks of experience would get right.
And it is getting used pretty much by every big firm out there.
Oh and BTW: There is ONE correct answer to the phrase ‘using AI is no longer optional’ : Fuck you.
That’s not AI. That’s just ATS. And it’s been shit for years. Definitely, definitely, make sure your resume is ATS compatible. Use the scanners.
I’m gonna be looking for a new job soon and I’ve been reading stuff like this more & more. Makes me really scared. I guess reaching out to recruiters directly via LinkedIn is more important than ever. I also hope the AI software hasn’t made its way down to small/medium-sized companies yet, since those are the ones I’d rather work for anyways
Your resume is ATS compatible. that’s a non-negotiable point nowadays.
small/medium sized companies
Sadly, those are worse. Since they don’t have the staff or expertise, most of the time they outsource to larger companies… that use AI. I’m almost 99% positive at this point if any of the sites use Workday, it’s getting parsed by an AI because that’s what ours does and it’s a PITA.
“Have any of you realized how much money we spent on this?!”
“But the results are objectively much worse than if I just did it myself, sir!”
“No one cares about the quality of your work, only the quantity!”
Someone has to generate the bugs we pay you to fix.
You have 10 minutes to clear your desk and get out. Not a team player!
American employers don’t even give you this anymore. You are escorted away by security and someone else empties your shit into a box and hands it to you in the lobby. They are very afraid of sabotage.
Seems like in the USA everyone gets treated badly all of the time, except the very richest.
Either that, or you make yourself indispensable. What the C-Suites do all day, I have no idea. Whatever it is isn’t working though.
When did they ever? I remember when one of my parents got fired in the 90s, they sent the stuff from the desk in a box. Including the company desk phone!
“You’re firing me for using AI to read and respond to your email?”
Basically, yeah.
At my company too but it’s owned by yet another cancerous private equity firm so it was expected.
Its to use the employees to train AI to replace them and they know it.
Nah its just part of the MLM scheme that is “AI”. Its useful because they said it would be useful. Its worth the investment because it cost a lot of money. Once you realize that all these companies care about is revenue and “growth” then it all clicks. It doesnt have to work or be profitable, it just needs to look good to investers.
They will even go as far as firing loads of workers and saying publicly that they “replaced them with AI” while in reality those workers were just doing something that the company was willing to sacrifice. They just replaced something with nothing to make it look like their magic AI can actually do things.
Cory Doctorow put it better than i ever could: https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/07/rah-rah-rasputin/
The whole post is good but i will just quote this section.The “boy genius” story is an example of Silicon Valley’s storied “reality distortion field,” pioneered by Steve Jobs. Like Jobs, Zuck is a Texas marksman, who fires a shotgun into the side of a barn and then draws a target around the holes. Jobs is remembered for his successes, and forgiven his (many, many) flops, and so is Zuck. The fact that pivot to video was well understood to have been a catastrophic scam didn’t stop people from believing Zuck when he announced “metaverse.”
Zuck lost more than $70b on metaverse, but, being a boy genius Texas marksman, he is still able to inspire confidence from credulous investors. Zuck’s AI initiatives generated huge interest in Meta’s stock, with investors betting that Zuck would find ways to keep Meta’s growth going, despite the fact that AI has the worst unit economics of any tech venture in living memory. AI is a business that gets more expensive as time goes on, and where the market’s willingness to pay goes down over time. This makes the old dotcom economics of “losing money on every sale, but making it up in volume” look positively rosy.
Ai definitely can’t replace many (if any) microsoft employees.
I think shouldn’t is better to say than can’t. They are definitely going to try.
Their hope is probably that AI can let current employees bear a greater workload so they can downsize.
Ding! Any gains in productivity will mean more work for less people.
Anyone who can’t see this coming - I have several bridges for sale.
Microsoft support was already mostly useless. So, yeah, a useless AI probably could replace that, but it would also probably be more expensive.
Frankly, with the garbage Microsoft is producing these days, and the rate at which the quality, for lack of a better word, is degenerating, I’m starting to consider if LLM slop might actually be less worse…
Not even the guys who call me on the phone to tell me that I have a virus on my computer?
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Sam Altman makes money from people believing this.
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Right now at least, AI is being more of a headache than anything in coding. Microsoft itself was responsible for one such gaffe in May, as an actual coder had to tell the AI to fix an error, again and again, as each time it’d make a different mistake
I use ChatGPT to write code fairly often. Because I don’t know how. ChatGPT never gets it right the first time, usually doesn’t get it right by the 10th try, and will never stop going down a robot hole of inaccuracy until I give up. The only success I have had in recent memory was getting some custom commands written in Karabiner for my desktop mice.
What other LLMs have you tried?
Lol
Malicious compliance and use it solely for internal emails.
can i send an AI bot to all my Teams meetings? THAT would actually increase my productivity.
Microsoft is in the process of downsizing to the tune of 3% of its global workforce and rising.
Could be they really are unironically cruising towards a CEO overseeing a bunch of spam bot email accounts they’re treating as headcount.
Good luck with that Microsoft
