Comment by mtmail
19 days ago
Depends on team but seems management is pushing it
from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44031432
"From talking to colleagues at Microsoft it's a very management-driven push, not developer-driven. Friend on an Azure team had a team member who was nearly put on a PIP because they refused to install the internal AI coding assistant. Every manager has "number of developers using AI" as an OKR, but anecdotally most devs are installing the AI assistant and not using it or using it very occasionally. Allegedly it's pretty terrible at C# and PowerShell which limits its usefulness at MS."
"From reading around on Hacker News and Reddit, it seems like half of commentators say what you say, and the other half says "I work at Microsoft/know someone who works at Microsoft, and our/their manager just said we have to use AI", someone mentioned being put on PIP for not "leveraging AI" as well. I guess maybe different teams have different requirements/workflows?"
The question is who is setting these OKRs/Metrics for management and why?
It seems to me to be coming from the CEO echo chamber (the rumored group chats we keep hearing about). The only way to keep the stock price increasing in these low growth high interest rate times is to cut costs every quarter. The single largest cost is employee salaries. So we have to shed a larger and larger percentage of the workforce and the only way to do that is to replace them with AI. It doesn't matter whether the AI is capable enough to actually replace the workers, it has to replace them because the stock price demands it.
We all know this will eventually end in tears.
Yep. I heard someone at Microsoft venting about management constantly pleading with them to use AI so that they could tell investors their employees love AI, while senior (7+ year) team members were being “randomly” fired.
> the only way to do that is to replace them with AI
I guess money-wise it kind of makes sense when you're outsourcing the LLM inference. But for companies like Microsoft, where they aren't outsourcing it, and have to actually pay the cost of hosting the infrastructure, I wonder if the calculation still make sense. Since they're doing this huge push, I guess someone somewhere said it does make sense, but looking at the infrastructure OpenAI and others are having to build (like Stargate or whatever it's called), I wonder how realistic it is.
> The question is who is setting these OKRs/Metrics for management and why?
Masters of the Universe, because they think they will become more rich or at least more masterful.
> The question is who is setting these OKRs/Metrics for management and why?
Idiots.
> Allegedly it's pretty terrible at C#
In my experience, LLMs in general are really, really bad at C# / .NET , and it worries me as a .NET developer.
With increased LLM usage, I think development in general is going to undergo a "great convergence".
There's a positive(1) feedback loop where LLM's are better at Blub, so people use them to write more Blub. With more Blub out there, LLMs get better at Blub.
The languages where LLMs struggle, with become more niche, leaving LLMs struggling even more.
C# / .NET is something LLMs seem particularly bad at, and I suspect that's partly caused by having multiple different things all called the same name. EF, ASP, even .NET itself are names that get slapped on a range of different technologies. The EF API has changed so much that they had to sort-of rename it to "EF Core". Core also gets used elsewhere such as ".NET core" and "ASP.NET Core". You (Or an LLM) might be forgiven for thinking that ASP.NET Core and EF Core are just those versions which work with .NET Core (now just .NET ) and the other versions are those that don't.
But that isn't even true. There are versions of ASP.NET Core for .NET Framework.
Microsoft bundle a lot of good stuff into the ecosystem, but their attitude when they hit performance or other issues is generally to completely rewrite how something works, but then release the new thing under the old name but with a major version change.
They'll make the new API different enough to not work without work porting, but similar enough to confuse the hell out of anyone trying to maintain both.
They've made things like authentication, which actually has generally worked fine out-of-the-box for a decade or more, so confusing in the documentation that people mostly tended to run for a third party solution just because at least with IdentityServer there was just one documented way to do it.
I know it's a bit of a cliche to be an "AI-doomer", and I'm not really suggesting all development work will go the way of the dinosaur, but there are specific ecosystem concerns with regard to .NET and AI assistance.
(1) Positive in the sense of feedback that increased output increases output. It's not positive in the sense of "good thing".
From a purely Schadenfreude perspective, I’d love to see Microsoft face karmic revenge for its abysmal naming “conventions”.
My impression is also that they are worse at C# than some other languages. In autocomplete mode in particular it is very easy to cause the AI tools to write terrible async code. If you start some autocomplete but didn't put an await in front, it will always do something stupid as it can't add the await itself at that position. But also in other cases I've seen Copilot write just terrible async code.
LLMs are terrible at writing hip-hop because they can only move forward.
Hip-hop is just natural language with extra constraints like rhythm and rhyme. It requires the ability to edit.
Similarly, types and PL syntax have more constraints than English.
Until transformers can move backward and change what they've already autocompleted, the problem you've identified will continue.
I rather suspect that it's bad at C# simply because there's much fewer open source C# code to train on out there than there is JavaScript, Python, or even Java. The vast majority of C# written out in real world is internal corporate apps. And while this is also true for Java, it has had a vast open source ecosystem associated with it for much longer than .NET.
> Depends on team but seems management is pushing it
The graphic "Internal structure of tech companies" comes to mind, given if true, would explain why the process/workflow is so different between the teams at Microsoft: https://i.imgur.com/WQiuIIB.png
Imagine the Copilot team has a KPI about usage, matching the company OKRs or whatever about making sure the world is using Microsoft's AI enough, so they have a mandate/leverage to get the other teams to use it regardless of if it's helping or not.
Well, what you describe is not terrible way to run things. Eat your own dogfood. To get better at it you need to start doing it.
Sure, but if the product in question is at best tangential to your core products, it sucks, and makes your work flow slow to a crawl, I don’t blame employees for not wanting to use it.
For example, if tomorrow my company announced that everyone was being switched to Windows, I would simply quit. I don’t care that WSL exists, overall it would be detrimental to my workday, and I have other options.
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you can directly link to comments, by the way. just click on the link which displays how long ago the comment was written and you get the URL for the single comment.
(just mentioning it because you linked a post and quoted two comments, instead of directly linking the comments. not trying to 'uhm, actually'.)
Using a throwaway for obvious reasons. I work at a non-tech megacorp that you've heard of. This company's (I will not say "our"!) CEO is very close to Nadella, they meet regularly. Management here is also pushing Github Copilot onto devs, aggressively, and including it in their HR reviews. Dev-adjacent roles (product, QA, BAs) are also seeing aggressive push.
This feels like it will end badly.
All of that is working, at least, because the very small company I work for with a limited budget is working on getting an extremely expensive copilot license. Oh no, I might have to deal with this soon..
It kinda makes sense for management to push it. Nothing else has a hope of preventing MSFT's stock price from collapsing into bluechip territory.
> management is pushing it
Why?
On the surface, because they're told to push it.
Further down, so that developers are used to train the AI that would replace both developers and managers.
It's a situation like this:
Mgr: Go dig a six-foot-deep rectangular hole.
Eng: What should the rectangle's dimensions be?
Mgr: How tall and wide are you?
Management is pushing it because the execs are pushing it, and the execs are pushing it because they already spent 50 billion dollars on these magic beans and now they really really really need them to work.
To validate the huge investment in openai - otherwise the leadership would appear to have overpaid and overplayed.
There are other options to do just that instead of ruining developers' life and hence drastically lowering the performance of teams.
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At Microsoft, because they sell that stuff and it would be really bad for their image if they insisted they work better by not using it.
(Or, rather, I have no idea how this compares with the image of they actually not delivering because they use it. But that's a next quarter problem.)
At every other place where management is strongly pushing it, I honestly have no idea. It makes zero sense for management to do that everywhere, yet management is doing that everywhere.
The stock price isn't going to go up on its own. Even when MS was massively profitable in the 2000s, the stock used to be stuck in the $30-$40 range because Wall St didn't think it was "innovating" fast enough.
Money.