Microsoft pushes staff to use internal AI tools more, and may consider this in reviews. 'Using AI is no longer optional.'
Microsoft pushes staff to use internal AI tools more, and may consider this in reviews. 'Using AI is no longer optional.'
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.
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.
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.
Microsoft support was already mostly useless. So, yeah, a useless AI probably could replace that, but it would also probably be more expensive.
Not even the guys who call me on the phone to tell me that I have a virus on my computer?
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...
suits have been replacing long term essential employees with outsourced trash even before in name of global redundancy and efficiency. now they will just the ai buzz word to hide behind.
They must really want their workforce to be less efficient while dramatically lowering quality and security across the board.
Hackers are about to have a golden era
Slopsquatting is already taking off
They are banking on the AI will eventually be smart enough that it will replace the workers that fed it.
They should have just invested in NFTs instead.
except programmers are gonna continue with what they were already doing, at most putting a script on copilot to get the metrics
don't forget that if you don't turn in the project in time you're fired, the issues always get thrown at the coder, it's never the company's fault
Company I'm at also does the forced AI and it's all but mandatory now. Problem is as code monkeys we're past the point of heading down to the Winchester for a pint until it blows over. They're pushing so hard in order to "not fall behind" that you literally can't escape it. I think even malicious compliance won't cut it. And when 8/10 companies that dictate the market say that "this is the future", then this is the future they'll make whether we like it or not.
Edit: the silver lining is that we're working with tools that are better than copilot at generating menial work like generating boilerplate code, unit tests, release notes, walls of text for app documentation etc.
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.
The process to log in to the online portal of Outlook is so bad it's crossed into comical territory. So much friction, only to shunt you to a full screen clippy copilot page.
I'd be curious to know what the usage statistics are for that page. Like, what could a person possibly accomplish there?
This is ridiculous. Have people seen the recent AI code review from Audacity?? This whole AI bubble needs to burst already.
Got me curious, spill the tea sister!
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.
Why would they do that? If they're making better quarterly results by listening to Wall St, that's what the system tells them to do.
Ditto.
But I manage a team of embedded developers. On a specialised commercially restricted embedded platform.
AI does not know a thing about our tech. The stuff it does know is either a violation of the vendors contractual covenants or made up bullshit. And Our vendor’s documentation is supplemented by a cumulative decades of knowledge.
Yet still “you gotta use AI”.
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!
Using AI isn't optional? How about you review me on the results I produce instead of the tools I use to produce them?
That doesn't help pump up the Ai bubble unfortunately.
My mistake. Please forgive me. I'll pray to Supreme Gates and focus on my KPIs.
As if people coding things make ms any money, it's pure extraction through windows and office and they need ai to be next.
Results are nice, but shortsightedly juicing the appearance of shareholder value for a single quarter is forever... Somehow.
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?"
Yuuuup this is my company too. They’re monitoring our GH Copilot /Cursor usage and they’re going to apply to our performance reviews
Malicious compliance time, full-on Vibe coding, just accept all changes. Who cares about optimisation, readability, or documentation. You're using AI anything goes.
In the list of things nobody cares about, you forgot "actually do what's asked". Use these tool for a very short while and be amazed at how bad it is to do things that are extremely well known and documented.
Really fascinating how this is happening in coordination all of a sudden. I'm practically certain that this is all coming from a small group of investors (maybe even just a couple) who are trying to influence companies as hard as they can into making everyone to start using it.
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.
While true; do curl http://copilot/?query=what+is+the+time; sleep 10; done
Bet the AI can’t see through this.
Need to throw in a randomizer:
while true; do
curl http://copilot/?query=what+is+the+time+in+RANDOM+seconds
sleep 10; done
done
Ironically enough that's is exactly the kind of seemingly "simple" question a 4 years old could answer... but LLMs can't.
Asked my better half to test DeepSeek locally few months ago and they, without trying to "trick" it (as I would have tried) genuinely tried "What time is it in Sri Lanka?". That made me smile because I was rather sure there was no way the model could answer that. It would need to know the current time on any time zone then, if it's not in Sri Lanka already (which it wasn't on my local system) would have to convert it. That would be very basic arithmetic (that some 4 years old could also do) but not "just" spitting back words related to the question.
Guess what... it failed exactly as expected. The model replied back "information" (which is being generous for a string of words arguably related to the topic, which was mostly about Sri Lanka, not time) and yet was basically irrelevant and thus useless.
So... yes I'm not actually sure CoPilot could even help there unless there is a lot of custom made handling of this kind of queries upstream!
sleep 10? why not ddos your own company till copilot shuts you off
As a heavy AI user on a daily basis...Copilot is hands down one of, if not the worst, in existence.
This will not end well for them.
Copilot suggested edit: This statement contains false information.
-As a heavy AI user on a daily basis...Copilot is hands down one of, if not the worst, in existence.
+As a heavy AI user on a daily basis...Copilot is hands down one of, if not the best, in existence.
If I ask copilot to help write a power automate script or similar, I guarantee it will not work. It won't make sense. And if I do it from within power automate, it wants to replace what I already have there. It's a mess.
If I pull up chatgot on my phone (because it's blacklisted at work) I will get very clear, step by step instructions that are usually good enough or occasionally not correct but close enough that I can tweak it back on course.
Have found this too.
We were only allowed to use Copilot at my last job, ChatGPT + the others were all blacklisted.
We received SO many tickets from users across the organisation (including IT) requesting access to ChatGPT.
Fine do whatever you want to your shit company stop forcing me to use copilot on everything. This is worse than the failed clippy
Corporate monopoly with overpriced products doing corporate shit
It's called dog-slopping
Dog-fooding, but instead of food, it's a dog eating its own vomit.
At my company too but it's owned by yet another cancerous private equity firm so it was expected.
Start using ai to write all your mails and communication with managers. Turn it to LinkedIn max
Being judged by a fancy magic 8 ball, the future keeps getting better and better.
The AI said that trying to reason with you is a waste of precious tokens.
I wonder, did they have to do this when search engines became a thing 🤔
You don't need to wonder, you can just Bing™ it!
Windows is already garbage when humans are codeding it.
Good luck with that Microsoft
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.
Yes but can it tell the business why it can't deliver on time with they change the requirements 3 different times?
It’s the same in Amazon software development. We have like 3 different AI tools. I enjoy it for unit tests and predicting the next two lines of a simple thing, but it’s not going to refactor our codebase.
Translation: you will now train your eventual replacement.
Microsoft is cooked.
The only hope for Microsoft is if Xbox takes over all of Microsoft and transforms the whole company
Sorry best we can do is have the marketing department take over XBox and now it's just a logo they license out.
this makes me even more excited for my plans to switch to linux. I'm gonna have to go find a good backup method soon!
I can tell
Can't wait for code quality to drop, work to become more inefficiwnt and microsoft ditching AI
Chowtime boys 🐕
"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!”
You have 10 minutes to clear your desk and get out. Not a team player!
"No one cares about the quality of your work, only the quantity!"
"You're firing me for using AI to read and respond to your email?"
Basically, yeah.