This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
they cut our copilot budget to 19€ per person (you can request more. but of course it’s a hassle)
they still insist AI the future and more AI is better. they are just now shifting the blame to employees: “you need to think more about how you use it”, “you cannot just throw tokens at a problem”, etc
two months ago I got an email from a manager asking me why my AI spending was so low.
Wait, we're not tokenmaxing anymore? So when the AI salesman said to make a leaderboard of people spening the hardest, it was to line their own pockets with cash? Huh. Color me surprised.
So next, you'll tell me that it costs more to have an LLM produce the same quality of code as a senior developer.
This just in, Management are complete morons. Film at 11.
Trend chasing upper class idiots
At our company, 12 months ago they said everyone wasn't using enough AI. They even made a leaderboard to see who was using the most tokens in the business and encouraged more and more.
A couple of months ago, everyone's AI spend was restricted to $100/month without warning. Entire workflows broken overnight because people had built theirs around Claude skills that used stupid amounts of tokens.
Now they're starting layoffs. Go figure.
Remember when chatgpt first went viral and everyone said that "prompt engineer will be the new career path". So, how's that going?
Now let's be honest here, work slop is absolutely nothing new. I've had coworkers who will spend countless hours on a fucking useless "walking deck" which is the dumbest fucking idea I've ever heard of. Its just a slideshow full of pretty pictures that morons like but says almost nothing useful. Just departmental marketing wank. At least slop is more democratic now, I can pull one of these turds together in 5 minutes, impress the dipshits that like pretty graphics that look good, but mean nothing.
Just in time for the big tech AI companies' bills to come due to their investors. Excellent... taps fingertips together
January: We're going AI native, please use AI as much as possible.
March: Everyone needs to attend workshops on how to maximize AI productivity.
July: Some models are only available for special (properly justified) cases. Speak to your manager. Turns out that some people did everything (even commits) with top cost models.
August: Ok, we're setting some limits on token usage, due to some people spending 1000% over the average.
September: we are creating additional frameworks and limits to AI use.
It took a bit of time for the actual AI cost/benefit to reach the top management and put some hard numbers in contrast with the hype machine, but it's happening.
Do we work at the same company??
I think this was the standard management reaction across all the companies that embraced AI as if it was the second coming of Jesus Christ.
They thought it was their ticket to fire everybody, and the more they made you use it the sooner they could fire you.
C-Suit are herd animals. Same schools, same country clubs, same conference. They all are formed the same. And they don't take advise from people who earn a few orders of magnitude less.
My company is at the July stage. Who knew giving people unrestricted access to Claude enterpise with no training would blow through budgets in days
Everyone who was paying attention even a little bit has known this would be the trajectory from the beginning. And we haven't even gotten to the crazy price hikes per token that are coming.
I feel like we're co-workers, with how perfectly that timeline matched the day-job's progression.
We're at "did you take the seminar on looping that uses tokens like a firehouse so you can use less tokens? Why are you using too little (/not enough) tokens, and why is it not magically 10x-ing all of your (fucking ansible) config?" Or some shit.
We are ruled by idiots. It's probably been that way for the majority of history.
Most places I've worked, management has been a negative force.
Management is good at accumulating and maintaining power. Competence in actually getting stuff done doesn't really help with that.
Competence would require pointing out flaws someone else is responsible for, which would certainly enganger your career eventually. So, not only is competence unnecessary in management, it is actively selected against.
Someone sent me what was clearly an AI generated doc. I read it, realized it was all AI, had my AI summarize it and ended up with nothing that brought new thinking
What a loop...
This is the thing that drives me absolutely nuts with how most people use LLMs at work. I'm fully capable of asking the LLM to create slop, I need others to actually check and ensure their documentation is useful and correct before communicating it with others.
If only literally everyone warned them this would happen…
But [company] selling [thing] told me it's good, it's not like they would lie about that!
“Why would I deceive you?”
The salesman took me out for a steak dinner and then a strip club! He's my friend!
Management spent two years demanding everyone use AI, then discovered everyone was using AI. Now they’re shocked the office is a conveyor belt of hallucinated PowerPoints reviewed by other bots. The real productivity breakthrough will be executives learning that buying subscriptions isn’t a business strategy.
After talking to some people who actually have been forced to work with AI on projects in teams Its been horrifying to find how little time they are given to build out proper safe guards, rules and test the process.
Management seems to be expecting these stupid robots to work the first time every time
Even in small projects for every 8 hours of work there's a good hour or two of adjusting memory, standing rules, hooks, and countless other things.
It's endless upkeep. Every shift in work flow tends to create knock on effects.
Management of the bot it self becomes a massive work load if you want them to be even remotely reliable.
I'm not surprised their use in a corporate environment is backfiring massively.
I sort of know what you mean. The company I work for has been encouraging the use of AI/LLMs. But some of the company leadership has been smart about it. We recently got some AI agents to use as tools in our workflow. However, they tested the agents for a few weeks before allowing us to use them, so that they know the agents do what they're suppose to do.
I just wish my company would start hiring again. I have been using the AI out of necessity, because we are short-staffed in certain areas. I've asked several times, directly, how much my AI use is costing and nobody is in a position to know. It's certainly helped in some areas but I want to build a case that hiring a college grad or two can help more....
Being short staffed is the whole point. They believe (where they are right or wrong) AI will replace large number employees. For example in my company where that are pushing vibe coding, my boss said that now they believe that the large projects need less people.
If you use AI and still have to work overtime you are your own problem. As long as you deliver why would they change anything? Don't deliver. It is not worth sacrificing your health for someone's else's profits. You have only one life.
I see people who embraced vibe coding still working overtime and over weekends, more than before.
Ernst and Young say 36% of companies using AI have experienced catastrophic incidents.
Hopefully some of them go bankrupt. That would be a stellar way to get rid of some bad management.
get rid of some bad management.
Good luck. Like cockroaches, they'd probably survive a nuclear holocaust.
Hahaha. No. Management is not losing jobs over this. Not in the quantities needed.
If anyone important does get fired they'll just get re-hired by another company who needs some doofus to fill a position in upper management.
"And why did you leave your last job?"
"The company went bankrupt due to severe mismanagement."
"How did you get your management position at that company?"
"My dad was rich."
"You're hired."
This really is just like every other management trend. They take something that can have a positive impact and then try to apply it in all the wrong places without investing in making it work. AI can really help with a lot of mundane tasks that everyone dreads doing. And it can really help at finding information in an ocean of docs and pages. But... you have to invest in training people jow to use it, building the internal tools to make it effective, and in getting the garbage out of your existing docs. It can also be used for coding of course, but the ecosystem needed to do that well requires even more investment in basics. The fact that tech writers who know how to work with and document for AI aren't being hired by the bundle tells you how wrong soo many companies are about their approach. Bonus points, if used well, AI doesn't have to be obscenely expensive. At least until they start charging what it actually costs.
They take something that can have a positive impact and then try to apply it in all the wrong places without investing in making it work.
That sounds like when a company I used to work for first found out about Agile....
People at my company are broadly phoning it in with AI. Everyone on my team was complaining the other day that people keep posting in our team Slack channel with Claude and we are the only humans in the conversation.
Recently in my team people are posting AI output for review, and others feed it into a chat bot and paste the result.
So which trade are you thinking of changing to?
