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points by cubefox 3 days ago | 0 comments

Perhaps because of increased productivity with LLMs, especially for developers?

Microsoft employees (developers) were told during an internal keynote that we need to be more judicious about using AI because it is expensive, makes some tasks take longer, and there is no evidence supporting increased productivity.

[–] astrange 3 days ago

Increased productivity makes employees more valuable, not less.

[–] cubefox 3 days ago

Not necessarily. If there aren't enough tasks to make use of the increased productivity of the employees, it makes them less valuable, because the company can get away with fewer employees.

[–] geraneum 3 days ago

Have we saturated all tasks that can be done by computers through development?

[–] qwerpy 3 days ago

The downvotes on your comments are weird. Maybe coming from an emotional place. I get it, I wouldn't want to be constantly reminded that the career I sacrificed so much for is a dead end. But it's true, at big companies there may be a ton of items in the backlog but none of them bring in more money. Having a bunch of idle engineers sitting around wastes money, and LLMs allow more engineers to do less. Why would a responsible VP keep around expensive employees who don't contribute to revenue?

[–] astrange 1 day ago

The backlog is always infinitely large since you can always find things to change for no reason, sure. For that I recommend KonMari-ing it.

But if people are more productive then you can find new things for them to do, unless demand is falling.

[–] dyauspitr 3 days ago

You’re getting downvoted because for most of us this is our biggest nightmare

[–] fugalfervor 2 days ago

It's also a very simplisic understanding and an identifier of someone falling victim to the Dunning-Krueger effect.

[–] causal 3 days ago

You are getting downvoted but I have to believe this is at least what some of the executives are thinking, even if it proves to be a complete illusion.