The reality is that Copilot’s laughable performance is almost entirely unrelated to AI models not being good at X.
Every single thing Copilot does has been solved much better by other products.
However, Copilot fails in extremely ridiculous ways, at very basic tasks which such a product absolutely must nail.
Copilot should not have been released.
A large majority of people involved have failed. People like managers, product managers etc should probably be fired. Technical leads equally so.
For everyone who has been building similar products it is immediately obvious that Copilot is sloppy, unfocused and unprofessionally executed.
People hate it, and for hood reason.
It just boggles the mind how they would go and release it, or that it even exists in its current form.
Those devs and managers rake in hundreds of thousands of dollars each, producing garbage that has been done better by dozens or hundreds of other teams
They indicate that this is something engineers want.
Further, half of the 3000 with transition back to engineering, indicating that they think they will be more valuable as engineers.
Middle management has this self-replicating dynamic of becoming bloated and inefficient. Most companies probably do not have good middle management, because they have too much of it.
They indicate that engineers want to spend less time on (slow) processes. That isn't necessarily the same thing as that they want less (middle) managers. I can say that at my current and previous companies (both over 30,000 employees) most of the processes/bureaucracy aren't things that the horizontal middle layers came up with. Most processes are imposed by vertical corporate functions like HR, finance, legal and compliance.
I'm not the reason my teams need to do software supplier risk assessments, or fill in at least 4 different surveys about their wellbeing and functioning as a team, or provide forecasts of their cloud spend for the year, or manage data usage agreements for the consumers of their data in our data lake. Nor is my people leader. But I am accountable if we don't stay on top of these responsibilities which are expected of all teams.
A weakness of European companies is that with very few exceptions, there is no equivalent IC role to managerial roles beyond maybe junior management.
There are companies that promise this, but it is rarely done. For whatever reason, management is universally convinced that ICs have lower value and are more replacable than managers.
It's also a distinctly European trait that European executives can look at US tech companies, who have IC roles on all levels, see that they are the most successful and innovative companies in the world, and conclude that yes, maybe capping IC benefits and adding another level of management is the way to go!
It works well in finance, that's about it. It makes no sense, as you say, everywhere else where the core business has to do with anything that needs engineering.
Many large corporations in Europe, especially in sectors of prior consistent growth and profit, are chock full of too many managers.
These are people who primarily create work for themselves and each other. I have sat in meetings about meetings for actions that, ultimately, have zero impact, in teams where managers involve outnumber people who actually execute anything three to one.
It's staggering.
I believe the best way to kill a company is to have middle management beyond the absolute minimum you might need.
I work for a very big US company. My team (10 people) has something like 4 PMs and every task is essentially priority 0. They're coming up with a new way to split tasks that seems inspired to a gatcha to prioritize between priority 0 tasks, this is their contribution and solution to the issue, any attempt to make them see how crazy that is has failed.
There are daily syncs for things that take weeks to do due to compliance, endless war rooms to solve things that would be done offline in half the time, and random bullshit process and committees introduced by management which generate even more meetings...
It's common all over the world, motion instead of progress. It's incredible to me how all those companies don't realize where their money is spent. But alas you cannot make people see a problem if their salary depends on it, and I may be no different.
It suddenly starts making sense when you realize that most people are stupid. My strategy here is that I just adjust my schedule to have tasks take literally 10x time than they should and enjoy my free time while managers argue about shit.
People are not as much stupid as selfish. Nobody is going to threaten their own revenue stream just because their job is bullshit, in fact most double down and see themselves above others.
And another layer I've seen frequently - people somehow need to make their work meaningful to make it part of their core identity, even if its literally moving one pile of dirt to next pile and then reverse, or just adding friction to progress. Strong ego game.
The reality is that once you reach a high enough level, your worth can be justified in smaller windows of time. The higher your role, the more impact your decisions have, and the more money small (but important) decisions can generate.
Think of a dev paid $250k/yr that comes up with a clever database scheme that saves the company $5m/yr in cloud costs. If nothing else, the company is in the green for years on that investment in that dev even if the dev just piddle paddles along with small fixes 99% of the time.
The part that sucks though is the general optics of these positions. Humans just instinctively want to correlate high pay with high busy work load, rather than high pay with high impact, which is how it actually works.
>Many large corporations in Europe, especially in sectors of prior consistent growth and profit, are chock full of too many managers.
As an engineer who 'jumped' to middle management: yes. 100% yes.
It's kinda disheartening and also a little bit insane to sit in a room with 12 people who learned CISSP and ISO27001 by heart but could not explain what SSH is or what a container does.
Everything has to first be abstracted away from tech into 'risks' and then 'controls' and then these controls have to be re-translated into actual changes in IT systems.
However, at every layer and every abstraction so much detail is lost that they're essentially steering blind.
Last week one of them suggested that we should whitelist the entire IPv4 range of AWS to allow some SaaS (Jira?) to connect to our internal Git.
The policy said to do whitelisting and so they all approved it until I challenged it.
Crazy to watch and honestly so disheartening that I might go do something else. Trying to affect change feels like leaning against a wall.
Pretty much due to there being no path forward with h respect to earnings if you are "just an engineer". There are some niches but mostly to make money you have to be management. Resulting in a massive Peter-principle issue and bloated layers of middle management to handle the extra managers. For what i know this is solidly entrenched into Dutch working culture.
As soon as you let some Germans into your company they will turn the bureaucracy up to 12 if allowed to, tale as old as time. It's a national culture more or less.
While you are not wrong, many of the cases I observed had managers from all over the world.
I think it's just a symptom. As a manager, you contribute nothing by yourself. You are useful if you have a useful team (ICs) with a good project. To have that, you need to defend yourself against other managers who will take this from you.
If you then also want to get prompted, your task is also to vacuum in all sorts of soft power, visibility, decision rights and being-in-the-roomness. It's even efficient, in that case, to destroy efficiency with processes (under your involvement)
As an IC, you are always valuable as you can always create value.
Hence, by having enough managers, you ensure that their competition will destroy the company.
Having ICs with no organization, synchronization or shared vision creates chaos, toxicity and a lot of technical debt. You can easily create negative value. ICs need direction to be successful, and well managed people are much happier in my experience than non-managed people.
Firstly, management and leadership are not the same thing. Giving direction is the job of a leader. Managers, just like anyone else, are rarely good leaders. They are more likely to give the wrong direction and vision than ICs, given that they typically also know less.
IC's do benefit from coordination, as any team might. That is management. However, having more than the absolute minimum of managers and management attached to a product invariably means an exponential decrease in efficiency.
Any team with more managers than senior ICs such as staff engineers is in trouble. That's because staff+ engineers are the people who's ACTUAL job it is to give direction, force multiplication and avoidance of local minima.
Hence, the nature of the position of manager is that it is very often unnecessary, or only intermittently useful. Therefore, a successful manager is not one who makes the product succeed, but rather someone who creates work that they themselves can and need to solve. Typically, this happens when there is a group of managers where there should be only one.
> Well managed people are much happier in my experienced
Emphasis on the well-managed. If the management actually helps the tram achieve their goals and doesn't stifle them, then great. Otherwise, you end up with bloat.
There are many useful and successful project management companies that are an indispensable part of many industries, most notably in infrastructure projects.
It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless
and bible-black, the cobbled streets silent and the hunched,
courters’-and-rabbits’ wood limping invisible down to
the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-
bobbing sea"
Yes however speaking allows flexibility in communication, dynamics that text does not support and, crucial if there is no alignment, nonverbal communication.
It is much much easier to build trust in person, which is important for efficient teams.
In the end, both modes have pros and cons, but there is indeed a lot of research indicating remote teamwork is much more challenging on many dimensions
To me all of this reads like gibberish but I'll admit that it's likely just me (and "my kind" of neurodivergent people). Far as dynamics go (ability to interrupt) voice chat solves the problem fully as far as I'm concerned. Non-verbal comms are lost on me to the point that I don't know what you even mean, and I simply cannot trust anyone who is close enough to me to potentially punch me...
Again, granted -- I'm an outlier, but that also means that I can just operate at my full capacity when I work with text and cannot when I work "in person".
Well done America, you made your neighboring country work on insurgency tactics because an imperialistic attack from you is now a real possibility.
Think about that a second.
It's insane that both countries are in a military alliance, have existing common defence projects and are preparing for a war against each other. Just insane.
It’s pretty well known that for probably 50+ years that the US has commissioned operational plans on virtually every country in the world. Including allies.
Every single thing Copilot does has been solved much better by other products.
However, Copilot fails in extremely ridiculous ways, at very basic tasks which such a product absolutely must nail.
Copilot should not have been released. A large majority of people involved have failed. People like managers, product managers etc should probably be fired. Technical leads equally so.
For everyone who has been building similar products it is immediately obvious that Copilot is sloppy, unfocused and unprofessionally executed.
People hate it, and for hood reason.
It just boggles the mind how they would go and release it, or that it even exists in its current form.
Those devs and managers rake in hundreds of thousands of dollars each, producing garbage that has been done better by dozens or hundreds of other teams
Bah
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