R.I.P. Byebye Programmers

[KNERD]

Microsoft offers voluntary buyouts to 60,000 employees as AI leads to efficiency push

Microsoft is trying to balance a rapid AI infrastructure build-out with capital efficiency.

www.cnbc.com

 

[wardmundy]

Truth be told... I could no longer do it by myself. AI isn't perfect, but it sure beats 4 years in college.

 

[atsak]

I could never do it, but a couple weeks ago I got chatgpt to write a python script for me to bulk invoice something using an API - I could never generate code but I can read it, and it seems that it has done exactly what I asked it to, and worked in testing. It took about 15 minutes. It's good for routine stuff, maybe not so much for the creative or complex things.
Ya, I could have used claude which would be better but i have a free credit for chatgpt from my amex so . . .

 

[mbellot]

Microsoft offers voluntary buyouts to 60,000 employees as AI leads to efficiency push

Microsoft is trying to balance a rapid AI infrastructure build-out with capital efficiency.

www.cnbc.com

Do you think Windows will finally start to get better with AI doing the programming?

Yeah, me neither.

 

[wardmundy]

My friends in sales didn't get buyout offers so... this pretty clearly shows it's the programmers being shown the door.

 

[KNERD]

Do you think Windows will finally start to get better with AI doing the programming?

Yeah, me neither.

Next version will probably only run on a Thin Client you purchase from M$, and pay a subscription for their "cloud" version.

 

[wardmundy]

@KNERD to the rescue! https://sourceforge.net/projects/lindows-os/

 

[mbellot]

My friends in sales didn't get buyout offers so... this pretty clearly shows it's the programmers being shown the door.

Sales? I thought M$ moved to a free/ad supported model.

What could they possibly do in sales besides three martini lunches?

 

[wardmundy]

Sales? I thought M$ moved to a free/ad supported model.

What could they possibly do in sales besides three martini lunches?

Think Europe and the Middle East.

 

[Samot]

Wow, so only Programmers and sales people are what Microsoft has. Interesting take. This round of voluntary buyouts is for everyone from an intern to a low level VP and it's based on *what teams opted in for it* not what job an individual does. Here are the teams, across four continents, that are opted in for the buyout offers which individual team members can take. It's a mixed bag of jobs and personnel.

Copilot
CoreAI and AI experiences
Windows + Devices
Xbox
Finance
Human resources
Some cloud, AI and legal groups.

The hot take is this isn't about replacing people with AI but about freeing up cash flow to invest in AI. But that is speculation right now since Microsoft hasn't provided real reasons for this outside of giving people a nice path out of the company.

 

[Halea]

Sales? I thought M$ moved to a free/ad supported model.

What could they possibly do in sales besides three martini lunches?

Corporate sales/contracts for all their products. That's the bulk of their income and if you don't make your numbers then you're out swiftly with AI or no AI. Absolutely nothing changes for sales people at places like M$ and IBM$, except they may lose their assistants/secretaries and have to cope with AI.

 

[KNERD]

The hot take is this isn't about replacing people with AI but about freeing up cash flow to invest in AI. But that is speculation right now since Microsoft hasn't provided real reasons for this outside of giving people a nice path out of the company.

I suspect they are going to replace with them with AI. Do you really think any of those jobs will come back? They are probably doing "buy outs" instead of straight layoffs for public relation reasons. I mean how much are they going to "save" by spending more on those 60k instead of just doing a layoff where the financial obligation to them is gone with a couple of months severance pay.

 

[dghundt]

Our office software isn't perfect, so I've written some helper programs over time to make my life easier (eventually).
I needed a couple things done, but didn't want to dust off my Visual Studio with C# hat and spend my free time programming.
I gave Github copilot a whirl within Visual Studio. Dang, something that would have taken me a week or two at night, I finished in less than a day. So I thought, "I need this application too!" Built that in less than two days.

Even though I know the basics of C#, it's still a challenge to debug someone else's code. That is a skill all on it's own. Then there is the stepwise logic of building and testing the application. Guess they call that 'prompting'.
A few times I just said, "which line does it do this/that", and stepped through the code and told it how to fix it. Other times, it wrote debug log files for me. I told it the error that needed fixing. So I didn't write much native code, but being facile in the IDE and C# certainly helped.