Anybody who has worked in IT support in the trenches in enterprise IT will tell you there are some Excel power users who basically run the company, are macros wizards and actual ninjas.. about 0.1% of the workforce.
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In an era where companies need to become more efficient and diverse they’ve basically picked the least efficient way to do it, with the biggest risks and highest costs - because everybody else is doing it.
I know somebody at one of the big 4 who has written something in Claude that prompts Claude each twenty minutes for a question, then feeds Claude’s question back into Claude to use their tokens - because token usage is factored into employee evaluations. What are we even doing.
@GossiTheDog For awhile, I had to report how much productivity AI added to my work. Now, I can no more quantify it that I can quantify the benefit of using a good IDE, adding extra RAM, or getting fresh air. Of course, negative numbers were not allowed.
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In an era where companies need to become more efficient and diverse they’ve basically picked the least efficient way to do it, with the biggest risks and highest costs - because everybody else is doing it.
I know somebody at one of the big 4 who has written something in Claude that prompts Claude each twenty minutes for a question, then feeds Claude’s question back into Claude to use their tokens - because token usage is factored into employee evaluations. What are we even doing.
@GossiTheDog This is stupid, of course - but, as they say, show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.
Still, I don't quite understand the "cost" thing. If used properly, AI should reduce cost. By using Claude, I was able to do in 3 months what I previously couldn't do in 5 years. This is on a Pro subscription (the cheapest one) that costs something like 180 euros per year.
If we had hired a professional programmer for the same work, their *monthly* salary would have been more than 10 times higher - and they would have become annoyed with me and left after 2 months anyway.
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I’m really serious about this one btw. Companies have no measurable way of knowing what employees are doing with GenAI. They’re giving Claude Code out like it’s candy and just presuming everybody is an IT power user. They aren’t. They’re converting PDFs and vibe coding garden planning tools.
Copilot M365 has a fake dashboard showing how productive people are.. it has no actual data. It just shows people use it. It’s CIO porn for the CEO. Orgs are pissing money up a wall worldwide.
@GossiTheDog I am no general opponent of AI use. But as every tool it takes a lot of learning.
The shallow learning curve at the beginning fools users and managers alike.
For long term reliable and reproducible success you need a lot of structure.
Developing that and enforcing it is a real challenge for most users.
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@GossiTheDog This is stupid, of course - but, as they say, show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.
Still, I don't quite understand the "cost" thing. If used properly, AI should reduce cost. By using Claude, I was able to do in 3 months what I previously couldn't do in 5 years. This is on a Pro subscription (the cheapest one) that costs something like 180 euros per year.
If we had hired a professional programmer for the same work, their *monthly* salary would have been more than 10 times higher - and they would have become annoyed with me and left after 2 months anyway.
@bontchev @GossiTheDog Why would your hypothetical employee have become annoyed with you?
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@GossiTheDog This is stupid, of course - but, as they say, show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.
Still, I don't quite understand the "cost" thing. If used properly, AI should reduce cost. By using Claude, I was able to do in 3 months what I previously couldn't do in 5 years. This is on a Pro subscription (the cheapest one) that costs something like 180 euros per year.
If we had hired a professional programmer for the same work, their *monthly* salary would have been more than 10 times higher - and they would have become annoyed with me and left after 2 months anyway.
@bontchev @GossiTheDog Are you paying the full price, which covers all cost or are you using AI burning VC capital?
Edit: Stupid question, I overlooked that you're paying 180 €. So burning VC capital.
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@GossiTheDog I am no general opponent of AI use. But as every tool it takes a lot of learning.
The shallow learning curve at the beginning fools users and managers alike.
For long term reliable and reproducible success you need a lot of structure.
Developing that and enforcing it is a real challenge for most users.
> I am no general opponent of AI use.
I am, though.
> Developing that and enforcing it is a real challenge for most users.
Is it even worth the trouble or feasible? I'd like to remind people that this is the same group of users where it was too much hassle to learn "the command line" or even how a filesystem works. It all needed to be point & click "discoverable" interface (never mind that this promise was never fulfilled).
The point is discoverability, though: An interface where function is (visually) recognizable.
I wonder how (chat based) AI --- where no feature is actually _visible_ --- will work for this user group.
Yes, I think it has a use, though: As a normal, only smart feature. Like cropping subjects from a picture as in Apple Photo (on iPad, YMMV): It's just a very smart lasso, but the concept is the same as of any other cropping tool: There is a line and the image is cropped along the line (if the user wants it).
But it doesn't have a use a smartass ghost in the machine which does magic things or nags or bosses around the user.
The average user won't "develop" a "structure", though: We (the software industry) have weaned them from doing so successfully now for almost 3 decades. The capability is gone. The promise of achievement without effort has stayed ...
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In an era where companies need to become more efficient and diverse they’ve basically picked the least efficient way to do it, with the biggest risks and highest costs - because everybody else is doing it.
I know somebody at one of the big 4 who has written something in Claude that prompts Claude each twenty minutes for a question, then feeds Claude’s question back into Claude to use their tokens - because token usage is factored into employee evaluations. What are we even doing.
@GossiTheDog Show me a metric and I'll show you a game.
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I’m really serious about this one btw. Companies have no measurable way of knowing what employees are doing with GenAI. They’re giving Claude Code out like it’s candy and just presuming everybody is an IT power user. They aren’t. They’re converting PDFs and vibe coding garden planning tools.
Copilot M365 has a fake dashboard showing how productive people are.. it has no actual data. It just shows people use it. It’s CIO porn for the CEO. Orgs are pissing money up a wall worldwide.
@GossiTheDog i've found it to be quite difficult to use the various security copilots for their (supposedly) intended uses without simply swapping previously automated processes for them, which is insane but also what one rather supposes to be the point.
i have however also used generic corporate copilot to do arbitrarily silly things like deobfuscate malware so anybody snooping on my prompts in the name of metrics or other glory may be in for a surprise
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In an era where companies need to become more efficient and diverse they’ve basically picked the least efficient way to do it, with the biggest risks and highest costs - because everybody else is doing it.
I know somebody at one of the big 4 who has written something in Claude that prompts Claude each twenty minutes for a question, then feeds Claude’s question back into Claude to use their tokens - because token usage is factored into employee evaluations. What are we even doing.
@GossiTheDog I wish I could find the original to attribute it properly but this fits
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RE: https://mastodon.social/@404mediaco/116908074107231828
Anybody who has worked in IT support in the trenches in enterprise IT will tell you there are some Excel power users who basically run the company, are macros wizards and actual ninjas.. about 0.1% of the workforce. About 99% of people can’t align a table in Word.
Giving the 99% of people tools which cost $$$ per user a month and letting them do anything is like giving a child a car, and being surprised when they ram the car into a wall three days later and cost $10k after achieving nothing.
@GossiTheDog How it started: "I want you to use more AI"
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@GossiTheDog This is stupid, of course - but, as they say, show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.
Still, I don't quite understand the "cost" thing. If used properly, AI should reduce cost. By using Claude, I was able to do in 3 months what I previously couldn't do in 5 years. This is on a Pro subscription (the cheapest one) that costs something like 180 euros per year.
If we had hired a professional programmer for the same work, their *monthly* salary would have been more than 10 times higher - and they would have become annoyed with me and left after 2 months anyway.
@bontchev Claude with effectively unlimited usage isn't going to stay $180/year for long. When they do usage based billing like everyone else has been forced to do it's really easy to have a 2 sentence input that costs $100
(It still might be cheaper than hiring a developer but it is still very expensive)
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@bontchev @GossiTheDog Why would your hypothetical employee have become annoyed with you?
@xan @bontchev@infosec.exchange @GossiTheDog read his bio and then you might get it
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@bontchev @GossiTheDog Why would your hypothetical employee have become annoyed with you?
@xan @bontchev @GossiTheDog My guess would be some combination of "doesn't know how to determine & articulate what is actually required" & "doesn't know how to assess outcomes".
This is less a dig at the poster in question, more a comment on the general state of working in pretty much any corporate tech role over the past few decades. -
I’m really serious about this one btw. Companies have no measurable way of knowing what employees are doing with GenAI. They’re giving Claude Code out like it’s candy and just presuming everybody is an IT power user. They aren’t. They’re converting PDFs and vibe coding garden planning tools.
Copilot M365 has a fake dashboard showing how productive people are.. it has no actual data. It just shows people use it. It’s CIO porn for the CEO. Orgs are pissing money up a wall worldwide.
@GossiTheDog notable here that all excel/word macro, activex embedding is for that 0.1% and it's the security nightmare for the 99.9% who don't actually use this stuff.
Really office should have been designed so that scripting was something you had to explicitly install. -
I’m really serious about this one btw. Companies have no measurable way of knowing what employees are doing with GenAI. They’re giving Claude Code out like it’s candy and just presuming everybody is an IT power user. They aren’t. They’re converting PDFs and vibe coding garden planning tools.
Copilot M365 has a fake dashboard showing how productive people are.. it has no actual data. It just shows people use it. It’s CIO porn for the CEO. Orgs are pissing money up a wall worldwide.
@GossiTheDog if they are like me, they are using it only as needed to keep their jobs until this fad blows over and the company comes to it's senses
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@bontchev @GossiTheDog Why would your hypothetical employee have become annoyed with you?
@xan @bontchev @GossiTheDog says more about the poster than the benefits of AI, IMO.
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I’m really serious about this one btw. Companies have no measurable way of knowing what employees are doing with GenAI. They’re giving Claude Code out like it’s candy and just presuming everybody is an IT power user. They aren’t. They’re converting PDFs and vibe coding garden planning tools.
Copilot M365 has a fake dashboard showing how productive people are.. it has no actual data. It just shows people use it. It’s CIO porn for the CEO. Orgs are pissing money up a wall worldwide.
@GossiTheDog And then there is the non-monetary costs. We recently completed our first penetration test against Copilot in my corp and to say we found a lot of secret and confidential stuff out there just for the prompting is an understatement. The company totally believed Microsoft when they said everything would be safe guarded, yet I personally found a document with every marketing service account name and password. Vender contracts, company secrets, legal documents: we found it all. Copilot in a corporate environment is the single largest amplifier of poor IAM configurations. It is the largest insider threat I’ve ever seen.
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I’m really serious about this one btw. Companies have no measurable way of knowing what employees are doing with GenAI. They’re giving Claude Code out like it’s candy and just presuming everybody is an IT power user. They aren’t. They’re converting PDFs and vibe coding garden planning tools.
Copilot M365 has a fake dashboard showing how productive people are.. it has no actual data. It just shows people use it. It’s CIO porn for the CEO. Orgs are pissing money up a wall worldwide.
Yes and people post on mastodon in their work supplied browsers too.
If your manager doesn't understand whether you do good work or not, it's natural to exploit that. That's not a tool problem, it's a manager problem!
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@GossiTheDog honestly, isn't most of the stuff IT teams do nowadays extremely wasteful?
I look at CI pipelines and feel the need to scream.
Upgrade your OS image with hundreds of packages on every push,
Build all layers of your container every time...
Then migrate to the next git service and CI/CD framework every year, complete rewrites.
How many bloody Artifactory mirrors does a company need?!!!Etc. etc. These kids should start with a C64 or ZX80 before let loose on this hot garbage
@brnrd @GossiTheDog There is a ‘certain amount of waste’ built into the modern way of writing, testing and deploying software.
That amount can be totally insane when changing a minor detail. If the pipeline is not able to isolate what to build, test and deploy it will just do it all. Is it necessary? No. Is it able to prevent mistakes? Maybe.
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@GossiTheDog And then there is the non-monetary costs. We recently completed our first penetration test against Copilot in my corp and to say we found a lot of secret and confidential stuff out there just for the prompting is an understatement. The company totally believed Microsoft when they said everything would be safe guarded, yet I personally found a document with every marketing service account name and password. Vender contracts, company secrets, legal documents: we found it all. Copilot in a corporate environment is the single largest amplifier of poor IAM configurations. It is the largest insider threat I’ve ever seen.
@GossiTheDog PS: we did raise these concerns when management announced everyone was getting Copilot. Took months (and months) to get them to agree to a test. “No one will be able to see anything they don’t already have access to,” they said.
️Yes. Exactly.
