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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Some Microsoft organizations are looking to increase their span of control, defined as the number of direct reports or subordinates a manager or supervisor oversees. It also wants to increase the number of coders compared to non-coders on projects,
According to anonymous people familiar with the matter who spoke to Business Insider, Microsoft has yet to decide how many jobs will be cut, though one person said it could be a significant portion of their team.
Other companies such as Amazon and Google are also reducing the number of managers and executives in their drive for efficiency.
Microsoft wants to decrease the ratio of product/program managers (PMs) to engineers. Microsoft security boss Charlie Bell's division has a ratio of around 5.5 engineers to one PM, but he wants that to reach 10:1.
News that Microsoft is targeting non-coders in these cuts is in contrast to the many stories about generative AI replacing the need for programmers. Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott made the startling prediction last week that 95% of all code will be generated by AI by 2030. He added that humans would still be involved in the process, though it's easy to imagine that there will be fewer of them.
At the start of the year, Microsoft confirmed it was implementing performance-based layoffs, though it said those let go would be replaced with new hires. Microsoft rates employees on a scale of 0 to 200 and bases their stock awards and bonuses on this rating. Anyone in the 60 to 80 range – 100 is average – is rated as a low performer.
Soon after those performance cuts were revealed, the company said it was making more job cuts across its business, impacting employees in the gaming, experience & devices, sales, and security divisions.
(Score: 4, Informative) by turgid on Monday April 14, @01:28PM (2 children)
Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott made the startling prediction last week that 95% of all code will be generated by AI by 2030.
Short Microsoft. I mean, what could possibly go wrong? And now stack ranking for the staff. How delightful.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 5, Insightful) by VLM on Monday April 14, @01:49PM
My suspicion is AI generated slop will soon destroy the free public internet/web leaving nothing but corporate login pages and paywalls and lots of unusable spam wrapped with megatons of unskippable ads.
At that point it'll no longer be possible to google for "Java enterprise design pattern factory example" so people who don't like memorizing and typing super verbose languages but do like the copy-paste-edit workflow will use that as an AI prompt, so "95% of code will be generated by AI" because web searching will no longer work and AI will be the new "search". Remember, create the problem and sell the solution at the same time for maximal profits!
In the old days compilers cost $500/seat but had excellent docs. Now we're in a lull where compilers and IDEs are free and so is a world of documentation. Soon compilers will still be free but if you want any docs at all you'll have to pay a monthly AI subscription. That'll destroy the book market so you won't even be able to buy (or pirate) a book. Once people are used to paying $100/month for their AI subscription it'll be time to get rid of those pesky free compilers and go back to charging, probably an additional monthly fee. "Why would you want a makefile, just as the AI to compile it for you and return an I'm sure perfectly trustworthy and bug-free executable for an extra fee"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by jb on Tuesday April 15, @08:11AM
In most cases, yes AI generated code will always be absolutely dreadful in comparison to code produced by skilled programmers.
But remember, this is Microsoft we're talking about here. "Stochastic parrots" LLMs may be, but then I'm pretty sure some of the real live parrots I've met could probably ship less buggy code than Microsoft ... so it may still end up being a net gain for them.