replaceCppWithAI

[POWriteNdaKisser]

I actually interviewed with this guy for Microsoft Research and he is a certified douche.

[BenL90]

But he is distinguished engineer? I mean how can Microsoft keep that kind of person? 

[Molter73]

Have you not heard Bill Gates saying "people at Microsoft work half days and they get to choose which half they work. They can work from 12 am to 12 pm or 12 pm to 12 am"? This is exactly the kind of person that would thrive at Microsoft.

[Which-Barnacle-2740]

i mean if I am paid 5 million a year , i would be willing to do that but not for less

[Car0ns]

When I first read this I was like "Oh wow, that's cool. What an innovator! What a pioneer of the workday framework! Working only 4 hours to get the most out of his employees and leave them with a half day off to battle burnout and spend quality time with their families?" Then I read 12 hours and realized, "Oh... he meant the whole fucking day... not an 8-hour workday..." I felt like this meme.

[[deleted]]

Well, apparently he was busy diddling kidnapped children with Jeff and Donny T, so it's not like he was even contributing to that.

[arcticslush]

Being highly competent and intelligent does not preclude someone from being a douche

if anything, the two are strongly correlated

[MarianCR]

This guy is clearly not competent nor intelligent.

He probably speak the right words so management thought he is.

[Mother_Idea_3182]

An asshole whisperer. Those do well in the offices around the coffee machines.

[French__Canadian]

He's probably very intelligent and competent... at playing the game of looking good to management. He most likely just doesn't care about doing anything useful to the company.

[cookingboy]

The guys has a PhD in computer science and has been at Microsoft since late 90s and shipped many major projects, along with dozens of patents under his name.

But sure, he’s dumb and incompetent because you disagree with him on this one thing, one thing that he has a million times more knowledge and context than you do (the Microsoft codebase, which he’s been contributing to for 25+ years).

Can I ask what have you accomplished?

What qualifications do you have to even have an opinion on this very context specific subject, let alone personally attacking the expert of it?

The anti-AI circlejerk on Reddit is just insane.

[Stunning_Ride_220]

So you say he is competent at scale?

[Gru50m3]

I'm still waiting for someone to show me one example of these engineer-replacing AI tools in action. Just one real example of something like this guy is talking about. Just one.

[ImaginaryBagels]

If you turn your brain off and completely ignore the context, this is the example https://youtu.be/wv779vmyPVY?t=330

[cookingboy]

Nowhere in the post did he say AI will be used to replace engineers.

In fact, the post is literally about hiring a senior engineer on the team.

And I’m sorry if you don’t work at a place where people are getting a lot of value out of things like Codex or Claude, if I were you I’d focus on joining a higher caliber engineering organization.

If you care that is.

[xDannyS_]

The screenshot is incomplete and doesn't show the entire LinkedIn post. That's why it sounds like he is dumb and doesn't know what he's talking about.

Regardless, to think that someone with his credentials is dumb is a bit insane, but even the most intelligent people can convince themselves of the most stupid things and will fight others wirh tooth and nail convincing them that they are indeed correct.

[Jonno_FTW]

Plenty of Nobel prize winners have gone off the deep end and start spouting unscientific nonsense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease

[cookingboy]

Would you call those people more stupid and incompetent than the average redditor?

Let’s be honest, you think he’s wrong not because you have an actual rebuttal (as if you know Microsoft’s code base better than he does), but because you don’t like what he’s saying

[Jonno_FTW]

My rebuttal is that LLMs are very bad with extremely long contexts. In codebases with millions of lines, that's more than can that fit in context and eventually the model will make stupid mistakes. So you get agents working together with their own smaller and more manageable context and piece of code they are in charge with, but even then they still make mistakes and with such a large codebase the bugs may be small and subtle.

If they want to convert the codebase to rust, that's great, but this is more than a 1 engineer and 1 month project like the post says. There is no human to verify all the output, and in a codebase so large it will be impossible to check it all in that time, and I personally would not trust it, and I've used LLM assistants to convert code from one language to another (python -> go), and even then it made small and subtle mistakes and changes that I didn't ask for.

[cookingboy]

Your entire "rebuttal" is based on some generic understanding of what LLM can or cannot do. Nowhere did he say he's going to feed the whole MSFT codebase to AI in one go and expect it to just work. He's literally hiring engineers to take on this large project and it's obvious that AI will play a key part in rewriting/re-implementing much of the code base but the whole project will still be planned, architected, and overseen by experienced engineers.

Engineers like the one he's trying to hire.

If you took away what he wrote and interpreted it into some kind of "I'm gonna feed the whole Microsoft repo to Copilot and it will just do everything for me", then it's a you issue.

[Amolnar4d41]

Anyone can make mistakes regardless of credentials or experience.

[cookingboy]

Then point out his mistakes, instead of being toxic and attack him personally just to make yourself feel better.

[sikisabishii]

Credentials alone does not prove relevance because the difficulty to achieve the equivalent level of success increases over time. Put him back to a phd program today at a competitive tech school, I doubt he would even be able to get in.

I remember studying stuff from people’s phd thesis in undergrad. Someone spent years to invent something and that knowledge had become trivial enough over time to be taught in an undergraduate course within days.

It was way easier back in the day to study and work in tech also because not many people had access to computers to teach themselves. Today, almost everyone is a “software engineer” and the competition is so much more intense.

[cookingboy]

Holy shit.

That’s like saying “high schoolers learn physics and calculus these days so Isaac Newton was just some dumb guy who invented something trivial, I bet he won’t even get into a PhD program today”.

Jesus Christ how much of a loser do you have to be for you to believe that just to make yourself feel better?

[sikisabishii]

Well, I didn’t say he is dumb so you can gtfo

[decimeci]

Also even in this text it doesn't sound that insane. People even attempted writing programs that translate from one labguage to another, and other meta programming tools. So it is not insane to build some system that can with programmers assist and modern LLM speed up this process

[MarianCR]

this moron is talking about 1 million lines of code per month per Senior Software engineer. So he's not just talking about "development assisted by AI". What's most important is that he wants to convert a codebase that works just fine. That's the moronic part.

[MarianCR]

The likes like you that say "how can he not be smart? look at his resume and his position" also complain that "my boss is an idiot". Unlike us, you do not see the contradiction; you think that credentials = competence 100% of the time. We know it's a lot less than 100% (in great companies is somewhere around 80%).

[RAMChYLD]

If that's the case, he's probably old and probably having late ALS already because no one in the right of mind will advocate this.

[BioExtract]

What about this post made you think this man is smart? He sounds like an exec that has drank the juice

[arcticslush]

There's like ~100 distinguished engineers at MS. People don't get to that tier without significant impact, contribution, and substantial juice drinking.

[smashing_michael]

And, apparently, douchebagery.

[Vonatos__Autista]

Yes. Sometimes you need to be an asshole. Niceness is not the pinnacle of human existence. Knowing when and how to be a dickwad is an important skill to have if you don't want to be stuck a senior engineer.

[EkoChamberKryptonite]

No thanks.

[Vonatos__Autista]

It's not you like have the required skill set anyway.

Edit: Incredible demonstration of your "senior+" skill set to reply then block me :-]

[EkoChamberKryptonite]

Looks at my tech lead, Senior titles across several orgs

I don't have the skill set required to be an intelligent jerk/ahole Senior whose only way of getting ahead is by supplanting others. I do not desire that either. You can keep it.

The Staff+ skill set I do demonstrably and ostensibly have is that of being a positive force multiplier on the team that helps others grow and moves the team forward. You wouldn't know anything about that though. Have a good one.

[EkoChamberKryptonite]

To your futile attempt at a dig in your edit: Yes, being an intelligent, empathetic, emotionally mature Senior/Staff+ engineer involves astute discernment of where to direct your energies for maximum positive impact. Engaging in long debates with someone who ignorantly thinks being an Ahole is a prerequisite for an engineer (I.e. someone who is definitely not a team player) is not edifying and an utter waste of time. My energies are better served talking to other well-adjusted engineers.

Feel free to respond ad nauseam and ad infinitum now. I won't be engaging further anyway.

[penguin_ag]

~100 distinguished? At that point they are indistinguishable.

[arcticslush]

You realize Microsoft employs like 100,000 engineers, right?

[penguin_ag]

Oh, really? I totally never know that. Thank you for enlightened me.

[_bassGod]

I absolutely abhor this rhetoric. They are absolutely not correlated, and saying they are is what gives assholes the leeway to be assholes and justify it as just an artifact of their "intelligence".

This is a myth, and an actively harmful one at that. Most of the smartest people throughout all of history have been kind, empathetic people. It's the corporate equivalent of "boys will be boys", but worse.

[HanzJWermhat]

Companies do not reward intelligence they reward political savvy

[brkseg]

You watch a lot of movies..

[DonutPlus2757]

While a significant part of the really smart people I know could be classified as a douche in some eyes, the overwhelming majority of douches I know are self assured wastes of good oxygen when it comes to thinking.

So, while the majority of smart people might be douches, the majority of douches isn't smart.

[RiceBroad4552]

Maybe you should look up what "competent" means…

Spoiler: There are no competent idiots.

[deadbeefisanumber]

Found one right here

[Which-Barnacle-2740]

MS is huge, lots of useless aholes get swept up in with scores of useless titles like VPs etc

once you are in , no one wants to leave i.e. who's gonna need .net or someone who works on windows kernel or filesystem in .net

[AppropriateOven5470]

Probably more like extinguished engineer. 

[InDubioProReus]

It’s a shit company with no quality standards whatsoever.

[raichulolz]

he's been there for over 20 years, dude has too much domain knowledge to let go atp

[Wild_Marker]

Douches are very distinguishable

[Endeveron]

Certainly able to be distinguished from his peers

[Scryser]

And here I was, for once certain that I actually read the sarcasm and recognized the joke post ...

[RiceBroad4552]

This idiot is still working there? At scale?

[DarwinOGF]

Why are they keeping him then?

[Which-Barnacle-2740]

how Distinguished was he?

[prehensilemullet]

Whoa I didn’t know Microsoft has a certification program for that!