#officeworkergripes — Public Fediverse posts

Now that many LLMs (e.g. Github Copilot) have moved from flat prices to usage-based prices, businesses are reacting.

As I'd expect, the guidance coming from senior business leaders is not brilliant. Instead, I'm seeing a lot of herding towards common, pithy, low-quality advice.

One particularly common directive is to use AI for high-value projects instead of time-consuming or high-effort work.

Why is that not brilliant?

...

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#OverheardInTheOffice #OfficeWorkerGripes #GithubCopilot

So, for the record, when I say "overheard in the office", that's a fuzzing tool I use to avoid writing something that might get myself or someone I know having their employment status unilaterally modified.

Nobody literally said the words in the post, but they are based on facts and truth.

It might be a thought or an observation. It might not be at my office or my employer, or even within my industry. It might be an anecdote amalgamated from several sources.

#OfficeWorkerGripes

Overheard in the office: so if we switch to use authenticator app on our phone for MFA, what happens if the phone breaks, the battery dies, or the phone was left at home (assume longish commute)? Does that mean that person is unable to work until they get their hands on a working phone again?

#OfficeWorkerGripes

Overheard at the office: "I'm skeptical. Are you sure your 'wonderful opportunity for many of our employees to grow into new roles as we transition' isn't more like corporate speak for 75% of us will have to abandon any sense of work/life balance to cover the work of the 25% you are about to layoff?"

#OfficeWorkerGripes

Who was the jack hole who thought 10 AM on a Tuesday was the right time to silently start installing a Teams update? Like, no. That's when meetings are happening.

Don't make a tool mission-critical, then think you can take it down at the moment when it is most needed.

#MicrosoftAnnoyances #OfficeWorkerGripes

A great way to boost your token use is to reply to any answer and ask it to explain in detail. It’s completely defendable as a way to understand what it is telling you, to help you determine if it’s based on reality, to see if there’s anything salvageable in the web of bullshit it heaped up for your review.

#OfficeWorkerGripes #GenerativeAI

I've been taking the next round of mandatory annual training at work and... good news, I'm only a few years away from qualifying for elder abuse. So, I've got that to look forward to. Hopefully it will keep me warm when Skynet cuts off my paycheck.

#OfficeWorkerGripes #ScottHumor

Overheard at the office: "I'm overwhelmed. They want ETA to completion to share with stakeholders on my next project, when I haven't even started it, and my current project has taken longer than expected. Meanwhile I'm being asked to sign off on something that I don't' think was done correctly. Retirement is looking good."

#OfficeWorkerGripes

Yayyy, my employer celebrated my 15-year anniversary with a line in the team PowerPoint. I will be sharing this award with my family tonight.

#OfficeWorkerGripes #ScottHumor

Overheard in the office:

Cuts and attrition have cut so deep that a single person taking a sick or vacation day leaves some tasks without any coverage. Managers are handling that by calling on people to cross-train, but that piles on additional mental load onto a team that was already stretched thin.

#OfficeWorkerGripes #Burnout #WorkplaceBurnout #WorkplaceCulture

I read someone's post about their job where Agentic AI use is tracked for performance reviews, so they’re now dumping every question they can into the LLM just to pad their metrics and burn as many tokens as they can in the process.

All I can say is... I think maybe a lot of people have had the same idea. 😇

#AgenticAI #OfficeWorkerGripes #ChatGPT #MicrosoftCopilot #ClaudeAI

I got into an argument with #Microsoft #Copilot today.

I asked for PowerShell code to trim the first N digits from every filename in a directory. Testing showed it actually removed 2·N characters. When I reported the bug, Copilot insisted that was impossible and said I must have run it twice.

I knew the cause and the fix, but I treated it as a learning exercise to see what it would take to get Copilot to correct itself.

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#ScottComputing #ScottProgramming #OfficeWorkerGripes

I heard from a colleague that a system was just identified with a y2k bug.

Wait, how is that possible?!

A system was using 2 digits to store and transmit the year. To resolve the initial y2k problem, the system employed the date window technique, where that window ended with 2025.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_windowing

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#OfficeWorkerGripes #ScottProgramming

Given the record-setting layoff pace of 2025, the pressing etiquette question of this time:

What is the respectful waiting period after a highly valued colleague is fired before you can delete your recurring 1:1 meeting from your calendar?

Joking, not joking.

#OfficeWorkerGripes #ScottHumor #JokingNotJoking #OfficeHumor

This is the blame shifting that's going to go down in a couple years when teams don't come up with the AI savings management promised (without any real plan on how they'd achieve those savings).

"We (management) didn't overpromise. Agentic AI didn't fail. It's the individual contributor's fault for not doing it right.'

#AgenticAI #OfficeWorkerGripes

I was in a meeting this week where it was stated the management belief is anyone complaining about the low quality of agentic AI responses is because that person is bad at prompting, and they should've spent more time using AI sooner.

Their example was a puzzle (how many trials to find irregular ball of 20, when 19 are same weight). Sure, AI can solve puzzles that lots of people have written about. What about fix a bug in our proprietary, 5,000-line program?

#AgenticAI #OfficeWorkerGripes

I’m in a work training for a agentic AI we will soon have access to. One use case that was suggested is researching and summarizing HR policy on a topic or for a question.

Oof. I expect it won’t be long before I read a news article where someone brings a wrongful termination suit based on either end of such a AI query.

#OfficeWorkerGripes #AgenticAI

Three of the people I work with had their positions eliminated today.

Obviously very bad for the displaced workers, and I feel very bad for them.

It’s been very upsetting to me and has killed most of my productivity for the day. Which is unfortunate because I have a progress status meeting tomorrow morning, and feel behind as I had two days on PTO last week.

#OfficeWorkerGripes

Had a call today where it was announced a co-worker passed away after a private illness. The host said they "were always the first one in [to the office] and the last one out", and not a lot else.

I didn't know this person or their situation, so I'm not commenting directly on this.

However, it does remind me of the idea: a year after you pass, the only people who will remember that you worked long hours are your family.

RIP, co-worker.

#OfficeWorkerGripes

Recruiters: please wait another 8 to 16 weeks while we review all other candidates and the hiring manager takes the time to make up their mind.

Also recruiters: why did you apply for so many different jobs at our company? Why didn't you apply exclusively to only my job listing? It's a red flag that you applied for so many different jobs (even though you are clearly qualified for all of them).

#OfficeWorkerGripes #OverheardInTheOffice #JobSearchGripes

Today is Employee Appreciation Day, announced by mass email to all employees. Get ready for (tokens of) our appreciation next week.

#OfficeWorkerGripes

True story time. ~7 years ago, onsite team meeting

New hire said when starting job, they thought "model" in job description meant we take photos, wondered where the girls were. Initially sounded like joke, but as they kept going, I realized they were serious. Next few years confirmed laziness, lack of curiosity.

How do you see "model" in #DataAnalytics job & not research it enough to know it means "predictive model" before interview?

#OfficeWorkerGripes #ScottThoughts #PredictiveModeling

I have my annual performance review scheduled for tomorrow, and the worry over it has pretty much killed my productivity this morning. The mid-year went poorly, and I expect at least some carryover from that. There are days when early retirement looks pretty good.

Hopefully I can push it out of my mind for this afternoon.

#ScottWork #OfficeWorkerGripes

Headline from LinkedIn: "Trust is essential to teams. Here's how to build and maintain it in your professional relationships."

I dunno. How about companies stop firing people for non-performance reasons, aka cost-cutting, aka profit-boosting? That might ****ing help?

I can say that nothing is more demoralizing than seeing good people let go when you know it had nothing to do with their job performance and the CEO just got a sweet bonus.

#OfficeWorkerGripes #ScottWork

I just spontaneously created a poem in my head while working:

I love you Excel.
You are so great.
Please make everything
into a date.

#OfficeWorkerGripes #MicrosoftAnnoyances

With a job change, I've spent the last 2 years learning Hadoop and Python. For reasons™, they are replacing the Hadoop component with something else. Ugh. At my career stage, I'm a little annoyed to have spent time and energy learning something that likely won't have any long-term benefit to me. I'll roll with it, though, because I have no other choice.

#OfficeWorkerGripes #ScottProgramming

A pattern I'm seeing with my current work group is the managers have no problems throwing people at a project where they know nothing, but then say "if you have any questions, we have made person A available." Then later it's "why did you not take X into consideration? You should've asked about X."

OK, neat, but much of the time, that's not helpful when you don't know what you don't know. Since I didn't know X existed until this meeting, how was I to know to ask about X?

#OfficeWorkerGripes

At work yesterday, the person whom I would consider my closest friend at work lost their job. I hadn't posted about it yet because I wasn't sure how to word it; I'm still not sure even now.

At least part of the reason they lost their job is tied to return to office and office consolidation strategy.

I'm feeling a mixture of sorrow and survivor's guilt. Not a great couple of days for me.

#OfficeWorkerGripes

I'm on a call where a non-technical manager of technical people has said, repeatedly, they don't understand how a single model execution can take less than a second but simulating a year's worth of historical transactions requires 15 minutes or more.

How is this so hard to understand? Maybe consider trying some multiplication or division. Did they cover arithmetic in MBA school?

#OfficeWorkerGripes