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.

1/4

#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

1/2

#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

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