Thread regarding Optum layoffs

These AI Initiatives Are Going to Destroy This Company's Tech

Leadership is STILL going all-in on this insane, stupid idea that AI needs to be a part of every product in this company. That every engineering team needs to be shoving resource intensive LLMs into their application no matter if the use-case of AI is.. useful. Otherwise they lose out on funding.

The critical, cognitive defect of these re--rds is astounding. Engineers who do actual work are either fleeing en masse, quiet quitting, or burning themselves out as they struggle to keep pace with the level of stupidity from their leaders.

I have NEVER in my time here seen something so astoundingly fu--ing stupid, and there's been a lot of astoundingly stupid things from our braindead leaders. As much as they gray-haired boomers liked to bring up buzzwords like ML, blockchain, etc. I never recall an initiative that EVERY team needs to be working with ML, or arbitrarily shove blockchain into their application.

It'd be one thing if they were simply asking engineers to use AI in some way, i.e. Copilot, ChatGPT, etc. It's another thing to have them invest actual time, resources, and FUNDING into throwing chatbots uselessly into their apps.

This is insanely disastrous and has gone on long enough from our negligent leaders. This DOES NOT "better serve our customers," in fact it does quite the opposite. This is a malevolent use of funding.


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| 1492 views | | 11 replies (last March 1) | Reply
Post ID: @OP+1kjapqavg

11 replies (most recent on top)

@bc You hit the nail on the head!

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Post ID: @tg+1kjapqavg

It is the laziest tech leadership I have ever seen! Let's not make strategic decisions about the right places to use AI, let's just encourage....nay, REQUIRE everyone to stick it everywhere! AI is the bestest hammer ever, and all I see are nails! /s

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Post ID: @g3+1kjapqavg

The purpose of AI buzz "1000 use cases!!!1!1!!eleven!" and the having SD around despite a lack of strategy or leadership is to pretend to investors that we're a tech company.

We announce a dividend and the stock is finally up. Problem is at some point, we can't give more than 100% of our profit as dividends when we're blowing it on AI. As the divvy is a bigger % of profit, it will get cut and that will be the end of the stock.

Contrary to opinions, the street doesn't care about AI hype. That's why the stock is down despite endless AI fluff. As long as the dividend comes in that's ok, but the cuts to immigration, low birthrate, and the fact that EVERYONE hates us, they will have to cut and it will be the end.

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Post ID: @bd+1kjapqavg

@b9 You quite literally are missing the point and I question if you yourself come from leadership or are even a technical person whatsoever. The AI initiatives are doing actually nothing. These AI initiatives at Optum aren't resulting in better coding agents. They aren't resulting in improvements in the AI space. They aren't resulting in improvements anywhere because they are just chatbots forcefully shoved into an application because that team wanted to get AI funding easily.

And Indian engineers are not the problem, and have never been the problem. We need them because we need people to be available in the off-hours when US engineers are asleep and an incident happens. I sure as fu-k don't want to respond to incident tickets at midnight, I don't even like getting incidents from you in the middle of the day. Their quality has never been of concern, US engineers are obviously more efficient, that much is clear to everyone, or most people. But they're not a problem.

The problem is we have Indian managers and leaders who are practicing extreme nepotism of the likes that has never been seen before in western society, who are completely mismanaging their technical teams because they themselves are not technical.

The problem is we have Help Desk staff offshored to the Philippines where they ask you questions you answered in your opening statement, open a ticket with literally 0 information in it, and search the biggest word you said that they don't know how to read for the first KB article that came up, and assign it to whatever team is mentioned in it.

And the problem is AI initiatives are wasting the time of actual engineers, AI initiatives that will never pan out, are duplicative work, and do nothing. AI initiatives that are wasting the time of the effective US engineers.

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Post ID: @bc+1kjapqavg

I’m not so sure. AI is smarter than those stinky Indians

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Post ID: @b9+1kjapqavg

I'm an engineer. I was just promoted to a 30. I receive a 5 every year, I own several large systems. I have had enough. 2 weeks notice Friday.

I'm tired of Ireland and India stealing jobs. Every high performing engineer I have known here is either leaving, or is trying to leave.

This company is toast in my opinion. 10 years of terrible decisions and the bill has come due.

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Post ID: @ag+1kjapqavg

@a8 There's no rhyme or reason to it. If we wanted to signal to shareholders or publicly state how much we're using AI (a d-mb metric, as are all that come from our lead-brained leaders), all they'd have to do to fudge the numbers is duplicate code repositories or add additional replicas to services that have AI, etc. as all these metrics have been, can be, and will be manipulated.

But no, leaders are unironically PUSHING engineers to waste their time on this. That's how you know they somehow believe in it, the only other reason would be there's some ulterior motive to drive engineering talent out of this company to let Optum stagnate and rot.

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Post ID: @a9+1kjapqavg

When I heard AI mandates initially i just thought it meant use it as a google search or assistant. Cool, i can do that

But no, they want to actually deploy LLM wrappers into production and invest millions of dollars into it. And you have to do an AI Feature and deploy it to prod once a quarter. NO CUSTOMERS ARE ASKING FOR THIS. So we are just doing it to try and pump the stock i guess??

We deployed some random AI chat bot RAG sh-t last year and not one person has touched it since. And thats the best use case for the tech!

Why is no one asking these leaders for ROI on these moonshot investments?

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Post ID: @a8+1kjapqavg

There is no plan. Just “AI Bro” to keep the stock above $100 until the bandits at the top can sell enough to have their fortune secured.

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Post ID: @a7+1kjapqavg

Agreed on entire post.

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Post ID: @a3+1kjapqavg

I will say that utilizing copilot in tech support is pretty nice. However, whatever happened to good ol deterministic workflows? Why does everything have to be a token consuming agent?

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Post ID: @a2+1kjapqavg

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