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The company I worked at was acquired by Google, I was tired of what I was doing, and due to RSI I could only be a product manager, couldn't type enough to write software. And I didn't want anything to do with selling ads. So I figured, Google Books—selling books is a fine business, they had a local team, I like books, hurrah.

I had some ideas, some I still haven't seen anyone do, but what I mainly learned is what it's like working at Google: upper management is akin to weather. In particular—

—the product manager I met at Google Books who seemed really smart and competent didn't get to actually work on making the product. Instead, first he had to do the all-Google-standard-design, and then it was the Year Of Social (none of those features ever landed in Google Books AFAIK—hope they got a bonus?), and then Books got moved under Android (maybe due to Kindle HD release?), and then he just gave up and switched to a different part of Google.

So again, upper management was like weather—

—they made some random decision at levels far far above you that you couldn't control, and you just had to live with it.

And the "Copilotization of GitHub" sounds like the same thing. Some of this will result in reasonable outcomes, some of it will result in whole teams wasting multiple person-years on building useless stuff (but hey they might get a bonus).

The whole thing gives me really bad management vibes, especially since per WSJ they're losing money on every CoPilot user.

@itamarst I've benefitted a lot from GitHub. Would be sad to see it risk everything on CoPilot.