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Comment by animuchan | Hacker News Reader

So true. Getting a Copilot subscription for $10/mo was an uphill battle. My daily supply of coffee alone costs the company more that that.

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Maybe I'm a dinosaur, but I wouldn't just approve an individual Copilot subscription either. The problem isn't the money, it's the copyright and whether trade secrets are being leaked. Those things can surely be solved, but it's far from trivial.

The general gist I’m getting from this comment section is a general lack of awareness over DLP and security. The thing half these comments are complaining about exist for very good reasons.

Every company I know that balked at using the "enterprise" version of either an OpenAI product or the equivalent Azure Open AI service already uses Microsoft 365, Teams, Azure DevOps, and Azure itself.

"We can't just give some unknown company our data!" screeched management.

"You already have."

Some of the data is covered by the data protection and SLA agreement the company signed. Some of it is not.

Okay imagine you’re an employee. You are ranked against your coworkers based on individual productivity, either explicitly or implicitly.

You can choose to either spend $10/month to get a big productivity multiplier, or you can play it by the book, not use it, and be the first one out the door the next time the company decides it needs to find efficiencies in a down market. What do you choose?

Buying copilot on my own, using a personal account, would have me fired for violating our data security policies. No need to wait for a layoff.

I have access to it now, but it’s through the company with whatever policies they put in place through Microsoft’s enterprise offering.

Now that I have it, I don’t find it that useful. It has not been the productivity multiplier I was promised. A big part of this could be down to how the plug-in is built in VS Code. The tab key hijacking made me turn off suggestions. Based on the stats, only about 20% of suggestions are accepted. That’s too low a number to take control of a key used as often as tab.

Its usefulness really depends on what you're writing: typical Kubernetes YAML files get fantastic suggestions, while algo-heavy code not at all.

Can't you rebind the tab key in the VS Code plugin to something else?

> Can't you rebind the tab key in the VS Code plugin to something else?

That was my goal. I figured tab + some modifier would be great. I spent quite a while looking for ways to do it, tried about a dozen, but it doesn’t seem like the feature exists. Eventually I had to just turn it off so I could actually get my work done.

I would choose to play it by the book.

You need to present a business case. Offer to give up the coffee.

Still trying to get our team Copilot subscription for 2 months now.

I had to perform due diligence on that. The cost was meaningless.

Wow, they must use expensive coffee beans.

When I was in an office of about 200 people, the facilities manager told me the coffee machine cost him $60k/year. That doesn’t include the coffee people brewed outside of using that machine. That works out to about $25/person/month. That assumes everyone drinks coffee from that machine, which they did not.

I also heard that number at least 10 years ago, so I’m sure that price has only gone up.

Not really.

3 cups a day, 5 days a week, 4 weeks a month = 60 cups of coffee. If we say 15g of beans per cup means you'll use 2 one pound bags in a month which could easily be $20-$40.

You guys get coffee? /s

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