3 ms·

Seriously. It’s hard to imagine a group of 40 people that would need a sufficient velocity of changes/new features to warrant 5 full time engineers.

xmaayy 4y ago
Massive corporate HR Dept with custom rolled software. Bank team with software for compliance. Endless possibilities...
shmatt 4y ago
From my experience, this is pretty common in AI Internal tools used by a dozen or a couple dozen AI engineers/Data Scientists, the models they output used by millions. It's totally worth keeping 5-10 person engineering team to create better and stronger tools that make upgrading and deploying new models easier and faster
- time_to_smile 4y ago
  > totally worth keeping 5-10 person engineering team I've worked in AI/ML for a long time, and I can tell you that in all but the rarest of exceptions nobody has sat down and done the math to really determine if that value is there. In my experience, most cases it's not. I've seen teams like you describe and then asked them "what's the difference in value between what our model does today and the theoretical optimum"? The answer, which nobody liked, was fractions of a penny per user. That means if the team achieved perfection it wouldn't really matter in practice. We're going to see a lot of the AI/ML teams disappear as companies are forced to focus on determining the real value add being provided.
cloverich 4y ago
Imagine each of those people is an employee at the same company, and they each command a salary of say 100k. How much more productive do you need to make them for it to become worth it? If you 3x their productivity, they are now doing the job of 3 people, you just saved 200k _per year_. To tie that back to your comment -- imagine its for a team of 40 users but the company would ideally like them to be a team of 400 users. Yet because of the software being created, those 40 people are doing the work of 400. You can extend that line of thinking pretty far -- and going down that line of thought is when I realized how valuable programming is. When you build the right things you are literally creating value with everything you ship, and it adds up over time.
- osigurdson 4y ago
  >> when I realized how valuable programming is Definitely. A cheap computer can outperform a billion humans at certain types of tasks. One must merely find the right tasks for the computer in order to exact unfathomable value. AI is going to expand the problem domains that computers can compete in by several orders of magnitude. The era of SPUs (Single Person Unicorn) companies is near.
pillefitz 4y ago
Any trading application, where markets are constantly changing, new financial products included, new models developed etc.

xmaayy 4y ago

Massive corporate HR Dept with custom rolled software. Bank team with software for compliance. Endless possibilities...

shmatt 4y ago

From my experience, this is pretty common in AI Internal tools used by a dozen or a couple dozen AI engineers/Data Scientists, the models they output used by millions. It's totally worth keeping 5-10 person engineering team to create better and stronger tools that make upgrading and deploying new models easier and faster

time_to_smile 4y ago
> totally worth keeping 5-10 person engineering team I've worked in AI/ML for a long time, and I can tell you that in all but the rarest of exceptions nobody has sat down and done the math to really determine if that value is there. In my experience, most cases it's not. I've seen teams like you describe and then asked them "what's the difference in value between what our model does today and the theoretical optimum"? The answer, which nobody liked, was fractions of a penny per user. That means if the team achieved perfection it wouldn't really matter in practice. We're going to see a lot of the AI/ML teams disappear as companies are forced to focus on determining the real value add being provided.

cloverich 4y ago

Imagine each of those people is an employee at the same company, and they each command a salary of say 100k. How much more productive do you need to make them for it to become worth it? If you 3x their productivity, they are now doing the job of 3 people, you just saved 200k _per year_. To tie that back to your comment -- imagine its for a team of 40 users but the company would ideally like them to be a team of 400 users. Yet because of the software being created, those 40 people are doing the work of 400. You can extend that line of thinking pretty far -- and going down that line of thought is when I realized how valuable programming is. When you build the right things you are literally creating value with everything you ship, and it adds up over time.

osigurdson 4y ago
>> when I realized how valuable programming is Definitely. A cheap computer can outperform a billion humans at certain types of tasks. One must merely find the right tasks for the computer in order to exact unfathomable value. AI is going to expand the problem domains that computers can compete in by several orders of magnitude. The era of SPUs (Single Person Unicorn) companies is near.

pillefitz 4y ago

Any trading application, where markets are constantly changing, new financial products included, new models developed etc.