3 ms·
My thinking as well. If coding assistants become so good that I'm at a competitive disadvantage, I'll just start using them. It's not rocket science. So far, ev
by fhd2 3y ago
My thinking as well. If coding assistants become so good that I'm at a competitive disadvantage, I'll just start using them. It's not rocket science. So far, everything I've tried largely slowed me down. As a Google/SO replacement for some types of questions, they sure save me maybe an hour per week, but that's really all I could extract so far.
Maybe my work is not too typical though, I spend only a fraction of my time actually typing in code. And I do eliminate the need for boilerplate through other means (picking frameworks/libraries that are a good fit for the problem, refactoring, meta programming, scripts, suitable tool chain etc).
- zmgsabst 3y ago1 hour per week of increased coding is a 5-7% boost in productivity, using the Amazon guidelines for how SDEs use their time — 50%/20hrs for SDE1 and 33%/13hrs for SDE3. Is that enough to be competitive? I’m not sure — but at scale that would be a 5% reduction in headcount for the same work, or ~$12M/yr for every 1,000 engineers. If you can figure out how to get 2-3 hours more coding done a week, we’re talking real gains.
- fhd2 3y agoDepends on where the time is saved. If it's in figuring out how to do something in Django where StackOverflow is flooded with outdated answers, sure. I see those kinds of savings. But the tragic beauty of programming is that a little time saved today can very well mean lots of time lost later. The former you can measure, the latter is a tougher nut.