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No, even contractors who are more expensive per day can be had for £200-300 per diem. Employee costs you are looking at closer to £165 including national insura

No, even contractors who are more expensive per day can be had for £200-300 per diem. Employee costs you are looking at closer to £165 including national insurance and pension on a standard £35k a year salary. Even an employee on £50k a year is only £241.97 a day. IR35 rules largely closed down a lot of the high-value contracting business and pushed day rates down heavily.

refulgentis 2y ago
Sure. So why are you saying we'd get a dev for a week for $600? :) Even we take that at face value, now we're claiming devs are $30K/year. (This was sort of baseline full-time pay when I was in high school, 20 years ago) Why do I need 1,000,000 tokens for 500 loc? I don't think further futzing with the numbers makes this work, it's off by multiple OOMs while barely credible
- zipy124 2y ago
  Ok closer to 4 days than a week, still an insane differential in cost. As we all know it's never just 500 lines of code, and 500 lines can take up quite a lot of tokens, especially on a reasoning model like o1-pro which we know can spend quite a hefty chunk of tokens on thinking. Once you add in iteration and testing you can find yourself racking up quite the bill even on small projects.
  - refulgentis 2y ago
    In a separate thread I estimated cost of doing the full output 10x. $18. It certainly adds up, yes, the thing I get indignant about (not with you, just, in general) is even the most expensive is definitely an OOM off and most likely 2 OOMs off from paying an engineer. It's non-trivial work that requires domain knowledge, i.e. it would have been a 4-6 week project for a noogler, and I would have been impressed if they did it without heavy guidance. (Emergent requirements around purposely using an older API, stuff like that).
    - zipy124 2y ago
      I don't agree with your cost estimate, but even accepting it there's no way your spending £1800/4-6 weeks on something as small as 500 lines of code and as simple as PCM audio player code. Your description sounds more like the thing an undergraduate might make in a Hackathon.
      - refulgentis 2y ago
        That's fair, for better or worse, I'm not going to spend my time proving it was hard.

refulgentis 2y ago

Sure. So why are you saying we'd get a dev for a week for $600? :) Even we take that at face value, now we're claiming devs are $30K/year. (This was sort of baseline full-time pay when I was in high school, 20 years ago) Why do I need 1,000,000 tokens for 500 loc? I don't think further futzing with the numbers makes this work, it's off by multiple OOMs while barely credible

zipy124 2y ago
Ok closer to 4 days than a week, still an insane differential in cost. As we all know it's never just 500 lines of code, and 500 lines can take up quite a lot of tokens, especially on a reasoning model like o1-pro which we know can spend quite a hefty chunk of tokens on thinking. Once you add in iteration and testing you can find yourself racking up quite the bill even on small projects.
- refulgentis 2y ago
  In a separate thread I estimated cost of doing the full output 10x. $18. It certainly adds up, yes, the thing I get indignant about (not with you, just, in general) is even the most expensive is definitely an OOM off and most likely 2 OOMs off from paying an engineer. It's non-trivial work that requires domain knowledge, i.e. it would have been a 4-6 week project for a noogler, and I would have been impressed if they did it without heavy guidance. (Emergent requirements around purposely using an older API, stuff like that).
  - zipy124 2y ago
    I don't agree with your cost estimate, but even accepting it there's no way your spending £1800/4-6 weeks on something as small as 500 lines of code and as simple as PCM audio player code. Your description sounds more like the thing an undergraduate might make in a Hackathon.
    - refulgentis 2y ago
      That's fair, for better or worse, I'm not going to spend my time proving it was hard.