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Why are software engineers paid well to date? Successful software uniquely benefits from operational and financial leverage. Which creates the term "software ma
by pclowes 1y ago
Why are software engineers paid well to date? Successful software uniquely benefits from operational and financial leverage. Which creates the term "software margins"
Financial leverage: It is cheap to write code, experiments are inexpensive. A million dollars in funding for a B2B SaaS gives many more shots on goal vs a million dollars in funding for drug research or manufacturing. This increases probability of ROI and permits aggressive investment.
Operational leverage: Scaling code is cheap as well. It is free to copy. Solving one problem with software well often enables solving immediately adjacent problems very cheaply.
Do LLMs decrease or increase the leverage here?
Writing code is cheaper, a single engineer can now do much more. Does that endanger engineers? Yes, if their job is "take requirements and implement to spec". No, if their job is "solve important business problems at scale". The former are already typically not valued or paid exceptionally highly. The latter are likely to be valued and paid even more than they already are.
Or put another way, if software engineers are going to be hurt by LLMs who is going to benefit? This is assuming a zero sum game which I would disagree with here. But if not software engineers than who is better positioned to wield LLMs effectively?
- Workaccount2 1y agoWhat is being missed here, and the actual blindside of LLMs, is that software devs will not be the sole gatekeepers of computer utilization in the future. I cannot overstate this enough. It is the main thing to watch for. Even if LLM progress halts today, there will be 5-10 years of fundamental changes in how end users interact with computers.
- dboreham 1y agoMeanwhile my phone still can't autocorrect my typing and my email provider still can't identify spam.
- jajko 1y agoIts cheap to write some code, but still big software projects cost massive amounts of cash, take forever and are often a failure. There are visible bugs or at least big missteps in design in literally all software I use - Windows OS, Office, browsers and specific webs like ebanking, desktop apps. I dare say making software work well consistently is not a skill thats easy to acquire. Also "solve important business problems at scale" - thats an extremely narrow mostly SV-based view on how most software out there is built, no company I ever worked for in past 20 years across 3 countries ever needed that from me nor anybody around. I'd say a junior view but that would ruffle some feathers. Seniors talk about team and client and budget communication, processes, delivery pipelines, support etc. Lets put it this way - real world is a tad more complex than your simplification make it look like.
- guappa 1y agoWell my company hired an american manager and now my job is in fact "do the tickets"… I just think it's done on purpose to get rid of the european office (where 100% of the product was implemented).