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I'm a staff level SWE at a company that you've all heard of (not a flex, just providing context). If my manager said to me tomorrow: "I have to either get rid
by thw09j9m 9mo ago
I'm a staff level SWE at a company that you've all heard of (not a flex, just providing context).
If my manager said to me tomorrow: "I have to either get rid of one of your coworkers or your use of AI tools, which is it?"
I would, without any hesitation, ask that he fire one of my coworkers. Gemini / Claude is way more useful to me than any particular coworker.
And now I'm preparing for my post-software career because that coworker is going to be me in a few years.
Obviously I hope that I'm wrong, but I don't think I am.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- episteme 9mo agoIs that a useful thought experiment? Claude benefits you as an individual more than a coworker, but I find I hard to believe your use of Claude is more of a value add to the business than an additional coworker. Especially since that coworker will also have access to Claude. In the past we also just raised the floor on productivity, do you think this will be different?
- shrubble 9mo agoThere’s often the question of communication overhead between people; Claude would remove that.
- stanleykm 9mo agoNo that’s not true at all. Humans can deal with ambiguity and operate independently. Claude can’t do that. You’re trading one “problem” for an entirely different one in this hypothetical.
- signa11 9mo ago> There’s often the question of communication overhead between people; Claude would remove that. ... and replace that with communication overhead with claude ?
- shrubble 9mo agoIf you’re already communicating with Claude, it’s not additional overhead.
- mjevans 9mo agoIsn't that what polishing 'the prompt' does? Refine the communication like an editor does for a publication? Only in this case it's instructions for how to get a transformer to mine an existing set of code to produce some sort of vaguely useful output. The human factor adds knowledge of the why that refines the results. Not just any algorithm or a standard pattern that fits, but the correct solution for the correct question.
- fendy3002 9mo agopeople talking as if communication overhead is bad. That overhead makes someone else able to substitute for you (or other one) when needs happen, and sometimes can discover concerns earlier.
- wcfrobert 9mo agoBut isn't living in a stable society, where everyone can find employment, achieve some form of financial security, and not be ravaged by endless rounds of layoffs, more desirable than having net productive co-workers?
- measurablefunc 9mo agoYou're forgetting that corporations have only one responsibility & it is to make profits for their shareholders.
- LastTrain 9mo agoWhereas a government's responsibility is to ensure peace and prosperity for as many of its citizens as possible. These things will be at odds when increased profits for companies no longer coincides with increased employment.
- forgetfreeman 9mo agoYou may be overlooking the fact that the US is an oligarchy.
- nephihaha 9mo agoCan you name a present-day country which isn't? No, not Sweden where 40% of the population have been employed in some way by the Wallenberg family and its corporations in recent times. The other Nordic countries are not as egalitarian as they are presented either.
- wing-_-nuts 9mo ago>a government's responsibility is to ensure peace and prosperity for as many of its citizens as possible. I've never seen the US government behave as if this was a priority. Perhaps things are different in a nordic country?
- 9mo ago
- Juliate 9mo agoI am truly, both as a being and having a manager, at loss as to how a manager would ask that, and would get such an answer… what is the rationale and the expectation?
- Clent 9mo agoSeems like a good test to see if the person who is ask should be fired. It's a test that clearly proves they are not a team player.
- ares623 9mo agoSweet then your fired coworker goes “i will do the same work for 80% of thw09j9m’s salary”.
- hillcrestenigma 9mo agoI get the point you are making, but the hypothetical question from your manager doesn't make sense to me. It's obviously true that any of your particular coworker wouldn't be useful to you relative to an AI agent, since their goal is to perform their own obligations to the rest of the company, whereas the singular goal of the AI tool is to help the user. Until these AI tools can completely replace a developer on its own, the decision to continue employing human developers or paying for AI tools will not be mutually exclusive.
- biophysboy 9mo agoWhy would a company pocket the savings of less labor when they could reinvest the productivity gains of AI in more labor, shifting employees to higher-level engineering tasks?
- nehal3m 9mo agoBecause shareholder value is more important than productivity to leadership. Thank Jack Welch.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 9mo agoYou would probably have the same answer if your boss said, I have to get rid of one of your co-workers or your use of editing tools - ie all editors. You either get rid of your co-worker or go back to using punch cards. You would probably get rid of your co-worker and keep Vim/Emacs/VsCode/Zed/JetBrains or whatever editor you use. All your example tells us is that AI tools are valuable tools.
- paul7986 9mo agoIm there with you at the govt contracting company i work for we lost a contract we had for ten years. Our team was 10 to 15 employees and we lost the contract to a company who are now doing the work with 5 employees and AI. My company said we now are going to being bidding with smaller teams and promoting our use of AI. One example of them promoting the company's use of AI is creating a prototype using chatGPT and AntiGravity. He took a demo video off of Youtube of a govt agency app, fed the video to chatGPT, GPT spit out all the requirements for the ten page application and then he fed those requirements to AntiGravity and boom it repilcated/created the working app/prototype in 15 minutes. Previously that would take a team of 3 to 5 a week or few to complete such a prototype.
- tehnub 9mo agoWhat's most useful to you is not necessarily most useful to the business. The bar for critical thinking to get staff at this company I've surely heard of must not be very high.
- lunar_mycroft 9mo agoFor your answer to be correct for your employer, the added productivity from your use of LLMs must be at least as much as the productivity from whichever coworker you're having fired. No study I've seen claims much above a 20% increase in productivity, so either a) your productivity without LLMs was ~5x that of your coworkers, or b) you're making a mistake in your analysis (likely some combination of thinking about it from your perspective instead of your employers and overestimating how helpful LLMs are to you).
- saulpw 9mo agoIt makes him (presumed) 20% more effective than his coworker makes him. Overall effectiveness of the team is not being considered, but that's why his manager isn't asking him :)
- lunar_mycroft 9mo agoThat fits, except later on they say > And now I'm preparing for my post-software career because that coworker is going to be me in a few years. Which implies they anticipate their manager (or someone higher up in the company) to agree with them, presumably when considering overall effectiveness of the team.
- thegrim000 9mo agoInteresting that this guy claims to be a "staff level SWE at a major company", yet one year ago he was on HN posting about how horrible of a time he was having getting a SWE job, how he's failed multiple interviews, including at FAANGs, was being rejected for even no-name small startups, had failed multiple interviews because of inability on algorithm questions ... and yet within the last year he was supposedly successfully hired on at a "major company" for a staff-level senior coding position.
- LarsDu88 9mo agoMaybe the company is Red Lobster?
- caminante 9mo agoDon't forget he's also >been considered top 10% of attractiveness in one country
- tayo42 9mo agoFunny call out. I always see people brag about working at a fortune 500 company, also meaningless with companies like Lululemon on their lol
- __loam 9mo agoDamn you got his receipts
- godelski 9mo agoWhat I think is the strangest part of it is that they don't respond to a single comment. They've only done it twice in their entire comment history (3 pages). Once 2 years ago where they talk about banging women and the other being a few months earlier talking about HFT (which the comment previous to that says they work at a HFT firm) But I think I found the answer... That's a mistake. A lot of people lie on their resumes. Source: I've lied on every resume I've ever sent out. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33903978 Something tells me they aren't the most honest person. That something is thw09j9m... Seriously... why lie about these types of things on an anonymous forum? There's literally nothing to gain
- mxkopy 9mo agoIn some companies, “one of your coworkers” have the skills to create & improve upon AI models themselves. Honestly at staff level I’d expect you to be able to do a literature review and start proposing architecture improvements within a year. Charitably, it just sounds like you aren’t in tech.
- fendy3002 9mo agohere's the thing, my manager won't need to do that. windsurf swe-1 is good enough for my use case and swe-1.5 is even better. Combined with free quotas of mixed openai, gemini and claude I don't really need to pay anything. In fact I don't want to pay too much, to prevent the incoming enshittification
- giuscri 9mo ago"I have to either get rid of one of your coworkers or your laptop, which is it?"