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yeah, I agree. When Engineering Budget Managers see their AI bills rising, they will fire the bottom 5-10% every 6-12 months and increase the AI assistant budg

by itake 8mo ago

yeah, I agree. When Engineering Budget Managers see their AI bills rising, they will fire the bottom 5-10% every 6-12 months and increase the AI assistant budget for the high performers, giving them even more leverage.

aurareturn 8mo ago
In my case, over the last 3 years, every dev who left was not replaced. We are doing more than ever. Our team shrunk by 50% but we are serving 200% more customers. Every time a dev left, we thought we're screwed. We just leveraged AI more and more. We are also serving our customers better too with higher retention rates. When we onboard a customer with custom demands, we used to have meetings about the ROI. Now we just build the custom demands in the time we took to meet to discuss whether we should even do it. Today, I maintain a few repos critical to the business without even knowing the programming language they are written in. The original developers left the company. All I know is what is suppose to go into the service and what is suppose to come out. When there is a bug, I ask the AI why. The AI almost always finds it. When I need to change something, I double and triple check the logic and I know how to test the changes. No, a normal person without a background in software engineering can't do this. That's why I still have a job. But how I spend my time as a software engineer has changed drastically and so has my productivity. When a software dev say AI doesn't increase their productivity, it truly does feel like they're using it wrong or don't know how to use it.
- lelanthran 8mo ago
  > Today, I maintain a few repos critical to the business without even knowing the programming language they are written in. [...] No, a normal person without a background in software engineering can't do this. Of course they can - if you don't know any of the tech-stack details (i.e. a "normal" user), why can't someone else who also doesn't know the tech-stackc details replace you? What magic sauce do you possess other than tech-stack chops?
  - aurareturn 8mo ago
    In the future, they might be able to. Not yet though. I still have a job. When a non software engineer can build a production app as well as I can, I know I won’t be working as a software engineer anymore. In that world, having great ideas, data, compute, and energy will be king. I don’t think we will get there within the next 3-4 years. Beyond that, who knows.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- akkanzn 8mo ago
  Could you provide some details on your company, code base, etc? These are wild claims and don’t match the reality I’m seeing everywhere else. How big is your team? How many customers? What’s your product? Can we see the code? How do you track defects? Etc. Part of the reason I’m struggling with this is because we’d be seeing OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. plastering these case studies everywhere if they existed. Instead, I’m stuck using CC and all its poorly implemented warts.
  - itake 8mo ago
    Not OP, but I am seeing this in my current company. Companies are charged per token, which means heavy AI users deliver more and stress budgets. They recently announced significant payroll costs over the past ~3 years. Those savings I think will partially be reclaimed by AI companies, enabling the high performers more ai model usage.
alternatex 8mo ago
Now if only companies knew how to correctly assess actual impact and not perceived impact.
- itake 8mo ago
  I don't think this is an AI problem. Even before AI, FANGA companies famously optimize promotions on perceived impact. During the promo review, people will look how many projects were done and the impact of those projects.
- aurareturn 8mo ago
  Acquisition rate, retention rate, revenue, profit margin?
  - alternatex 8mo ago
    By those metrics, Microsoft lost 20% of it's value due to hopping on the AI coding assistance train. I'm not saying it is the case, just making it apparent how unreliable it is to measure productivity by comparing what's happening at the lowest level in a company to its financials.
    - aurareturn 8mo ago
      Microsoft is mostly a SaaS company. Many SaaS businesses have lost much more in market cap since due to AI disruption. Imagine if Microsoft didn't invest in AI? Maybe they'd be down 50% now.

by itake 8mo ago

aurareturn 8mo ago

In my case, over the last 3 years, every dev who left was not replaced. We are doing more than ever. Our team shrunk by 50% but we are serving 200% more customers. Every time a dev left, we thought we're screwed. We just leveraged AI more and more. We are also serving our customers better too with higher retention rates. When we onboard a customer with custom demands, we used to have meetings about the ROI. Now we just build the custom demands in the time we took to meet to discuss whether we should even do it. Today, I maintain a few repos critical to the business without even knowing the programming language they are written in. The original developers left the company. All I know is what is suppose to go into the service and what is suppose to come out. When there is a bug, I ask the AI why. The AI almost always finds it. When I need to change something, I double and triple check the logic and I know how to test the changes. No, a normal person without a background in software engineering can't do this. That's why I still have a job. But how I spend my time as a software engineer has changed drastically and so has my productivity. When a software dev say AI doesn't increase their productivity, it truly does feel like they're using it wrong or don't know how to use it.

lelanthran 8mo ago
> Today, I maintain a few repos critical to the business without even knowing the programming language they are written in. [...] No, a normal person without a background in software engineering can't do this. Of course they can - if you don't know any of the tech-stack details (i.e. a "normal" user), why can't someone else who also doesn't know the tech-stackc details replace you? What magic sauce do you possess other than tech-stack chops?
- aurareturn 8mo ago
  In the future, they might be able to. Not yet though. I still have a job. When a non software engineer can build a production app as well as I can, I know I won’t be working as a software engineer anymore. In that world, having great ideas, data, compute, and energy will be king. I don’t think we will get there within the next 3-4 years. Beyond that, who knows.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
akkanzn 8mo ago
Could you provide some details on your company, code base, etc? These are wild claims and don’t match the reality I’m seeing everywhere else. How big is your team? How many customers? What’s your product? Can we see the code? How do you track defects? Etc. Part of the reason I’m struggling with this is because we’d be seeing OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. plastering these case studies everywhere if they existed. Instead, I’m stuck using CC and all its poorly implemented warts.
- itake 8mo ago
  Not OP, but I am seeing this in my current company. Companies are charged per token, which means heavy AI users deliver more and stress budgets. They recently announced significant payroll costs over the past ~3 years. Those savings I think will partially be reclaimed by AI companies, enabling the high performers more ai model usage.

alternatex 8mo ago

Now if only companies knew how to correctly assess actual impact and not perceived impact.

itake 8mo ago
I don't think this is an AI problem. Even before AI, FANGA companies famously optimize promotions on perceived impact. During the promo review, people will look how many projects were done and the impact of those projects.
aurareturn 8mo ago
Acquisition rate, retention rate, revenue, profit margin?
- alternatex 8mo ago
  By those metrics, Microsoft lost 20% of it's value due to hopping on the AI coding assistance train. I'm not saying it is the case, just making it apparent how unreliable it is to measure productivity by comparing what's happening at the lowest level in a company to its financials.
  - aurareturn 8mo ago
    Microsoft is mostly a SaaS company. Many SaaS businesses have lost much more in market cap since due to AI disruption. Imagine if Microsoft didn't invest in AI? Maybe they'd be down 50% now.