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If average is all we need, then anyone can do it. What value do I add? How does an employee differentiate themselves? Why didn’t the boss ask the AI for the ch

If average is all we need, then anyone can do it. What value do I add? How does an employee differentiate themselves? Why didn’t the boss ask the AI for the charts to begin with? Everyone’s income is going to be below average, because they got fired.

CodeyWhizzBang 6mo ago
Not everyone can be average. Half of people will be below average. I might not agree with the point, but I can see that idea that many things just need to be "good enough" (which we might define as "average") and we save our real expertise for the things that really matter.
- sva_ 6mo ago
  > Half of people will be below average. s/average/median
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  - jagged-chisel 6mo ago
    I don’t believe this is a meaningful distinction when we’re not going to agree on how to judge performance of software engineers. If this were solely about income, it might be an important distinction.
  - wongarsu 6mo ago
    The article assumes a normal distribution, making the distinction moot But it is useful to question whether that is true in all cases. The cases that aren't normal-distributed might be exactly the cases where it pays off to be neither average or median
    - programjames 6mo ago
      It is almost never true. If you filter people you're going to get a Pareto distribution.
    - skeeter2020 6mo ago
      there is a major shortcoming in this assumption; everything we've seen related to the internet and technology in general suggests there is rarely a normal distribution. I think it's way more valuable ato frame the questions as a long tail (pareto) distribution and a "good enough" cut-off point.
  - paulddraper 6mo ago
    Median is a type of average. Though usually "average" implies arithmetic mean.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
jerf 6mo ago
Reducing the amount of time I spend on the average code has meant I'm spending more time adding my above-average contributions to the code base. Amdahl's law, basically. Reducing the amount of time spent on one task means the percentage of time spent on the others increases. How stable that is on the long term, I don't know any more than the next guy, but it is where I'm contributing now.
bluegatty 6mo ago
The power saw makes average cuts, it didn't disemploy carpenters, we just made better homes.
- HWR_14 6mo ago
  We make more homes, but I would say the construction of the average home is worse after the invention of the power saw than before it.
  - bluegatty 6mo ago
    Good gosh no. That's like saying 'cars were better made in the 1950's because they used tons of steel'. Like they were 'heavier and more robust' - but that doesn't mean better. Foundations are way better, more robust, especially weatherized. Windows today are like magic compared to windows 100 years ago. What we do more poorly now is we don't use wood everywhere, aka doors, and certain kinds of workmanship are not there - like winding staircases, mouldings - but you can easily have that if you want to pay for it. That's a choice. AI is power and leverage, it will make better things as long as it's directed by skilled operators.
    - HWR_14 6mo ago
      Yes, houses got better because materials got better. Windows are better. But the construction of the houses is worse. The precision of how the wood or material meets is worse (when cut at the site). There is a huge amount of sloppy work in modern construction.
      - kaashif 6mo ago
        I'm interested in how one would prove that one way or another. It seems to me that in the past there probably was lots of shoddy workmanship and just no-one paid attention to it. But I have no proof of that.
        bluegatty 6mo ago
roenxi 6mo ago
That isn't a sane starting point; if a corporation's strategy is to only hire above average employees they're going to fail. Enron springs to mind. Corporations generally take average people and give them a reasonably well defined scopes of simple work to complete that adds value. The bigger the corporation the more difficulty they have handling even the standard deviation above average differently to the one below; almost everyone just becomes a human resource to be swapped around based on social factors. The people who need to be above average and exceptionally are senior management and maybe a few bright sparks in middle management. Most of the value-add happens there that builds social machines that then do the work. > If average is all we need, then anyone can do it. Pretty much, yes. That is why the range of salaries on offer is pretty compressed compared to the range of returns capitalists get.
- drfloyd51 6mo ago
  > The people who need to be above average and exceptionally are senior management and maybe a few bright sparks in middle management. Most of the value-add happens there that builds social machines that then do the work. That is the dream. Upper management can get software made without talent. But is seems to be the greatest ideas in the last 30 years didn’t start in board rooms. They started with a couple coders creating a new idea. No boardroom could have invented Google. It was so fundamentally different than what other search engines were doing. We have this myth that upper management is so important. It is as the business grows in size, they are excellent for coordination. But ideas come from people closer to the problems.
  - roenxi 6mo ago
    > No boardroom could have invented Google. It was so fundamentally different than what other search engines were doing. You might want to try a different example, that one rather undermines the point you're trying to make. PageRank [0] was developed by Page & Brin as original research/based on the work of other people who weren't employees. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank#History
j45 6mo ago
The average of quality isn't always available in all people.
analog31 6mo ago
For that matter, how does a business differentiate themselves, if people can write their own software? While we're busy trying to replace our employees with AI, our customers are trying to replace our products with AI.
- 8note 6mo ago
  support quality is an obvious one, the other being how well the ai can use it, and how ai SEO-ed you are. vercel and next.js for isntance are absolutely loved by claude
raw_anon_1111 6mo ago
At any tech company with leveling guidelines that I have seen, promotions above mid level have never been based on “I codez real gud”. It’s always been based on scope, impact and dealing with ambiguity. It’s stated differently in different companies. No one has ever differentiated themselves based on how good of a ticket taker they are. Coding especially on the enterprise dev side where most developers work has been being commoditized since 2016 at least and compensation has stagnated since then and hasn’t come near keeping up with inflation. In 2016, a good solid full stack, mobile or web developer working in the enterprise could make $135K working in a second tier city. That’s $185K inflation adjusted today. Those same companies aren’t paying $185K for the same position. My one anecdote is that the same company I worked for back then making $125K and some of my coworkers were making $135K just posted a position on LinkedIn with the same requirements (SQL Server + C#) offering $145K fully remote.
- Ancapistani 6mo ago
  > At any tech company with leveling guidelines that I have seen, promotions above mid level have never been based on “I codez real gud”. It’s always been based on scope, impact and dealing with ambiguity. It’s stated differently in different companies. I 100% agree here. AI has been a huge boon for me personally, because I stopped spending most of my writing code years ago. I was reviewing code, writing procedures, handling incidents, and generally just looking for pain points across the entire company and solving them before they became critical. Those skills have transferred directly to working with AI.

CodeyWhizzBang 6mo ago

Not everyone can be average. Half of people will be below average. I might not agree with the point, but I can see that idea that many things just need to be "good enough" (which we might define as "average") and we save our real expertise for the things that really matter.

sva_ 6mo ago
> Half of people will be below average. s/average/median
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- jagged-chisel 6mo ago
  I don’t believe this is a meaningful distinction when we’re not going to agree on how to judge performance of software engineers. If this were solely about income, it might be an important distinction.
- wongarsu 6mo ago
  The article assumes a normal distribution, making the distinction moot But it is useful to question whether that is true in all cases. The cases that aren't normal-distributed might be exactly the cases where it pays off to be neither average or median
  - programjames 6mo ago
    It is almost never true. If you filter people you're going to get a Pareto distribution.
  - skeeter2020 6mo ago
    there is a major shortcoming in this assumption; everything we've seen related to the internet and technology in general suggests there is rarely a normal distribution. I think it's way more valuable ato frame the questions as a long tail (pareto) distribution and a "good enough" cut-off point.
- paulddraper 6mo ago
  Median is a type of average. Though usually "average" implies arithmetic mean.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

jerf 6mo ago

Reducing the amount of time I spend on the average code has meant I'm spending more time adding my above-average contributions to the code base. Amdahl's law, basically. Reducing the amount of time spent on one task means the percentage of time spent on the others increases. How stable that is on the long term, I don't know any more than the next guy, but it is where I'm contributing now.

bluegatty 6mo ago

The power saw makes average cuts, it didn't disemploy carpenters, we just made better homes.

HWR_14 6mo ago
We make more homes, but I would say the construction of the average home is worse after the invention of the power saw than before it.
- bluegatty 6mo ago
  Good gosh no. That's like saying 'cars were better made in the 1950's because they used tons of steel'. Like they were 'heavier and more robust' - but that doesn't mean better. Foundations are way better, more robust, especially weatherized. Windows today are like magic compared to windows 100 years ago. What we do more poorly now is we don't use wood everywhere, aka doors, and certain kinds of workmanship are not there - like winding staircases, mouldings - but you can easily have that if you want to pay for it. That's a choice. AI is power and leverage, it will make better things as long as it's directed by skilled operators.
  - HWR_14 6mo ago
    Yes, houses got better because materials got better. Windows are better. But the construction of the houses is worse. The precision of how the wood or material meets is worse (when cut at the site). There is a huge amount of sloppy work in modern construction.
    - kaashif 6mo ago
      I'm interested in how one would prove that one way or another. It seems to me that in the past there probably was lots of shoddy workmanship and just no-one paid attention to it. But I have no proof of that.
      - bluegatty 6mo ago

roenxi 6mo ago

That isn't a sane starting point; if a corporation's strategy is to only hire above average employees they're going to fail. Enron springs to mind. Corporations generally take average people and give them a reasonably well defined scopes of simple work to complete that adds value. The bigger the corporation the more difficulty they have handling even the standard deviation above average differently to the one below; almost everyone just becomes a human resource to be swapped around based on social factors. The people who need to be above average and exceptionally are senior management and maybe a few bright sparks in middle management. Most of the value-add happens there that builds social machines that then do the work. > If average is all we need, then anyone can do it. Pretty much, yes. That is why the range of salaries on offer is pretty compressed compared to the range of returns capitalists get.

drfloyd51 6mo ago
> The people who need to be above average and exceptionally are senior management and maybe a few bright sparks in middle management. Most of the value-add happens there that builds social machines that then do the work. That is the dream. Upper management can get software made without talent. But is seems to be the greatest ideas in the last 30 years didn’t start in board rooms. They started with a couple coders creating a new idea. No boardroom could have invented Google. It was so fundamentally different than what other search engines were doing. We have this myth that upper management is so important. It is as the business grows in size, they are excellent for coordination. But ideas come from people closer to the problems.
- roenxi 6mo ago
  > No boardroom could have invented Google. It was so fundamentally different than what other search engines were doing. You might want to try a different example, that one rather undermines the point you're trying to make. PageRank [0] was developed by Page & Brin as original research/based on the work of other people who weren't employees. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank#History

j45 6mo ago

The average of quality isn't always available in all people.

analog31 6mo ago

For that matter, how does a business differentiate themselves, if people can write their own software? While we're busy trying to replace our employees with AI, our customers are trying to replace our products with AI.

8note 6mo ago
support quality is an obvious one, the other being how well the ai can use it, and how ai SEO-ed you are. vercel and next.js for isntance are absolutely loved by claude

raw_anon_1111 6mo ago

At any tech company with leveling guidelines that I have seen, promotions above mid level have never been based on “I codez real gud”. It’s always been based on scope, impact and dealing with ambiguity. It’s stated differently in different companies. No one has ever differentiated themselves based on how good of a ticket taker they are. Coding especially on the enterprise dev side where most developers work has been being commoditized since 2016 at least and compensation has stagnated since then and hasn’t come near keeping up with inflation. In 2016, a good solid full stack, mobile or web developer working in the enterprise could make $135K working in a second tier city. That’s $185K inflation adjusted today. Those same companies aren’t paying $185K for the same position. My one anecdote is that the same company I worked for back then making $125K and some of my coworkers were making $135K just posted a position on LinkedIn with the same requirements (SQL Server + C#) offering $145K fully remote.

Ancapistani 6mo ago
> At any tech company with leveling guidelines that I have seen, promotions above mid level have never been based on “I codez real gud”. It’s always been based on scope, impact and dealing with ambiguity. It’s stated differently in different companies. I 100% agree here. AI has been a huge boon for me personally, because I stopped spending most of my writing code years ago. I was reviewing code, writing procedures, handling incidents, and generally just looking for pain points across the entire company and solving them before they became critical. Those skills have transferred directly to working with AI.