5 ms·

The bottleneck has moved from producing a thing that works to knowing that the thing was the right thing to build. The more of the latter they can take on, the

The bottleneck has moved from producing a thing that works to knowing that the thing was the right thing to build. The more of the latter they can take on, the fewer knowledge workers are needed at all. So rather than 5% of every knowledge worker's salary going into tokens, 100% of the knowledge worker's total employment cost goes into tokens and you get a 20x productivity boost as a theoretical minimum across those tasks. That's the game. There's a view you could take of this that this is just a growing of the pie: with those cost dynamics a lot more "small businesses" get a vast amount of leverage, so the overall economy grows without replacing the knowledge workers. I'm not sure I trust the MBA class to have that view.

layer8 4mo ago
Who pays for that value, and from what, if all knowledge workers lose their jobs? It sounds like the economy would largely reduce to the small minority class of independently wealthy people.
- whatshisface 4mo ago
  There were no knowledge workers in the middle ages.
  - layer8 4mo ago
    There wasn’t 20x value to pay for in the middle ages either.
  - wongarsu 4mo ago
    Back then people were mostly farmers, but we already automated that job away. Not completely, but compared to the middle ages we 50x'd their output. Which is a great illustration what it means to make a job 50 times more productive. We went from 80-90% of the population being required to barely make enough food for everyone to survive, to 4% of the population producing such an abundance that consuming too much food has become a systemic health issue
    - fodkodrasz 4mo ago
      At the mere cost of destroying soil, and polluting water and the atmosphere in only 200 years! Possibly this will also play out well, and there is a huge market of... maybe social media influencer economy to pick up those being automated out of their previous work... or rather identity, as actually much like in the middle ages, the modern world also makes the profession largely the identity of the individual. I'm pretty skeptical on the outcomes and the costs also (natural and social as well), but possibly we can have 50x or even more software in the end! The phrase will be truer than ever: > Software is eating the world!
      - coryrc 4mo ago
        Maybe ironically, but software and robotics should allow us to scale regenerative agriculture in a way that doesn't leave everyone in poverty. We already have lasers mounted to trailers doing precise weeding instead of broad herbicide usage. https://www.agtechmarket.net/news/laserweeding https://www.agtechmarket.net/news/laserweeding (random web search, I don't vouch for this site, it just looks legit at a glance) Next innovation could be to scale succession planting, which keeps the ground from being exposed in between crops and lets you transition from nitrogen fixers to users quicker, getting more food out per acre while reducing fertilizer usage. But you can't do that with current harvesters and human labor is too valuable to spend on this. Also take broccoli harvesting, typically you get a few big heads, then it keeps producing smaller heads, but it's not economical to harvest the smaller heads with human labor. Robotic harvesting lets the same plant produce more food per acre and uses the energy needed for new plants instead to keep producing food.
        fodkodrasz 4mo ago
        Masses will be unemployed, due to robots displacing them, but human labor will also be too costly. We won't be able to afford a person shepherding, but we will need to produce "meat" (substitutes) in plants, or in inhumane animal-jail, and we'll need robot-weedkiller lasers to produce the feedstock instead of letting animals graze... and we'll give the food produced this way to people on UBI... This is where this is going, the whole industrialism is totally self-serving, and for every problem its answer is digging deeper in the rabbit hole, and creating 2 more problems in addition to solving the initial problem only half-way. I don't want to say what you are suggesting is not possibly useful, I just want to emphasize how stuff works out in reality, in addition to doing some nice stuff like what you called out (the halfway solution to the problems). All we get is more alienation and humans getting depressed and feeling a lack of purpose... but somehow we cannot afford to pay fair prices for the agricultural work, and pay fair prices for the food, and not overproduce and overpollute... and the same thing is happening in every aspect of the human condition, not only food production, which is the most basic and ancient activity we have been doing.
  - jrochkind1 4mo ago
    Relatively few anyway. Monks (who wrote and edited books and managed libraries, and also taught), artists and musicians, bookkeepers/treasury/exchequer, scribes/chancery (who were the administrators of the kingdoms), and bankers all existed in European "middle ages". But a significantly smaller part of economy/society compared to "western world" now, yes.
  - thewebguyd 4mo ago
    There definitely were what could be considered knowledge workers in the (high) middle ages, it just wasn't the majority of work like today. The knowledge workers then were just a tiny, elite faction, mostly employed by the church or directly by nobility. Kindgoms were still big bureaucracies and needed scribes, theologians, academics, lawyers.
  - skydhash 4mo ago
    Are you sure? Any functional organization requires keepers to oil the machine. First the government. The best examples were the chinese empire, the catholic church, and the various kingdoms. Or do you think that everyone was either fighting or farming? Stewardship is knowledge work. Bookkeeping is another.
- simonw 4mo ago
  The more time I spend using agent tools the less I worry about knowledge worker job loss. It takes a skilled knowledge worker to use these things.
  - layer8 4mo ago
    Sure. I was challenging the parent on how the “game” they are positing would play out.
  - kansface 4mo ago
    We'll get around to training job specific models or the equivalent. Thats just lower on the value chain for now.
  - keeda 4mo ago
    Yes, but I do worry about junior knowledge worker job loss. These models are very good (and getting better) at the vast dark matter of "donkey work" that happens in knowledge-based industries -- work typically done by junior devs / analysts / lawyers / consultants, paralegals, admin assistants, customer success / support, etc. -- and those roles comprise the bulk of the workforce. And worse, these are the tasks that help the junior people eventually grow into the skilled knowledge workers required to operate models, so there's a pipeline problem too.
    - simplyluke 4mo ago
      I do too, but I think it currently has a lot more to do with the quasi-recession we've been in since the end of ZIRP and AI is a better excuse to stop training juniors than telling investors it's belt tightening, just like layoffs. I'm already seeing tech execs/hiring managers getting very frustrated at the lack of new-senior-engineers to hire. The market will correct for this in time.
      - rogerrogerr 4mo ago
        Curious if you can share any backing information from your last statement? As a senior engineer (well, that's my job title anyway), I find it encouraging.
- rvz 4mo ago
  > Who pays for that value, and from what, if all knowledge workers lose their jobs? They do not care unless these companies can get a bailout. UBI only exists for companies that are too big to fail. Case in point, 2008 and SVB when there was too much money on the line. One of the AI companies attempted to guarantee themselves a way for the government to bail them out if they were close to defaulting on the debt from the data center build out.
  - mikeocool 4mo ago
    SVB didn't get bailed out, their investors and creditors were wiped out. You could argue depositors were bailed out -- as they took the undue risk of keeping more than $250k in a single bank (though as part of a requirement for getting a loan from SVB, you had to have your operating accounts with them. So lots of companies had no choice, as SVB was one of the few banks that would lend to them). Arguably, the main impact of securing SVB depositors above the $250k limit is that it prevented thousands of people from being laid off that week, as their employers wouldn't have had the money to make payroll the following Wednesday.
    - matwood 4mo ago
      Thank you for saying this. Continuing to point at SVB as a bailout is annoying. They were not bailed out. Anyone with deposits in an accredited bank should be made whole - always. Without trusted banking we have no economy.
      - anonymars 4mo ago
        > Anyone with deposits in an accredited bank should be made whole - always Sure, but is that the case now? Is everyone made whole when a bank fails and they have more deposits than the insurance limits? Or only when it's the well-connected / too-big-to-fail? Looks like the answer is no: https://www.wsj.com/finance/banking/a-small-banks-failure-leaves-big-depositors-feeling-the-pain-574b83a2 https://www.wsj.com/finance/banking/a-small-banks-failure-le... So I don't think it's unreasonable to describe SVB as a bailout. Not for the investors, but for the depositors. Has anything changed to reduce the moral hazard / make it less likely to recur?
- regularfry 4mo ago
  See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48300427 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48300427 for an alternative take. I don't think either direction is inevitable, yet. To follow on from that comment, if the growth in breadth of capacity of AI leads to a decrease in the risk of running a smaller business, which I don't think is an unreasonable prediction, then it's not inevitable people do lose their jobs. Employers get smaller, higher-leverage, and more plentiful.
seanp2k2 4mo ago
>The bottleneck has moved from producing a thing that works to knowing that the thing was the right thing to build I would argue that that's been the case for quite some time before AI. As an example, what innovative amazing world-changing products have Google or Meta launched in the past decade with their very high numbers of very talented and highly-compensated engineers? The issue with most big tech companies are leadership, strategy, and product direction. I'm not saying that they don't make any profits, just that they probably aren't "building [the right thing]". AI for product development and management would be far more impactful than automating rote coding tasks / building React UIs that mirror API structures IMO.
- Figs 4mo ago
  > AI for product development and management would be far more impactful than automating rote coding tasks [...] Yeah, if this stuff actually worked that well already, OpenAI et al. would just run AI CEOs and engineers. Why get some other company to pay you at all when you can automate every other company out of existence and take all the money they make? The fact of the matter is that while the tech has some uses, it sure as hell isn't a full scale replacement and you almost always actually have to massage the input into LLMs to get anything decent back out in practice. Some CEOs and managers can learn to do this, of course, and some already are... but that quickly turns into a second full time job. A "programmer" is still needed. The job might change from mostly hand-writing C++/JS/Python to prompt engineering + some manual coding to fix all the stupid fuck-ups that the bots can't solve themselves, but you still need someone to actually prompt the bot. When that changes, it won't just be engineers losing work; there will be no reason to even have a human CEO any more.
  - dogwalker5000 4mo ago
    > When that changes, it won't just be engineers losing work; there will be no reason to even have a human CEO any more. The human race isn’t ready for that world IMHO. The only reason there is a middle class is because people have leverage in the form of their labor. When that becomes worthless … the people who own stuff and make their living from doing so won’t hesitate to get rid of everyone else - whom are now worthless to them.
radicaldreamer 4mo ago
If knowledge workers get laid off in mass, you can expect political curbs on AI adoption.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
cogman10 4mo ago
This is the same argument that has been historically made for outsourcing developers. Get 20 more devs for the cost of 1 dev in the US. I suspect that AI will fail to pan out to the same extent for the same reason why outsourcing hasn't fully panned out (even though every company tries it after getting big enough). The problems that will come up will be and always have been ongoing maintenance. AI is great at writing new code without a brain behind it, but once you get to the point where you need to refactor code, you start really needing someone with coding experience to guide the AI or veto it's mistakes. I don't think that's really fixable even with a lot better AI. It's not something that ultimately comes out of the likes of github data. I'm not saying that AI isn't going to make things better, btw, I just don't think we'll see a 20x improvement. Probably more like 1.5 or 2x.
- roncesvalles 4mo ago
  Outsourcing of knowledge workers didn't work out because at large enough scales, the geographic arbitrage disappeared. Companies mostly always got what they paid for. The determinant of success was only whether the task needed American-tier labor or could make do with sub-American quality labor.
  - cogman10 4mo ago
    That's certainly part of it. But the other part that I've heard time and time again is that in order for outsourcing to be successful you basically needed an american engineer in the mix hand holding everything, clarifying requirements, and vetoing bad code. That part of dev work, the requirements gathering, attention to details, clarifying requirements, is something AI also struggles with. A lot of companies basically waste time and money on outsourced devs because without a clear path forward they effectively will sit and do nothing, waiting for a prompt.
    - m1coti 4mo ago
      I would not agree on that point. It really depends on company's structure. I mean it also depends with people that makes the team. I would say there are a lot of unknowns but I would certainly not generalize. How I find your argument is that one distinguished engineer from US could do the same with the use of AI. I worked with both and I know great and bad engineers from both sides. Only thing is that US has a bigger pool of great engineers.
OtherShrezzing 4mo ago
> The bottleneck has moved from producing a thing that works to knowing that the thing was the right thing to build “There’s more capital than good ideas to fund” has been a complaint from the likes of A16z & other VCs for a long time now. It’s why we ended up with stuff like NFTs getting funded.
roncesvalles 4mo ago
Why do you think of knowledge workers as a fungible commodity? What makes you think the people who used to build (or would have built) software will switch into the industry of "knowing that the thing was the right thing to build", as opposed to something cooler like surgery, city planning or experimental physics? The roles within a tech company are not the only jobs in the world.
- kys11 4mo ago
  [dead]
- regularfry 4mo ago
  > Why do you think of knowledge workers as a fungible commodity? I don't. > What makes you think the people who used to build (or would have built) software will switch into the industry of "knowing that the thing was the right thing to build", as opposed to something cooler like surgery, city planning or experimental physics? Because it's probably already part of the job. It's a change of emphasis, not a change of career. Your boss can already ask you to do it. If you're producing code, you're probably also reviewing code, checking it matches the acceptance criteria, testing it, sanity checking that it was the right code to have been written, today.
kmac_ 4mo ago
Producing a thing has always been cheap since personal computers existed. From mail-order software companies' times to SaaS times, producing a sellable MVP was an initial cost that is relatively small compared to the later cost of expansion and maintenance. Marketing and selling was and still is the hardest part.
KaiShips 4mo ago
[flagged]
jimbokun 4mo ago
That’s very unimpressive return on investment compared to what was promised.
- regularfry 4mo ago
  I have nothing riding on any specific multiple. Choose your own adventure there.

layer8 4mo ago

Who pays for that value, and from what, if all knowledge workers lose their jobs? It sounds like the economy would largely reduce to the small minority class of independently wealthy people.

whatshisface 4mo ago
There were no knowledge workers in the middle ages.
- layer8 4mo ago
  There wasn’t 20x value to pay for in the middle ages either.
- wongarsu 4mo ago
  Back then people were mostly farmers, but we already automated that job away. Not completely, but compared to the middle ages we 50x'd their output. Which is a great illustration what it means to make a job 50 times more productive. We went from 80-90% of the population being required to barely make enough food for everyone to survive, to 4% of the population producing such an abundance that consuming too much food has become a systemic health issue
  - fodkodrasz 4mo ago
    At the mere cost of destroying soil, and polluting water and the atmosphere in only 200 years! Possibly this will also play out well, and there is a huge market of... maybe social media influencer economy to pick up those being automated out of their previous work... or rather identity, as actually much like in the middle ages, the modern world also makes the profession largely the identity of the individual. I'm pretty skeptical on the outcomes and the costs also (natural and social as well), but possibly we can have 50x or even more software in the end! The phrase will be truer than ever: > Software is eating the world!
    - coryrc 4mo ago
      Maybe ironically, but software and robotics should allow us to scale regenerative agriculture in a way that doesn't leave everyone in poverty. We already have lasers mounted to trailers doing precise weeding instead of broad herbicide usage. https://www.agtechmarket.net/news/laserweeding https://www.agtechmarket.net/news/laserweeding (random web search, I don't vouch for this site, it just looks legit at a glance) Next innovation could be to scale succession planting, which keeps the ground from being exposed in between crops and lets you transition from nitrogen fixers to users quicker, getting more food out per acre while reducing fertilizer usage. But you can't do that with current harvesters and human labor is too valuable to spend on this. Also take broccoli harvesting, typically you get a few big heads, then it keeps producing smaller heads, but it's not economical to harvest the smaller heads with human labor. Robotic harvesting lets the same plant produce more food per acre and uses the energy needed for new plants instead to keep producing food.
      - fodkodrasz 4mo ago
        Masses will be unemployed, due to robots displacing them, but human labor will also be too costly. We won't be able to afford a person shepherding, but we will need to produce "meat" (substitutes) in plants, or in inhumane animal-jail, and we'll need robot-weedkiller lasers to produce the feedstock instead of letting animals graze... and we'll give the food produced this way to people on UBI... This is where this is going, the whole industrialism is totally self-serving, and for every problem its answer is digging deeper in the rabbit hole, and creating 2 more problems in addition to solving the initial problem only half-way. I don't want to say what you are suggesting is not possibly useful, I just want to emphasize how stuff works out in reality, in addition to doing some nice stuff like what you called out (the halfway solution to the problems). All we get is more alienation and humans getting depressed and feeling a lack of purpose... but somehow we cannot afford to pay fair prices for the agricultural work, and pay fair prices for the food, and not overproduce and overpollute... and the same thing is happening in every aspect of the human condition, not only food production, which is the most basic and ancient activity we have been doing.
- jrochkind1 4mo ago
  Relatively few anyway. Monks (who wrote and edited books and managed libraries, and also taught), artists and musicians, bookkeepers/treasury/exchequer, scribes/chancery (who were the administrators of the kingdoms), and bankers all existed in European "middle ages". But a significantly smaller part of economy/society compared to "western world" now, yes.
- thewebguyd 4mo ago
  There definitely were what could be considered knowledge workers in the (high) middle ages, it just wasn't the majority of work like today. The knowledge workers then were just a tiny, elite faction, mostly employed by the church or directly by nobility. Kindgoms were still big bureaucracies and needed scribes, theologians, academics, lawyers.
- skydhash 4mo ago
  Are you sure? Any functional organization requires keepers to oil the machine. First the government. The best examples were the chinese empire, the catholic church, and the various kingdoms. Or do you think that everyone was either fighting or farming? Stewardship is knowledge work. Bookkeeping is another.
simonw 4mo ago
The more time I spend using agent tools the less I worry about knowledge worker job loss. It takes a skilled knowledge worker to use these things.
- layer8 4mo ago
  Sure. I was challenging the parent on how the “game” they are positing would play out.
- kansface 4mo ago
  We'll get around to training job specific models or the equivalent. Thats just lower on the value chain for now.
- keeda 4mo ago
  Yes, but I do worry about junior knowledge worker job loss. These models are very good (and getting better) at the vast dark matter of "donkey work" that happens in knowledge-based industries -- work typically done by junior devs / analysts / lawyers / consultants, paralegals, admin assistants, customer success / support, etc. -- and those roles comprise the bulk of the workforce. And worse, these are the tasks that help the junior people eventually grow into the skilled knowledge workers required to operate models, so there's a pipeline problem too.
  - simplyluke 4mo ago
    I do too, but I think it currently has a lot more to do with the quasi-recession we've been in since the end of ZIRP and AI is a better excuse to stop training juniors than telling investors it's belt tightening, just like layoffs. I'm already seeing tech execs/hiring managers getting very frustrated at the lack of new-senior-engineers to hire. The market will correct for this in time.
    - rogerrogerr 4mo ago
      Curious if you can share any backing information from your last statement? As a senior engineer (well, that's my job title anyway), I find it encouraging.
rvz 4mo ago
> Who pays for that value, and from what, if all knowledge workers lose their jobs? They do not care unless these companies can get a bailout. UBI only exists for companies that are too big to fail. Case in point, 2008 and SVB when there was too much money on the line. One of the AI companies attempted to guarantee themselves a way for the government to bail them out if they were close to defaulting on the debt from the data center build out.
- mikeocool 4mo ago
  SVB didn't get bailed out, their investors and creditors were wiped out. You could argue depositors were bailed out -- as they took the undue risk of keeping more than $250k in a single bank (though as part of a requirement for getting a loan from SVB, you had to have your operating accounts with them. So lots of companies had no choice, as SVB was one of the few banks that would lend to them). Arguably, the main impact of securing SVB depositors above the $250k limit is that it prevented thousands of people from being laid off that week, as their employers wouldn't have had the money to make payroll the following Wednesday.
  - matwood 4mo ago
    Thank you for saying this. Continuing to point at SVB as a bailout is annoying. They were not bailed out. Anyone with deposits in an accredited bank should be made whole - always. Without trusted banking we have no economy.
    - anonymars 4mo ago
      > Anyone with deposits in an accredited bank should be made whole - always Sure, but is that the case now? Is everyone made whole when a bank fails and they have more deposits than the insurance limits? Or only when it's the well-connected / too-big-to-fail? Looks like the answer is no: https://www.wsj.com/finance/banking/a-small-banks-failure-leaves-big-depositors-feeling-the-pain-574b83a2 https://www.wsj.com/finance/banking/a-small-banks-failure-le... So I don't think it's unreasonable to describe SVB as a bailout. Not for the investors, but for the depositors. Has anything changed to reduce the moral hazard / make it less likely to recur?
regularfry 4mo ago
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48300427 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48300427 for an alternative take. I don't think either direction is inevitable, yet. To follow on from that comment, if the growth in breadth of capacity of AI leads to a decrease in the risk of running a smaller business, which I don't think is an unreasonable prediction, then it's not inevitable people do lose their jobs. Employers get smaller, higher-leverage, and more plentiful.

seanp2k2 4mo ago

>The bottleneck has moved from producing a thing that works to knowing that the thing was the right thing to build I would argue that that's been the case for quite some time before AI. As an example, what innovative amazing world-changing products have Google or Meta launched in the past decade with their very high numbers of very talented and highly-compensated engineers? The issue with most big tech companies are leadership, strategy, and product direction. I'm not saying that they don't make any profits, just that they probably aren't "building [the right thing]". AI for product development and management would be far more impactful than automating rote coding tasks / building React UIs that mirror API structures IMO.

Figs 4mo ago
> AI for product development and management would be far more impactful than automating rote coding tasks [...] Yeah, if this stuff actually worked that well already, OpenAI et al. would just run AI CEOs and engineers. Why get some other company to pay you at all when you can automate every other company out of existence and take all the money they make? The fact of the matter is that while the tech has some uses, it sure as hell isn't a full scale replacement and you almost always actually have to massage the input into LLMs to get anything decent back out in practice. Some CEOs and managers can learn to do this, of course, and some already are... but that quickly turns into a second full time job. A "programmer" is still needed. The job might change from mostly hand-writing C++/JS/Python to prompt engineering + some manual coding to fix all the stupid fuck-ups that the bots can't solve themselves, but you still need someone to actually prompt the bot. When that changes, it won't just be engineers losing work; there will be no reason to even have a human CEO any more.
- dogwalker5000 4mo ago
  > When that changes, it won't just be engineers losing work; there will be no reason to even have a human CEO any more. The human race isn’t ready for that world IMHO. The only reason there is a middle class is because people have leverage in the form of their labor. When that becomes worthless … the people who own stuff and make their living from doing so won’t hesitate to get rid of everyone else - whom are now worthless to them.

radicaldreamer 4mo ago

If knowledge workers get laid off in mass, you can expect political curbs on AI adoption.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

cogman10 4mo ago

This is the same argument that has been historically made for outsourcing developers. Get 20 more devs for the cost of 1 dev in the US. I suspect that AI will fail to pan out to the same extent for the same reason why outsourcing hasn't fully panned out (even though every company tries it after getting big enough). The problems that will come up will be and always have been ongoing maintenance. AI is great at writing new code without a brain behind it, but once you get to the point where you need to refactor code, you start really needing someone with coding experience to guide the AI or veto it's mistakes. I don't think that's really fixable even with a lot better AI. It's not something that ultimately comes out of the likes of github data. I'm not saying that AI isn't going to make things better, btw, I just don't think we'll see a 20x improvement. Probably more like 1.5 or 2x.

roncesvalles 4mo ago
Outsourcing of knowledge workers didn't work out because at large enough scales, the geographic arbitrage disappeared. Companies mostly always got what they paid for. The determinant of success was only whether the task needed American-tier labor or could make do with sub-American quality labor.
- cogman10 4mo ago
  That's certainly part of it. But the other part that I've heard time and time again is that in order for outsourcing to be successful you basically needed an american engineer in the mix hand holding everything, clarifying requirements, and vetoing bad code. That part of dev work, the requirements gathering, attention to details, clarifying requirements, is something AI also struggles with. A lot of companies basically waste time and money on outsourced devs because without a clear path forward they effectively will sit and do nothing, waiting for a prompt.
  - m1coti 4mo ago
    I would not agree on that point. It really depends on company's structure. I mean it also depends with people that makes the team. I would say there are a lot of unknowns but I would certainly not generalize. How I find your argument is that one distinguished engineer from US could do the same with the use of AI. I worked with both and I know great and bad engineers from both sides. Only thing is that US has a bigger pool of great engineers.

OtherShrezzing 4mo ago

> The bottleneck has moved from producing a thing that works to knowing that the thing was the right thing to build “There’s more capital than good ideas to fund” has been a complaint from the likes of A16z & other VCs for a long time now. It’s why we ended up with stuff like NFTs getting funded.

roncesvalles 4mo ago

Why do you think of knowledge workers as a fungible commodity? What makes you think the people who used to build (or would have built) software will switch into the industry of "knowing that the thing was the right thing to build", as opposed to something cooler like surgery, city planning or experimental physics? The roles within a tech company are not the only jobs in the world.

kys11 4mo ago
[dead]
regularfry 4mo ago
> Why do you think of knowledge workers as a fungible commodity? I don't. > What makes you think the people who used to build (or would have built) software will switch into the industry of "knowing that the thing was the right thing to build", as opposed to something cooler like surgery, city planning or experimental physics? Because it's probably already part of the job. It's a change of emphasis, not a change of career. Your boss can already ask you to do it. If you're producing code, you're probably also reviewing code, checking it matches the acceptance criteria, testing it, sanity checking that it was the right code to have been written, today.

kmac_ 4mo ago

Producing a thing has always been cheap since personal computers existed. From mail-order software companies' times to SaaS times, producing a sellable MVP was an initial cost that is relatively small compared to the later cost of expansion and maintenance. Marketing and selling was and still is the hardest part.

KaiShips 4mo ago

[flagged]

jimbokun 4mo ago

That’s very unimpressive return on investment compared to what was promised.

regularfry 4mo ago
I have nothing riding on any specific multiple. Choose your own adventure there.