Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

papers.ssrn.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 532 posts

Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#311

Post by WalterBright »

Buttons840 wrote: post #257
WalterBright wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies deliver what customers are willing to pay for. If customers are willing to pay for X, and no companies make X available, you have a great case to make to a venture capitalist. BTW, in every company I've worked for, the employees thought management was stupid and incompetent. In every company I've run, the employees thought I was stupid and incompetent. Sometimes these people leave and start their own compan…

I think those who run companies are often stupid and incompetent, and the workers are probably right most of the time. Just look at the quote again, there's lots of things people don't know when they're starting a company. It would be nice if being smart and competent was the key to success in our society, but you hint at the real key to success in your own comment--getting favor and money from those who already have…

> I think those who run companies are often stupid and incompetent

If you've never run a business, it can sure seem that way.

> the real key to success in your own comment--getting favor and money

Nobody is going to invest in your startup unless you convince them that you're capable of making money for them.

Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#312

Post by lrem »

matrix2003 wrote: post #182
trashtester wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I did ML at insurance companies and got branded as an insurance ML guy. If you're an "ML insurance guy" outside of the US, it may be quite lucrative compared to other developers. It's really only in the US (and maybe China) that pure developers are demanding $200k+ salaries. In most places in Europe, even $100k is considered a high salary, and if you can provide value directly to the business, it will add a lot to…

> In most places in Europe, even $100k is considered a high salary I think it's worth adding here that US developers can have a much higher burden for things like health insurance. My child broke his arm this year, and we hit our very high deductible. I would like to see numbers factoring in things like public transportation, health insurance, etc., because I personally feel like EU vs US developers are a lot closer…

It’s not really about the numbers. My pile of money at retirement would definitely be larger if I moved across the pond. But here my children walk themselves to school from the age of six. I don’t worry about them getting killed by a madman. And even the homeless get healthcare, including functional mental health support. Things no employer can offer in the US.

Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#313

Post by carlmr »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #45
carlmr wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've gotten responses now on PRs of the form. "I don't know either, this is what Copilot told me." If you don't even understand your own PR, I'm not sure why you expect other people can. I have used LLMs myself, but mostly for boilerplate and one-off stuff. I think it can be quite helpful. But as soon as you stop understanding the code it generates you will create subtle bugs everywhere that will cost you dearly in t…

Copilot is best for me when it's letting me hit tab to auto-complete something I was going to write anyways.

Copilot does hit that sweet to spot sometimes.

Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#314

Post by makeitdouble »

nostrademons wrote: post #225
ang_cire wrote: post #90

I sometimes wonder about whether the decline in IT worker quality is down to companies trying to force more and more roles onto each worker to reduce headcount. Developers, Operations, and Security used to be dedicated roles. Then we made DevOps and some businesses took that to mean they only needed 2/3 of the headcount, rather than integrating those teams. Then we made DevSecOps, and some businesses took that to mea…

One person can do the work of 3 and regularly does in startups. I think that what the MBAs miss is this phenomena of overconstraint . Once you have separate the generic role of "developer" into "developer, operations, and security", you've likely specified all sorts of details about how those roles need to be done. When you combine them back into DevSecOps, all the details remain, and you have one person doing 3x the…

> One person can do the work of 3 and regularly does in startups.

Startup architecture and a 500+ engineer org's architecture are fundamentally different. The job titles are the same, but wont reflect the actual work.

Of course that's always been the case, and applies to the other jobs as well. What a "head of marketing" does at a 5 person startup has nothing to do with what the same titled person does at Amazon or Coca Cola.

I've also seen many orgs basically retitling their infra teams members as "devops" and call it a day. Communication between devs from different part of the stack has become easier, and there will be more "bridge" roles in each teams with an experienced dev also making sure it all works well, but I don't see any company that cared about their stack and performance fire half of their engineers because of a new fancy trend in the operation community.

Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#315

Post by namaria »

overrun11 wrote: post #279
matrix2003 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In most places in Europe, even $100k is considered a high salary I think it's worth adding here that US developers can have a much higher burden for things like health insurance. My child broke his arm this year, and we hit our very high deductible. I would like to see numbers factoring in things like public transportation, health insurance, etc., because I personally feel like EU vs US developers are a lot closer…

US big tech devs typically make 3x+ what the Euro equivalent does. A 4500 deductible isn't really materially relevant. I (a US dev) have a high deductible plan but my employer contributes substantially to it anyway.

You're conflating median and average compensation.

Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#316

Post by noisy_boy »

sgarland wrote: post #27
alternatex wrote: post #5

I wonder if the study includes the technical debt that more experienced developers had to tackle after the less experienced devs have contributed their AI-driven efforts. Because my personal experience has involved a lot of that in one of the companies listed in the study. Also, I've personally seen more interest in AI in devs that have little interest in technology, but a big interest in delivering. PMs love them th…

> Also, I've personally seen more interest in AI in devs that have little interest in technology, but a big interest in delivering. Thank you, this says what I have been struggling to describe. The day I lost part of my soul was when I asked a dev if I could give them feedback on a DB schema, they said yes, and then cut me off a few minutes in with, “yeah, I don’t really care [about X].” You don’t care? I’m telling y…

> Also, I've personally seen more interest in AI in devs that have little interest in technology, but a big interest in delivering.

They are/will be the management's darling because they too are all about delivering without any interest in technology either.

Well designed technology isn't seen as foundation anymore; it is merely a tool to just keep the machine running. If parts of the machine are being damaged by the lack of judgement in the process, that shouldn't come in the way of this year's bonus; it'll be something to worry about in the next financial year. Nobody knows whats going to happen in the long-term anyway, make hay while the sun shines.

The age of short-term is upon us.

Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#317

Post by duggan »

ehnto wrote: post #295
neom wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment had me laughing pretty hard, and thanks for making me feel old. Anyway, I guess I'm a "webmaster" in theory even tho I've not worked on web since early 2000s, lamp stack handy++ tho. made me laugh because: was a Supabase meetup recently and some kid told me he was full stack, but he can't ssh into a server? I'm supa confused what fullstack means these days.

I have stopped calling myself a full stack developer, because the meaning and the role are kind of ambiguous now. Clients don't know what they can talk to me about (everything), and PMs seem to be unsure of what I can be assigned to (anything). In fairness as well, the frontend tooling landscape has become so complex that while I'm capable of jumping in, I am in no way an efficient fronted developer off the rip.

The tooling has become complex, sure, but so have capabilities and expectations.

I used to “make websites” in the 2000s, then stopped for about 15 years to focus on backend and infrastructure.

Have been getting back into front end the last few months — there was a good bit of learning and unlearning, but the modern web stack is amazingly productive. Next.js, Tailwind, and Supabase in particular.

Last time I checked in to frontend dev, CSS directives fit on an A4 sheet, valid XHTML was a nerd flex and rounded corners were painstakingly crafted from tables and gifs.

Frontend is a dream now :)

Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#318

Post by _dain_ »

nextos wrote: post #226
matrix2003 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In most places in Europe, even $100k is considered a high salary I think it's worth adding here that US developers can have a much higher burden for things like health insurance. My child broke his arm this year, and we hit our very high deductible. I would like to see numbers factoring in things like public transportation, health insurance, etc., because I personally feel like EU vs US developers are a lot closer…

I would also like to see those numbers. IMHO, the biggest difference comes from housing cost. For example, from my own back-of-the-envelope calculations, a £100k Oxbridge job affords a better lifestyle than a $180k NY job mostly because of housing. However, some US areas have competitively priced housing and jobs that would make the balance tilt in favor of America. In EU, affordable spots with lots of desirable loca…

I don't know how NY is in comparison, but housing in Cambridge is almost as expensive as in London. A detached 3br starts at £700k. NIMBYs keep killing any expansion of supply.

Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#319

Post by TeMPOraL »

ang_cire wrote: post #90

I sometimes wonder about whether the decline in IT worker quality is down to companies trying to force more and more roles onto each worker to reduce headcount. Developers, Operations, and Security used to be dedicated roles. Then we made DevOps and some businesses took that to mean they only needed 2/3 of the headcount, rather than integrating those teams. Then we made DevSecOps, and some businesses took that to mea…

This is happening across the board, not just to IT workers, and I suspect it's the major factor as for why the expected productivity improvements from technology didn't materialize.

Think of your "DevSecOps" people doing 3x the work they should. Do you know what else are they doing? Booking their own business travels. Reconciling and reporting their own expenses. Reporting their own hours, broken down by business categories. Managing their own vacation days. Managing their own meetings. Creating presentations on their own, with graphics they made on their own. Possibly even doing 80% of work on lining up purchases from third parties. And a bunch of other stuff like that.

None of these are part of their job descriptions - in fact, all of these are actively distracting and disproportionally compromise the workers' ability to do their actual jobs. All of these also used to have dedicated specialists, that could do it 10x as efficiently, for fraction of the price.

My hypothesis is this: those specialists like secretaries, internal graphics departments, financial staff, etc. they all were visible on the balance sheet. Eliminating those roles does not eliminate the need for their work to be done - just distributes it to everyone in pieces (in big part thanks to self-serve office software "improving" productivity). That slows everyone down across the board disproportionally, but the beancounters only see the money saved on salaries of the eliminated roles - the slowdown only manifests as a fuzzy, generic sense of loss of productivity, a mysterious costs disease that everyone seems to suffer from.

I say it's not mysterious; I say that there is no productivity gain, but rather productivity loss - but because it turns the costs from legible, overt, into diffuse and hard to count, it's easy to get fooled that money is being saved.

Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#320

Post by Buttons840 »

yibg wrote: post #297
Buttons840 wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think those who run companies are often stupid and incompetent, and the workers are probably right most of the time. Just look at the quote again, there's lots of things people don't know when they're starting a company. It would be nice if being smart and competent was the key to success in our society, but you hint at the real key to success in your own comment--getting favor and money from those who already have…

The problem isn't that those who run companies are stupid and incompetent (which his probably true). It's that the people lobbing those jabs would also be stupid and incompetent if they were running the companies but thinks they have the answers.

Right. I agree that we all have our share of stupidity and incompetence. Some of us are stupid and incompetent on a worker's salary, and some of us are stupid and incompetent on a CEO's salary. See, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38849580
Post reply on HN