Live data from Hacker News

The Industrialization of IT

benn.substack.com

11–20 of 53 posts

Re: The Industrialization of IT

#11
post #4

Tangential, but an entry level developer at 190k USD per year seems nuts, is that really a reasonable number? From a quick search, I find numbers below 100k USD for the bay area, which seems more reasonable. In a well off European country, you'd pay around 45k USD for a strong entry level developer. I can imagine 2x salaries, considering costs of living, fire at will and all that, but >4x? Not sure how to back that u…

Agree US market seems bloated, not only salaries but also positions, you can find "seniors" with 2 years of experience, maybe a side effect from the pandemic boom

Re: The Industrialization of IT

#12
post #4

Tangential, but an entry level developer at 190k USD per year seems nuts, is that really a reasonable number? From a quick search, I find numbers below 100k USD for the bay area, which seems more reasonable. In a well off European country, you'd pay around 45k USD for a strong entry level developer. I can imagine 2x salaries, considering costs of living, fire at will and all that, but >4x? Not sure how to back that u…

You’re right, but you’ve only got half the truth. Bay Area devs are overpaid and European devs are underpaid.

Re: The Industrialization of IT

#13
> In 2025, the engineer probably beats Gemini. Sure, great. But in 2030, who wins this hypothetical?

I don't think we need to wait for 2030. Today, using aider/cursor and Gemini-pro-2.5, I'm pretty sure a team of two or three senior developers with great domain knowledge would be competitive with a team of 10 average devs. Being a small, close-knit team has a lot of advantages. And LLMs can help close the productivity gap.

Re: The Industrialization of IT

#14
post #4

Tangential, but an entry level developer at 190k USD per year seems nuts, is that really a reasonable number? From a quick search, I find numbers below 100k USD for the bay area, which seems more reasonable. In a well off European country, you'd pay around 45k USD for a strong entry level developer. I can imagine 2x salaries, considering costs of living, fire at will and all that, but >4x? Not sure how to back that u…

Well, the author did cite Levels, which is pretty reliable. A quick search shows that >150k seems accurate for a lot of the top tech companies (eg. Google).

I absolutely know people individually who made 150k+ out of college. Sorry europeans, but Bay Area salaries are definitely a large multiple of European salaries, even entry level.

A lot of this is possible because these companies make a lot of money, and a lot of money per employee, and that trickles down to new-hire salaries. It doesn't seem like there are many wildly profitable European companies in tech, at least not ones that can really drive up salaries like this. It's too bad, because Europe broadly has really strong talent, but I imagine there is a constant pressure pulling people away for more money.

Re: The Industrialization of IT

#15

> In 2025, the engineer probably beats Gemini. Sure, great. But in 2030, who wins this hypothetical? I don't think we need to wait for 2030. Today, using aider/cursor and Gemini-pro-2.5, I'm pretty sure a team of two or three senior developers with great domain knowledge would be competitive with a team of 10 average devs. Being a small, close-knit team has a lot of advantages. And LLMs can help close the productivit…

> I'm pretty sure a team of two or three senior developers with great domain knowledge would be competitive with a team of 10 average devs.

This has always been true. LLMs didn't change that.

Re: The Industrialization of IT

#16
post #8

Clear and concise thinking, its the first time I have read someone cut through the hype and argue logically for what the next incremental steps are in making progress down this path of LLMs creating technology. The first steam engines were too expensive and underpowered, the first cars were deatch traps when they actually ran. Dont lul yourself into the dream of a static world. We see the wave coming, I will look for…

> We see the wave coming, I will look for a way to surf it. Don't be the stunned sceptic waiting to feel the crush What would you do to surf it? What would you suggest to who's an engineer right now?

For one, I have started using the tools that are available right now, to increase my productivity and intuition with what the new capabilities are.

I think the original author is on to something, about how the structure of our codebases will change, and therefore our preferred frameworks will change as well.

The frameworks we use today, assume that the codebase is DRY[1], and that a human will verify the workings of the codebase. A human will write a single test, for a single component and verify that the test functions correctly - then leave it in there, for successive runs to prove there has been no regression to the code quality.

But as the author points out - that doesn't lend itself to truly parallel programming. Because as one programmer/agent changes a central component that another programmer/agent also changed in the same release cycle, merge conflicts arise and grown into architectural conflicts and grow into team conflicts.

I see how accepting more duplication, can lead to more parallelization. I mostly cared about keeping code DRY because its hell to refactor a codebase with 5 implementations of the same thing. But if I am just instructing an LLM to make the change, I dont care how many files it has to visit - its still the same single instruction from me.

So I will think long and hard about how tooling needs to improve, and how frameworks need to change, to be part of this new paradigm. Similar to how Object Oriented Programming optimised for human logic rather than cpu cycles, the time of LLMs will optimise for testability and parallelisation rather than gpu cycles, or DRY paradigmes.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_repeat_yourself

Re: The Industrialization of IT

#17

> In 2025, the engineer probably beats Gemini. Sure, great. But in 2030, who wins this hypothetical? I don't think we need to wait for 2030. Today, using aider/cursor and Gemini-pro-2.5, I'm pretty sure a team of two or three senior developers with great domain knowledge would be competitive with a team of 10 average devs. Being a small, close-knit team has a lot of advantages. And LLMs can help close the productivit…

> I'm pretty sure a team of two or three senior developers with great domain knowledge would be competitive with a team of 10 average devs. This has always been true. LLMs didn't change that.

Yes!

Spend any amount of time, reading the implementation of powerfull algorithms (A* search, Bubble sort), and you will realize that the power is in the idea, not the feeble attempt at coding it in PHP, Go, JS or what ever.

Re: The Industrialization of IT

#18
post #4

Tangential, but an entry level developer at 190k USD per year seems nuts, is that really a reasonable number? From a quick search, I find numbers below 100k USD for the bay area, which seems more reasonable. In a well off European country, you'd pay around 45k USD for a strong entry level developer. I can imagine 2x salaries, considering costs of living, fire at will and all that, but >4x? Not sure how to back that u…

>In a well off European country, you'd pay around 45k USD for a strong entry level developer. I can imagine 2x salaries, considering costs of living, fire at will and all that, but >4x? Not sure how to back that up.

You back that up with the fact that Google makes 500k USD profit per employee, AFTER they pay each of them 200k+ in salaries plus added taxes and other expenses. Valve makes 19 Million USD profit per employee. There are no European tech companies that make even remotely as much profit per employee, so obviously they'll never be able to pay such salaries no matter how much EU workers as for.

It's not like the US tech workers work 4x harder, or 4x faster, or are 4x smarter than the European ones, it's that their companies are 4x more profitable and that reflects in workers' compensation.

Re: The Industrialization of IT

#19

You get something right, something awfully wrong. It's true that machines dont sleep, but less true that every software engineer costs 230000$ an year. Maybe (!) that's true in Silicon Valley. In Italy, it costs 35000E. And we don't see many software companies in Italy. Why? Because I'm sad to have that explained, code is 10% of development. Whatsapp was sold for 17 billion dollars and it was 55 employees, and it's a…

Certainly the sorts of salary numbers thrown around with the likes of Google are not generally true of smaller companies, east coast companies except perhaps for some finance roles, and certainly not for IT/developer roles at non-tech companies. Nor is it true for pretty much any other STEM jobs. Doesn’t seem sustainable. I’m tempted to think that a lot of people learning CS today because it’s so lucrative are going to be disappointed.

Re: The Industrialization of IT

#20
post #4

Tangential, but an entry level developer at 190k USD per year seems nuts, is that really a reasonable number? From a quick search, I find numbers below 100k USD for the bay area, which seems more reasonable. In a well off European country, you'd pay around 45k USD for a strong entry level developer. I can imagine 2x salaries, considering costs of living, fire at will and all that, but >4x? Not sure how to back that u…

You’re right, but you’ve only got half the truth. Bay Area devs are overpaid and European devs are underpaid.

Also, a few years ago I had teams in multiple countries (South East Asia, India, Easter Europe, Western Europe, East and West Coast), all well paid (but not at FAANG levels). While their capacity was roughly similar, the West Coast ones were by far the more expensive ones, but also quite stressed out to make ends meet (buying a house, having a kid, putting them through school) compared to the other teams.

Eastern Europe was a place to find hidden gems (very cheap - but not so now), and some brilliant people (but not all of them). Western Europe was consistent, solid moderate quality at moderate costs vs US. So in line with your views

Post reply on HN