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Along another vein, I guess I wonder with my limited knowledge of economics if the demand for programmers is elastic or inelastic.
One datacenter rack of NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPUs costs $8 million. That's about the same cost as a team of software engineers. These data centers are not going to pay for themselves.
> One datacenter rack of NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPUs costs $8 million. That's about the same cost as a team of software engineers. How many engineers do you think that can pay for? At 100k/year that's a pretty huge team.
Also you need both now. It’s not enough to just have humans, and that OpEx needs to come from somewhere.
I’m not happy about it - just the way it is.
I still think AI is just a cover story for these job cuts. Tech companies are still "rightsizing" after unsustainable growth during the pandemic. At the same time we're clearly headed into a recession. Investors like growth, not shrinkage. Claiming AI is replacing those jobs helps avoid the appearence of shrinkage, while also feeding the AI hype machine that many of these companies have invested heavily into.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You must be joking, the vast majority of HN loves AI and thinks they don't need to write any code anymore.
Some people love AI, some don't. But the point about there being nothing new in the article still stands.
Cutting people because of AI makes no sense, you know these people are good without AI, you'd want to keep them! Freeze the constant over-hiring instead, and take care of the people you know aren't lobotomized yet, and train them if needed. I'm seeing so much shedding of knowledge workers though, even though AI clearly isn't ready to replace people, just ready to augment them currently, that it looks like looney-tune…
You see this in enterprise consulting, wiht the increase in cloud, serverless, SaaS/iPaaS, low code/no code, content generation and translations, followed by AI agent orchestration, the teams can be reduced down to about 1/3 of what they used to be.
It isn't as if there are enough projects around to keep the other 2/3 busy, so eventually when there are enough of those people on bench they have to find something else.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the scale of a company, augmenting is replacing. If a worker plus AI can do the work of two workers without AI (but cheaper), you go for that; and it doesn't matter how good or bad AI is without the human.
The point is if a worker plus AI can do the work of two workers without AI, then why not keep both workers and have them both use AI to have the equivalent of four non-assisted workers?
Cutting people because of AI makes no sense, you know these people are good without AI, you'd want to keep them! Freeze the constant over-hiring instead, and take care of the people you know aren't lobotomized yet, and train them if needed. I'm seeing so much shedding of knowledge workers though, even though AI clearly isn't ready to replace people, just ready to augment them currently, that it looks like looney-tune…
On the scale of a company, augmenting is replacing. If a worker plus AI can do the work of two workers without AI (but cheaper), you go for that; and it doesn't matter how good or bad AI is without the human.
- AI pricing is variable, probably the cheapest it will ever be right now
- AI produces a lot more shit for humans to review, and you will always need humans. If you don’t focus on keeping things simple you will probably play yourself unless you’re good at separating out blast radiuses.
- I see a lot of super low quality work that doesn’t solve the problem but it’s like look that guy solved the problem in one day! Promote him! Everyone is happy except for the end users who for whatever reason are being totally ignored (whose problem it fails to appropriately solve) and I saw this in accounting software so…hello eventual lawsuits?
“Remove this old feature.” “Are you sure you didn’t break anything?”
That was it. Then I manually tested it to make sure nothing was broken. Then I did a brief review before posting it for code review and then pushed it. What would have taken me probably about 1 day to go through and figure out code changes and then actually change the code took me about 30 seconds.
To think that we need to maintain the post-Covid hiring bloat is nonsense. I’m not so arrogant to think that someone with an llm can’t replace me, if I survive a few more years in this industry I’ll be amazed and grateful.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point is if a worker plus AI can do the work of two workers without AI, then why not keep both workers and have them both use AI to have the equivalent of four non-assisted workers?
Because the entire structure of the business is designed for approximately the amount of work it currently does and likely has no particular immediate use for twice as much work in most departments.
Businesses are not magically efficient
One datacenter rack of NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPUs costs $8 million. That's about the same cost as a team of software engineers. These data centers are not going to pay for themselves.
> One datacenter rack of NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPUs costs $8 million. That's about the same cost as a team of software engineers. How many engineers do you think that can pay for? At 100k/year that's a pretty huge team.