161–170 of 218 posts
"That assumption is wrong."
"The human is the equation. AI is what makes that equation run faster." -- what?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
AI aside, if we just look at other engineering disciplines in mature sectors, the future is not bright(er). No fully paid golden cadillac benefits packages (for your dog too!), no twice daily uber eats comps, no $150k entry level, no unlimited PTO, no 6 months leave. If you go to your uncles engineering department at the boiler company, these guy's engineering roles are about as pampered as the warehouse managers. Th…
Two things: 1) Unlimited PTO is a scam. Ask anyone who ever got paid out six weeks salary when they changed jobs. 2) “the craft” is doing some heavy lifting here. I happen to enjoy AI-assisted dev, but it is nothing like the work that drew me to the industry. Otherwise agreed on all counts.
Well, no. It's just the target beneficiary is not you (the employees) but the employer.
Unlimited PTO resolves the employer from paying out PTO when they make you "redundant".
> Not because they have fewer costs. Because they have more capability. This kind of sentences are typically AI-generated. What’s the point of an article about AI generated by AI?
However, in this case I think both were fairly vacuous. Also, sentence fragments are a hallmark of bad writing that high school English teachers try to train you out of, apparently unsuccessfully if the training data makes them so likely.
I think the unfortunate reality is that lots of companies in our industry have suspiciously inflated employee counts in the first place. Even when removing AI and the pandemic over-hiring, I wouldn't have been surprised to see corrections sooner or later. Employee count seems to correlate to stock market incentives - which is how GitLab is like 5x larger than Valve.
Doesn't Valve hire tons of contractors? I don't think anyone except them knows how many people/agencies they're paying to work on stuff like proton, linux, mesa, vulkan, etc., not to mention internal projects.
Valve could not actually do all that they do with just the leaked headcount numbers.
Preaching to the HN choir - great for upvotes but does anyone read anything new in this? Feels like I’ve seen the same article about this every month and I don’t think business people care.
My pet theory is that AI enables programmers to be relatively more productive than other roles. So, if I want to grow my company, shouldn't I hire MORE programmers? Anyone know a good counterargument? Along another vein, I guess I wonder with my limited knowledge of economics if the demand for programmers is elastic or inelastic.
for software it will be requirement gathering, product planning, looking for buyer / customer, even brainstorming on finding what to make.
You mean companies blaming AI or using it as an excuse?
The real answer is stop reading the headlines or the fake news.
I think the unfortunate reality is that lots of companies in our industry have suspiciously inflated employee counts in the first place. Even when removing AI and the pandemic over-hiring, I wouldn't have been surprised to see corrections sooner or later. Employee count seems to correlate to stock market incentives - which is how GitLab is like 5x larger than Valve.
Its also notable that over the last few decades the business community has normalized layoffs and layoffs while highly profitable as net positive for the company (stock). While all the engineering driven companies, GE, Boeing, etc that pioneered this management philosophy end up in strategic decline.
The companies cutting headcount because of AI often just aren’t creative enough to expand their portfolio. There, I said it. Today, even someone with minimal context can ship end-to-end prototypes. That means existing employees, the people with actual domain knowledge should be able to innovate faster than ever. Anthropic has shipped one of the best coding agents on the market and still has hundreds of engineering ro…