Funny has this goes hand in hand with the rise in fractional and contract roles
If they are 1099 they aren’t part of the team, right?
AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era
161–170 of 189 posts
Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
And for enterprise sales, you need a salesforce and many multi-billion companies have an enterprise salesforce. And documentation writers, and support staff, in multiple geographies, and events/marketing teams to support customers, etc.
> you need a salesforce That's a cloud subscription away!
Except it's not. All the big cloud providers catering to enterprises, whether SaaS or AWS/Google/Azure, definitely have large sales forces whether or not they thought they needed them at first or not.
Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
This has been an industry wide problem at silicon valley for years now. For all their talks of changing the world, what we've gotten the last decade has been taxi and hotel apps. Nothing truly revolutionizing.
> what we've gotten the last decade has been taxi and hotel apps. Nothing truly revolutionizing. I’m not sure where you are from, but this is not my perspective from Northern California. 1. Apps in general, and Uber in particular, have very much revolutionized the part-time work landscape via gig work. There are plenty of criticisms of gig work if/when people try to do it full time, but as a replacement for part time…
Yeah but that's not tech, the positive are just result from legal loop holes. I would say though that Taxi companies now have proper app because Uber forces them to catch up with the tech. Calling taxi in the pre-Uber era was literally hell.
Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, you still do all of that domain research and requirements gathering and system design as your meatbag job. But now instead of writing the ETL code yourself by hand you can get 80-90% of the way there in a minute or two with AI assistance.
> you can get 80-90% of the way there in a minute or two with AI assistance. That just leaves the other 80-90% to do manually ;)
If you do it in prod, you can save a lot of time by just borking the database and hoping they don't have backups.
Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era
#165[dead]
Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era
#166I'm working on a bunch of different projects trying out new stuff all the time for the past six months. Every time I do something I add another layer of AI automation/enhancement to my personal dev setup with the goal of trying to see how much I can extend my own ability to produce while delivering high quality projects. I definitely wouldn't say I'm 10x of what I could do before across the board but a solid 2-3x ave…
A while back, someone here linked to this story[0]. It's a bit simplified and idealized, but is actually fairly spot-on. I have been using AI every day. Just today, I used ChatGPT to translate an app string into 5 languages. [0] https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/superhuman-what-can-ai-do-i...
If someone reports a translation error, how do you verify and fix it? Especially those tricky ones that have no direct translation and require deep understanding of the language?
Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
Instagram was 13 employees before they were purchased by Facebook. The secret is most employees in a 1000 person company don't need to be there or cover very niche cases that your company likely wouldn't have.
> The secret is most employees in a 1000 person company don't need to be there or cover very niche cases that your company likely wouldn't have. That is massively wrong, and frankly an insulting worldview that a lot of people on HN seem to have. The secret is that some companies - usually ones focused on a single highly scalable technology product, and that don't need a large sales team for whatever reason - those co…
I have worked for many companies and the majority of them are not technically complex. They are drowning in tech debt from when they were in a high growth phase and many of the employees they have are due to needing to handle that debt but the product itself is technically very simple.
Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
A while back, someone here linked to this story[0]. It's a bit simplified and idealized, but is actually fairly spot-on. I have been using AI every day. Just today, I used ChatGPT to translate an app string into 5 languages. [0] https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/superhuman-what-can-ai-do-i...
If someone reports a translation error, how do you verify and fix it? Especially those tricky ones that have no direct translation and require deep understanding of the language?
That's an issue, regardless of the source of translation.
For my bulk translations, I have used Babbelon[0] for years. They do a great job. I wouldn't dream of replacing them entirely with ChatGPT.
What I would use ChatGPT for, is when I need to do a very minor change (like adding a simple prompt label to an app). Maybe just a few words.
Doing that through the translation service is crazy. They have a minimum price, and it can take a day or three to get the results. Since I work quickly, and most of my apps are free (for users; they usually cost me, quite a bit), changes can be a problem. Translations are a major "concrete galosh"[1].
With ChatGPT, I can ask, not only for a direct translation, but can also explain the context, so the translation is relevant to the implementation. That's a lot of work for bulk, but quite feasible for small "spot jobs."
As far as responding to reports of issues, that isn't always "black and white." For instance, I live in the US, and Spanish is basically a second US language. But it isn't just "Spanish." We have a dozen different variants, and proponents of each, can get very passionate about it.
For Spanish, I have learned to just use Castilian Spanish, most times. No one (except Spaniards) are completely happy, but it prevents too much bellyaching.
In some instances (like highly local sites), choosing a specific dialect may be advisable.
You verify by having a lot of friends, all over, who are true native speakers of languages. They usually aren't up for doing the translations, but are willing to vet the ones you do implement.
Localization is a huge topic, and maybe I'll write about it, sometime.
Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The secret is most employees in a 1000 person company don't need to be there or cover very niche cases that your company likely wouldn't have. That is massively wrong, and frankly an insulting worldview that a lot of people on HN seem to have. The secret is that some companies - usually ones focused on a single highly scalable technology product, and that don't need a large sales team for whatever reason - those co…
I have worked for many companies and the majority of them are not technically complex. They are drowning in tech debt from when they were in a high growth phase and many of the employees they have are due to needing to handle that debt but the product itself is technically very simple.
Which doesn't make my point wrong.
In many companies, tech, whether good or bad, is not the majority of the workforce, nor is it necessarily the "core competency" of the company, even if they are selling technical products! A much bigger deal is often their sales and marketing, their brand, etc.
Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
> you can get 80-90% of the way there in a minute or two with AI assistance. That just leaves the other 80-90% to do manually ;)
If you do it in prod, you can save a lot of time by just borking the database and hoping they don't have backups.
Remember to run the commands outside of a transaction to optimize two statements!