Superstar coders are raking it in. Others, not so much • Hacker News Board

Re: Superstar coders are raking it in. Others, not so much

#21

Post by rorylaitila » Wed, Jul 02, 2025, 6:35 PM UTC

kjkjadksj wrote: post #19

rorylaitila wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I agree with you. There is also a subtly incorrect belief people have that employees are just costs. Therefore increased efficiency = fire people = increased profits. The more accurate frame is that employees produce more value than their costs, so each employee is actually a profit producer. If you can increase their efficiency, then they produce more profit. Firing profit producers decreases your profit, not i…

It isn’t that simple because your profit upside is usually finite. Say you run a lemonade stand in a small town. Number of employees can’t really exceed some threshold set by the amount of lemonade customers a given day in that town. Even if the employee is the profit producer. It isn’t an infinite money machine and money has to be made available to seek.

Yeah that's correct, I mentioned "Of course any individual company may have other constraints that makes hiring additional people unviable". One such constraint would be the total market size.

Re: Superstar coders are raking it in. Others, not so much

#22

Post by _benton » Wed, Jul 02, 2025, 7:30 PM UTC

rorylaitila wrote: post #17

SilverBirch wrote: post #14

I'm incredibly skeptical of this idea that AI is creating such efficiencies that employers can hire fewer engineers. Firstly, there's the massive confounding factor of Covid, the stock market went crazy, companies went on crazy hiring sprees etc. and the tail of that bullwhip effect is clearly still putting downward pressure on hiring from organisations that overhired. But secondly, are we seriously saying that in th…

Yeah I agree with you. There is also a subtly incorrect belief people have that employees are just costs. Therefore increased efficiency = fire people = increased profits. The more accurate frame is that employees produce more value than their costs, so each employee is actually a profit producer. If you can increase their efficiency, then they produce more profit. Firing profit producers decreases your profit, not i…

I agree with you but I think at a certain point with large teams, the marginal benefit of hiring n+1 becomes negligible and then dips negative.

I've never worked for a company with thousands of devs but I imagine at a certain point the cost of simply collaborating and managing those devs becomes pretty high too.

Re: Superstar coders are raking it in. Others, not so much

#23

Post by rorylaitila » Wed, Jul 02, 2025, 7:52 PM UTC

_benton wrote: post #22

rorylaitila wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I agree with you. There is also a subtly incorrect belief people have that employees are just costs. Therefore increased efficiency = fire people = increased profits. The more accurate frame is that employees produce more value than their costs, so each employee is actually a profit producer. If you can increase their efficiency, then they produce more profit. Firing profit producers decreases your profit, not i…

I agree with you but I think at a certain point with large teams, the marginal benefit of hiring n+1 becomes negligible and then dips negative. I've never worked for a company with thousands of devs but I imagine at a certain point the cost of simply collaborating and managing those devs becomes pretty high too.

Yeah there are certainly diminishing returns. It's just that if they had N employees today, it's very unlikely they were at the top of their s-curve, such that N+1 employees is now net negative. Unless the business was already very mature. Most companies are expecting to grow revenue.

So it would be the exceptional case that firing employees because they were suddenly more productive makes sense.

What's more likely is they were already overhired and the new found "efficiency" is the excuse to resize.

Edit: btw this comes up IRL for me all the time in my work. Companies default play is to cut expenses to hit desired margin. It's much more beneficial in most cases to keep the team but increase their efficiency and handle more revenue. There are diminishing returns to profit by cutting back.

Re: Superstar coders are raking it in. Others, not so much

#24

Post by leoqa » Wed, Jul 02, 2025, 11:19 PM UTC

kjkjadksj wrote: post #20

leoqa wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Senior+ eng roles at Netflix, Stripe, Discord, Figma, Reddit

Those are all definitely not asking about writing little services in postgres on their job apps. That tier job posting today looks more like a post for a tenure track ML faculty position.

I’ve worked at half of these places and they’re all doing yaml massaging and grpc sculpting. Not much more than basic KTLO with some regularly scheduled feature work and reliability heroics.

Re: Superstar coders are raking it in. Others, not so much

#25

Post by Mars008 » Thu, Jul 03, 2025, 2:08 AM UTC

bgwalter wrote: post #3

The rest of us non-AI-whizzes combined literally wrote 100% of the functioning open source code that the AI-whizzes steal and transform to an inferior product using Rube Goldberg agent setups.

> The rest of us non-AI-whizzes combined literally wrote 100% of the functioning open source code that the AI-whizzes steal

Open source is hard to steal. It's intended to be taken for free with some license limitations. Second, most giants are already dead. Their work was used for free and that was/is considered normal. Third, many 'AI-whizzes' contributed to open source for long time.

In any case AI will be used on open source. For example to find bugs and backdoors at scale.

Re: Superstar coders are raking it in. Others, not so much

#26

Post by bgwalter » Thu, Jul 03, 2025, 11:19 AM UTC

Mars008 wrote: post #25

bgwalter wrote: post #3

The rest of us non-AI-whizzes combined literally wrote 100% of the functioning open source code that the AI-whizzes steal and transform to an inferior product using Rube Goldberg agent setups.

> The rest of us non-AI-whizzes combined literally wrote 100% of the functioning open source code that the AI-whizzes steal Open source is hard to steal. It's intended to be taken for free with some license limitations. Second, most giants are already dead. Their work was used for free and that was/is considered normal. Third, many 'AI-whizzes' contributed to open source for long time. In any case AI will be used on…

Even if AI-whizzes have contributed to open source for a long time, which I question, it does not give them the right to take everyone else's code. Neither does using "AI" on open source.

Moreover, many "AI" open source code bases are a mess and probably wouldn't even contribute in a positive manner to training.

Re: Superstar coders are raking it in. Others, not so much

#27

Post by kjkjadksj » Thu, Jul 03, 2025, 3:34 PM UTC

leoqa wrote: post #24

kjkjadksj wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are all definitely not asking about writing little services in postgres on their job apps. That tier job posting today looks more like a post for a tenure track ML faculty position.

I’ve worked at half of these places and they’re all doing yaml massaging and grpc sculpting. Not much more than basic KTLO with some regularly scheduled feature work and reliability heroics.

Well that is not what that tier job description is describing today at least. Maybe in the past or even still today if you got in early. Hard to imagine so much weight being put on ML knowledge and skills in the job app if it isn’t getting used in the role at all.