AI can also do the work of 500 Grindr CEOs.
Grindr CEO Says AI Is Doing the Work of 200 Engineers
21–30 of 31 posts
Re: Grindr CEO Says AI Is Doing the Work of 200 Engineers
#22Only takes 300 data centres worth of compute.
Re: Grindr CEO Says AI Is Doing the Work of 200 Engineers
#23Software developers are famous for lamenting the high time preferences of business forcing them to make poor engineering decisions. The dynamic is common. Therefore one should not expect higher quality out of many businesses using AI, but you should certainly expect such businesses to highly value AI. The arguments in favor of quality didn't seem to work before, I don't think they will now.
Yep. If your bosses don't care about the quality of the product then there's no reason for you to care either. Make the AI vibe code slop and ship it. That is what the people signing your paychecks actually want you to do.
Re: Grindr CEO Says AI Is Doing the Work of 200 Engineers
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Charles Simonyi Has that story about how a PM began publicly calling out engineering productivity by having them report weekly lines of code, and Simony one week put a negative number in for his line count. The PM stopped doing that afterward.
Related story about Bill Atkinson at Apple, reporting -2000 lines of code, at https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html . Perhaps that's the one you are thinking of? It's certainly likely that it happened more than once, but I've not heard a similar one for Simonyi.
I heard this directly from someone who worked with simonyi back then, although she could have been making it up.
Re: Grindr CEO Says AI Is Doing the Work of 200 Engineers
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Related story about Bill Atkinson at Apple, reporting -2000 lines of code, at https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html . Perhaps that's the one you are thinking of? It's certainly likely that it happened more than once, but I've not heard a similar one for Simonyi.
I heard this directly from someone who worked with simonyi back then, although she could have been making it up.
Alternatively, since Simonyi was at PARC, just up the road from Apple, he may have known the story and shared it, which got re-attributed, as happens in the game of telephone.
Re: Grindr CEO Says AI Is Doing the Work of 200 Engineers
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
I heard this directly from someone who worked with simonyi back then, although she could have been making it up.
Alternatively, since Simonyi was at PARC, just up the road from Apple, he may have known the story and shared it, which got re-attributed, as happens in the game of telephone.
The story was from the time he was working on Microsoft Office, so after Parc in the early or mid 80s. I was actually just surprised someone who worked at Microsoft back then was still at Microsoft (I heard the story in 2009).
Re: Grindr CEO Says AI Is Doing the Work of 200 Engineers
#27No way Grindr needs 200 engineers.
Especially considering the quality of the app and how long bugs last.
Re: Grindr CEO Says AI Is Doing the Work of 200 Engineers
#28And what do Grindr engineers think of that?
Re: Grindr CEO Says AI Is Doing the Work of 200 Engineers
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Alternatively, since Simonyi was at PARC, just up the road from Apple, he may have known the story and shared it, which got re-attributed, as happens in the game of telephone.
The story was from the time he was working on Microsoft Office, so after Parc in the early or mid 80s. I was actually just surprised someone who worked at Microsoft back then was still at Microsoft (I heard the story in 2009).
I'm having a tough time making the few pieces I know fit together.
When Simonyi started at Microsoft there were only 40 employees. He was the head of the then-new applications group, which I normally don't think of as being a programming job, nor one where LoC is all that relevant.
(That's not to say he wouldn't have written any code. The book "Showstopper! The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft" mentions that Cutler, the head of the NT project, wrote some of the code, but not much. And Simonyi, like Cutler, was an expert software developer.)
Wouldn't any PM for Word and Multiplan/Excel be under Simonyi? As the head, he could surely say "no" to the request, and even tell the PM to stop gathering that information, right?
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, Simonyi developed the "meta-programming" software production method in his PhD, which he brought to Microsoft. The meta-programmer does all the design work and architectural decisions, which the programmers then code up. If they get stuck, they take the problem back to the meta-programmer.
The meta-programmer doesn't actually write lines of code, or at least those LoC are much less than what the underlying programmers write, making that measurement even less relevant for someone like Simonyi who, of course, would be a meta-programmer.
Re: Grindr CEO Says AI Is Doing the Work of 200 Engineers
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
The story was from the time he was working on Microsoft Office, so after Parc in the early or mid 80s. I was actually just surprised someone who worked at Microsoft back then was still at Microsoft (I heard the story in 2009).
I'm having a tough time making the few pieces I know fit together. When Simonyi started at Microsoft there were only 40 employees. He was the head of the then-new applications group, which I normally don't think of as being a programming job, nor one where LoC is all that relevant. (That's not to say he wouldn't have written any code. The book "Showstopper! The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generat…
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