Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is it a bubble?

oaktreecapital.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 605 posts

Re: Is it a bubble?

#241

Post by keeda »

jimbokun wrote: post #165
johnfn wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Have you received a 5-10x pay increase? Does Amazon pay everyone who receives "Not meeting expectations" in their perf review 0 dollars? Did Meta pay John Carmack (or insert your favorite engineer here) 100x that of a normal engineer? Why do you think that would be?

I wouldn’t be surprised to find out Carmack was paid 100x more than the average engineer once equity from the acquisition of his company is taken into account. Does anyone know how much he made altogether from Meta?

The unfortunate reality of engineering is that we don't get paid proportional to the value we create, even the superstars. That's how tech companies make so much money, after all.

If you're climbing the exec ladder your pay will scale a little bit better, but again, not 100x or even 10x. Even the current AI researcher craze is for an extremely small number of people.

For some data points, check out levels.fyi and compare the ratio of TCs for a mid-level engineer/manager versus the topmost level (Distinguished SWE, VP etc.) for any given company.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#243

Post by hatthew »

skydhash wrote: post #189
mcv wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

World class? Then what am I? I frequently work with Copilot and Claude Sonnet, and it can be useful, but trusting it to write code for anything moderately complicated is a bad idea. I am impressed by its ability to generate and analyse code, but its code almost never works the first time, unless it's trivial boilerplate stuff, and its analysis is wrong half the time. It's very useful if you have the knowledge and exp…

> I frequently work with Copilot and Claude Sonnet, and it can be useful, but trusting it to write code for anything moderately complicated is a bad idea This sentence and the rest of the post reads like an horoscope advice. Like "It can be good if you use it well, it may be bad if you don't". It's pretty much the same as saying a coin may land on head or on tail.

saying "a coin may land on head or on tail" is useful when other people are saying "we will soon have coins that always land on heads"

Re: Is it a bubble?

#245

Post by venturecruelty »

kscarlet wrote: post #33
sp4cec0wb0y wrote: post #7

> In many advanced software teams, developers no longer write the code; they type in what they want, and AI systems generate the code for them. What a wild and speculative claim. Is there any source for this information?

The line right after this is much worse: > Coding performed by AI is at a world-class level, something that wasn’t so just a year ago. Wow, finance people certainly don't understand programming.

Of course not, why would they? They understand making money, and what makes money right now? What would be antithetical to making money? Why might we be doing one thing and not another? The lines are bright and red and flashing.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#246

Post by Illniyar »

sp4cec0wb0y wrote: post #7

> In many advanced software teams, developers no longer write the code; they type in what they want, and AI systems generate the code for them. What a wild and speculative claim. Is there any source for this information?

I think he might be misrepresenting it a bit, but from what I've seen every software company I know of heavily uses agentic AI to create code (except some highly regulated industries).

It has become a standard tool, in the same way that most developers code with an IDE, most developers use agentic AI to start a task (if not to finish it).

Re: Is it a bubble?

#247

Post by venturecruelty »

no_wizard wrote: post #201
sp4cec0wb0y wrote: post #7

> In many advanced software teams, developers no longer write the code; they type in what they want, and AI systems generate the code for them. What a wild and speculative claim. Is there any source for this information?

Here's the lede they buried: >The key is to not be one of the investors whose wealth is destroyed in the process of bringing on progress. They are a VC group. Financial folks. They are working largely with other people's money . They simply need not hold the bag to be successful. Of course they don't care if its a bubble or not, at the end of the day, they only have to make sure they aren't holding the bag when it al…

They have "capital" in their domain name. Of course they're going to be, well... on the side of capital. This shouldn't be hotly debated... "Mining company says mine they own is full of ore and totally not out of ore."

Re: Is it a bubble?

#248

Post by rfrey »

9rx wrote: post #147
whoknowsidont wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not. And if your team is doing this you're not "advanced." Lots of people are outing themselves these days about the complexity of their jobs, or lack thereof. Which is great! But it's not a +1 for AI, it's a -1 for them.

It's true for me. I type in what I want and then the AI system (compiler) generates the code. Doesn't everyone work that way?

I understand what you're getting at, but compilers are deterministic. AI isn't just another tool, or just a higher level of program specification.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#249

Post by 9rx »

wakawaka28 wrote: post #205
9rx wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not exactly wrong. Not since the advent of AI systems (a.k.a. compilers) have developers had to worry about code. Instead they type in what they want and the compiler generates the code for them. Well, except developers have never had to worry about code as even in the pre-compiler days coders, a different job done by a different person, were responsible for producing the code. Development has always been about…

Compilers are not AI, and code in high-level languages is still code in the proper sense. It is highly dishonest to call someone who is not a competent software engineer a "developer" even if their job consists entirely of telling actual software engineers or "coders" what to do.

> Compilers are not AI

They are if you define them as such. But there is already a silly semantic thread going on if that's what you are looking for.

> and code in high-level languages is still code in the proper sense.

Sure. As is natural language (e.g. criminal code).

> It is highly dishonest to call someone who is not a competent software engineer a "developer" even if their job consists entirely of telling actual software engineers or "coders" what to do.

Okay. But coders, as spoken of earlier, were not software engineers. They were human compilers. They took the higher level instructions written by the software engineers and translated that into machine code. Hence the name. Developer in the above referred to what you call software engineer. It seems your misinterpretation is down to thinking that software engineer and coder were intended to be the same person. That was not the intent. Once the job of coding went away it has become common to use those terms synonymously, but the above was clearly written about the past.

Again, if you're looking for a silly semantic discussion, there is already another thread for that.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#250

Post by stego-tech »

The memo itself is an excellent walk through historical bubbles, debt, financing, technological innovation, and much more, all written in a way that folks with a cursory knowledge of economics can reasonably follow along with.

A+, excellent writing.

The real meat is in the postscript though, because that's where the author puts to paper the very real (and very unaddressed) concerns around dwindling employment in a society where not only does it provide structure and challenge for growth, but is also fundamentally required for survival.

> I get no pleasure from this recitation. Will the optimists please explain why I’m wrong?

This is what I, and many other, smarter "AI Doomers" than myself have been asking for quite some time, that nobody has been able or willing to answer. We want to be wrong on this. We want to see what the Boosters and Evangelists allegedly see, we want to join you and bring about this utopia you keep braying about. Yet when we hold your feet to the fire, we get empty platitudes - "UBI", or "the government has to figure it out", or "everyone will be an entrepreneur", or some other hollow argument devoid of evidence or action. We point to AI companies and their billionaire owners blocking regulation while simultaneously screeching about how more regulation is needed, and are brushed off as hysterical or ill-informed.

I am fundamentally not opposed to a world where AI displaces the need for human labor. Hell, I know exactly what I'd do in such a world, and I think it's an excellent thought exercise for everyone to work through (what would you do if money and labor were no longer necessary for survival?). My concern - the concerns of so many, many of us - are that the current systems and incentives in place lead to the same outcome: no jobs, no money, and no future for the vast majority of humanity. The author sees that too, and they're way smarter than I am in the economics department.

I'd really, really love to see someone demonstrate to us how AI will solve these problems. The fact nobody can or will speaks volumes.

Post reply on HN