441–450 of 584 posts
AI is coming for jobs—but the real risk isn’t where most people are looking. The leading AI exposure indices (Anthropic, Eloundou et al.) focus on which jobs get automated. They treat low exposure as “safe.” But the least exposed workers—cooks, roofers, dishwashers, construction laborers—are often in the worst jobs: low pay, high physical toll, short career spans, and little upward mobility. Safe from AI, but not fro…
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having been an early employee and founder of a few startups and then working at a few larger companies, most people who only ever worked at FAANG have no idea how much more productive tiny teams with ownership are.
I have a theory that when you have 2 developers working in synergy, you're at something like 1.8x what 1 person can do. As you add more people you approach 2x until some point after which you start to decrease productive. I don't think that point is far beyond 5.
Brooks law “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later” is just the surface of some of the metaphorical language that has most stuck with me: large systems and teams quickening entanglement in tar pits through their struggle against coordination scaling pains, conceptual integrity in design akin to preserving architectural unity of Reims cathedral, roles and limitations attempting to expand surgical teams, etc.
Love a good metaphor, even when its foundation is overextended or out of date. Highly recommend.
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Or better yet, fire the managers or bean counters that think decreasing everyone’s productivity is good for long term savings. I’m reminded of https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...
Fire the middle management, HR, and etc that have been enthusiastically using AI to do their jobs for the past two or three years already. 90% of them can be replaced by an agent with access to an email account.
How much bloat and bureaucracy bottleneck is sitting in middle management whose favorite past time is wasting everyone's time on meetings that could have been an email? HR? Not the execs, but the HR drones that do nothing but answer employee questions about policy, could have already been replaced with not even an AI, just an old school chatbot, a long time ago.
Instead of cutting engineers, cut the non-tech jobs, flatten the structure.
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Amazes me that people pay 20k a month for a dev rather than paying 2k a month for one in Poland or 1k a month for one from India There’s obviously a benefit of paying higher rates for US programmers, but does that benefit change when llms are thrown into the mix
My experience with outsourcing over 20+ years (Russia, Romania, India, South America) is that you just move money around when you do it. It takes more planning, more specification, more coordination, more QA. The quality is almost always worse, and remediation takes forever. So your BA, QA and PM time goes way up and absorbs any cost savings. YMMV.
Look at GPT 5.4 and Opus, we’re clearly hitting diminishing returns already and these guys are pumping unsustainable amounts of money into them.
I’m bullish on AI, it’s been a net positive for me and my team. All I see here though is propaganda disguised as science to convince businesses to shrink their engineering budgets and redirect it to AI companies.
TL;DR: AI company says AI is amazing, more at 10.
People who are saying they're not seeing productivity boost, can you please share where is it failing? Because, I am terrified by the output I am getting while working on huge legacy codebases, it works. I described one of my workflow changes here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47271168 but in general compared to old way of working I am saving half of the steps consistently, whether its researching the codebas…
The companies laying off people have no vision. My company is a successful not for profit and we are hiring like crazy. It’s not a software company, but we have always effectively unlimited work. Why would anyone downsize because work is getting done faster? Just do more work, get more done, get better than the competition, get better at delivering your vision. We put profits back in the community and actually make l…
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The companies laying off people have no vision. My company is a successful not for profit and we are hiring like crazy. It’s not a software company, but we have always effectively unlimited work. Why would anyone downsize because work is getting done faster? Just do more work, get more done, get better than the competition, get better at delivering your vision. We put profits back in the community and actually make l…
That was my insight also. As a manager, you already have the headcount approved, and your people just allegedly got some significant percentage more productive. The first thought shouldn't be, great let's cut costs, it should be great now we finally have the bandwidth to deliver faster. On a macro level, if you were in a rising economic tide, you would still be hiring, and turning those productivity gains into more b…
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And you are paying for their tokens on top of their salary, right? Right?
"Bring your own tools" is not exactly novel in the workplace. Maybe so for office workers, but not more generally. Anyway, these particular tools are cheap enough that it hardly even matters who is expected to pay for them. The $20 a month tier in particular is a trivial expense, on par with businesses that expect their workers to wear steel toed shoes. Some may give workers a little stipend to buy those boots, some…
I don't do tech outside of 9-5, so either my employer pays for it all, or I don't use it. Simple as that. Thankfully, they do pay for it, but I couldn't imagine working somewhere that says "You need to use AI" and then not providing it on their dime.
Quite frankly it should be regulation that if a W2 employee needs something to perform their job duties, the employer must provide it.
I think experienced people move faster because they can evaluate the output and redirect it, less experienced people often struggle because they don’t yet know what “good” looks like.
The interesting long-term question is how companies rebuild the environments where that judgment gets developed in the first place.
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Because its failure rate is too high. Beyond boilerplate code and CRUD apps, if I let AI run freely on the projects I maintain, I spend more time fixing its changes than if I just did it myself. It hallucinates functionally, it designs itself into corners, it does not follow my instructions, it writes too much code for simple features. It’s fine at replacing what stack overflow did nearly a decade ago, but that isn’t…
It’s not that it just makes mistakes but it also implements things in ways I don’t like or are not relevant to the business requirements or scope of the feature / project. I end up replacing any saved time with QA and code review and I really don’t see how that’s going to change. In my mind I see Claude as a better search engine that understands code well enough to find answers and gain understanding faster. That’s a…