Yes-Anding you, if one developer is suddenly 3x more productive and does 40 hours of work in 15 with AI tools, any reasonable manager would still want the same three people to keep working at 3x productivity.
I don’t see Keynes’ theory we would all be working drastically fewer hours per week suddenly materializing due to AI. As always we’re just going to try to output more in the same time. The fact I, a manager, can “vibe code” some bugs away between meetings does not mean I will benefit from having one less dedicated engineer.
No because you have the customers and budget in that moment for three already and I’m not interjecting that more budget is given or any taken away.
Restated, I’m not saying we’re hiring more or less because of LLM AI productivity changes. I’m rejecting the idea we need less people for all the previous reasons stated and my own two cents that we’re yet to see the reduced work hours Keynesian economics predicted as output per hour increased. We humans just keep working the same hours even if that hour is massively more productive.
This last point is well studied and not my own original thought. I’m just poorly regurgitating college level Macro Economics.
My own point I’ll add here is we’re not seeing companies bragging about their two day work weeks.
My personal experience with layoffs is that it’s all been financial engineering and the lack of nearly free financing that we had in the 2010s, again in the Pandemic, CapEx tax changes last year, and/or over hiring similar to but not nearly as massive as Google and Facebook. I worked for a European company that hired a dozen Americans to become more “US Tech Company” like and eventually let us all go two years ago once the fun money ran out when rates increased. They did a little bit of the AI babbling but realistically they couldn’t get the financing to keep it all rolling.
The companies reducing to one developer for a product are likely not doing this because of LLM AI work but likely will survive better because of it.
To your point, I’m actually living it and it’s nothing to do with AI. One of my teams was cut to 25% of its size a year ago and the whole QA team let go. Roughly this was an EBITA play. Basically the only way we get anything done is by doing what I mentioned in my earlier post where the front end dev uses LLMs to build a prototype backend they can use to support their front end expertise and the back end dev does the same for the front end. Eventually they meet in the middle and I can juggle some of the KTLO myself. Is this fun? Absolutely not. If we had the headcount back we’d be able to meet the ‘25-26 roadmap but instead we’re doing 40% of it.
Budget is based on revenue, though, at least in broad terms. If you thought you could triple your revenue by hiring a few extra programmers, you would, even if it meant raising money somehow.
I doubt you will ever see two day work weeks. Instead of cutting hours it makes a lot more sense for companies to cut people and have the remaining employees work full time. Or more. There are a lot of fixed costs for each employee, and most people would rather make more money than work less.
I worked at a company which, faced with slow period, reduced everyone's pay by 20% and switched to a 32 hour work week instead of cutting people. Most of my colleagues were bitter about it and a few even quit. Personally I was happy, but I was in a small minority.
Sorry to hear about your rocky employment experience. I feel like that's getting to be the norm these days.
You have to account that expectations are set in part owing to bottlenecks, not just limits to desire/needs. Consumer expectations will adapt to the ability to improved productivity.
On the multimedia consumption (tv/film/music/games) side it seems like we are approaching a saturation point (between time sunk and desire to do so), but for business applications I don't see this being the case. Things sometimes move at a glacial pace.
Uber needs to prove that they are growing though to validate their stock value, one of the tricks used to be increasing headcount to show growth.
But other tricks include new ventures, essentially public companies and VC companies have an almost unlimited appetite for new ventures, as that is how they keep validating their future growth and stock prices.
Currently financial realities are forcing layoffs, and the AI story is covering for the "growth" validation to keep stock prices going up.
But what's next? After you've fired everyone, what's the next growth story? They'll start hiring again, for new projects, even if AI can handle the coding there is still gobs of work surrounding building a software business or department that needs meat moving it forward.
The end of ZIRP (cheap money) is precisely what ended the new-ventures/new-projects drive among big companies and turned them all to cost-cutting and maintenance mode.
0, yes you will. Or at least most would unless piblic transit were a genuinely better way to get around. But it won’t be zero as it’s bounded by the base cost of operating the vehicle.
Lowering the cost of travel to 0 would mean implementing a technology by which anyone can simply desire to be somewhere else, and they will instantly teleport to that new location.
returnInfinity is simply lying about not doing double (or more!) the amount of travel in that case.
I’m sure that he/she would ride a lot more if it cost nothing, but I think the point is valid: even if Uber could 10x or 100x productivity, they could not do the same with income, because there is a limit to how much people actually need to go places.
That’s true but fully autonomous driving alone might double my car travel. Going into the nearest major city is a pain. So is driving into the mountains. Operating costs and time are still costs. But not having to drive would really change the game for me.
Who said anything about instantly teleporting? Uber could cut the cost in money to 0 but still operate cars which are bound by the laws of physics and the rules of the road.
Maybe returnInfinity already spends 12 hours a day in Ubers, or otherwise has them satisfy all his transportation needs, and couldn't usefully double his usage of them.
It's impossible for them to cut the cost to 0 (without using magic), but that doesn't make it impossible for us to talk about what the cost being 0 would involve. Travel time is one of the costs you pay for Uber's service. That you don't pay it to Uber doesn't matter. If Uber reduced that cost to 0, you would use Uber a lot more.
The concern isn't that a dev sees 3x. Rather that at some point devs become a pointless middleman in the workflow. If the manager/PM can just tell the computer what they want, why do they need the dev in the middle to do it for them?
Will we ever achieve that world? Who knows. We've heard these promises before, with things like COBOL and 4GLs. Yet we're still here coding.
PET Scans feature areas with blood flow so tumors show up as hot spots for follow up. People who are maybe only feeling off or had one confirmed tumor can have a lot of small tumors spread across their body which will show up clearly on a PET scan.
When my brother was at the end of his run fighting cancer he felt a bit under the weather and managed to catch covid so everyone figured he was feeling bad due to that. The PET scan showed he had thousands of small masses converging into the large mass that eventually killed him by cutting off blood flow to his kidneys. His cancer was an aggressive blood cancer that had stood up to conventional and Trial Chemo drugs. There was no way to treat this but other cancers that are less aggressive can be treated at this point and would be treated differently than a single mass.
In a nutshell it’s that level of visibility that makes PET scans worth it.
A Toyota Corolla starts at $23K. I think the "Under 20" and "Under 30" price points (a la the original Model 3 goal) are simply a thing of the past for any volume car with reasonable demand.
What you get for that $23k is now quite substantial though.
Power windows are standard. 169hp. Automatic climate control, central locking and key fobs, Automatic emergency braking and other radar based features. Digital gauge cluster. Modern infotainment. Modern crash safety, which is really good compared to 20 years ago.
That's a lot of car for $10k in 1996 dollars.
That's ignoring the $3k in fees, taxes, and whatever scam the dealer runs.
The reason we don't see more of it is that selling one $23k Corolla to one value minded shopper can't make line go up as much as selling one $60k MEGATRUCK to one easily influenced shopper. The new car market is exclusively for people who buy new cars regularly, and are therefore willing to get very bad deals for cars. The market is driven by people who self select for bad ability to parse value.
Yup. The expectations are set higher and to a point since cars are bigger for safety reasons (crumple zones, airbags) and have more pedestrian safety features like spring loaded hoods, it invited incremental additions until the new price points were set. A spartan 19K car isn’t going to sell as well as a CarPlay equipped 23K car.
The same plugin spec runs across several browsers and Edge is now chrome based. It’s likely just hard coded defaults that seem a little silly when used on the target browser it pretends to be.
One thing that really hurt them from my PoV was how they acted when they changed their licensing structure with respect to revenue generating companies. I’m fine with the idea that licensing Docker and Docker Desktop is a good thing to do. However, I think they just made people distrust their motives with their approached to this.
At two places I worked their reps reached out to essentially ensnare the company in a sort of “gotcha” scheme where if we were running the version of Docker Desktop after the commercial licensing requirement change, they sent a 30 day notice to license the product or they’d sue. Due to the usual “mid size software company not micromanaging the developers” standard, we had a few people on a new enough version that it would trigger the new license terms and we were in violation. They didn’t seem to do much outreach other than threatening us.
So in each case we switched to Rancher Desktop.
The licensing cost wasn’t that high, but it was hard to take them in good faith after their approach.
Same here. The rug pull was not received well by our teams. The messaging was terrible. Some still joke it was a like a stick up. "Pulling a docker" has now become internal slang for firms that let you use/build for years and then ransom you later. We pivoted just after too. They also tagged my personal accounts which had nothing to do with my day job.
They basically made the case for podman existing, and I see podman gaining steam and being easier and easier to drop in as a replacement for Docker.
If they never changed that licensing, nobody would have had an incentive to put big effort into an alternative.
I think the hosted Docker registry should have been their first revenue source and then they should have created more closed source enterprise workflow solutions and hosted services that complement the docker tooling that remained truly open source, including desktop.
> if we were running the version of Docker Desktop after the commercial licensing requirement change, they sent a 30 day notice to license the product or they’d sue.
What exactly are you objecting to? Since you say “I’m fine with the idea that licensing Docker and Docker Desktop is a good thing to do” it’s not the change, so what is it? The 30 days, them saying they would sue after that, or the tone?
I haven’t seen the messages so I cannot comment on that, but if you accept that the licensing can be changed, whats wrong with writing offenders to remind them to either stop using the product or start paying? And what’s wrong with giving them 30 days, since, in my memory, they announced the licensing change months in advance?
It's rude behavior, and generally not a good way to start a business relationship.
It reminds me of someone handing me something on the street then asking me to pay for it, whenever they do that I just throw whatever it is as far as I can and keep walking.
I don’t object to licensing software. It’s the way they went about it. Individual EMs and ICs being targeted and intimidated vs going through a procurement/legal channel. The companies I’ve worked for have staff lawyers for a reason. If they have a legal objection they should take it up with them. Not someone trying to work through a React bug.
I believe you’re using royal-you but just to be clear I didn’t run these companies.
At one place there wasn’t and at the other it wasn’t well managed. I agree from a compliance point of view and have advocated for this but I was not on the IT/Ops side of the business so I could only use soft power.
The CTO at the first company had a “zero hindrances for the developers” mindset and the latter was reeling from being the merger of five different companies. The latter did a better job of trying to say the least but wasn’t great about it. Outcome was the same none the less.
I mainly consult but we have a few managed clients that are dev houses too. We do their employee onboarding, wrangle their licensing, keep them updated, give them a self service storefront for commercial software that they pay for, add SSO integrations for them etc. Basically they wanted to do NoOps but also didnt want to have to procure or configure their equipment.
But outside of 'make sure the oracle lawyers never contact us' they dont want us policing them and they are admins on their own devices. For a lot of businesses their computer network has separate production and business zones and the production zone is a YOLO type situation.
Amazon has device management but still allows developers to install software via `brew`. Windows is slightly more locked down in that user's don't have admin by default, but there's a very low bar to clear to get it temporarily.
Brew also has workbrew which gives the admin control of the repository. There's also JAMF on macos. None of these systems must give developers free reign to violate software licenses.
At my midsize company, our engineers could absolutely say something like “we don’t like Terraform Cloud, we want to switch to OpenTofu and env0” and our management would be okay with it and make it happen as long as we justify the change.
We wouldn’t even really have to ask permission if the change was no cost.
I think OPs point is they failed on this part. "Making it happen" should have been ensuring a compliant and approved version of the software was the one made available to the developers.
At a large scale that is done via device management, but even at a medium sized enterprise that should have been done via a source management portal of some sort.
Yup, exactly that. The situation shouldn’t have even happened in the first place but sometimes that’s just how it goes.
I’ve consulted at some places that should have been licensing Dicker Desktop and I just skipped the workflow headaches and used Rancher from the start with the compatibility aliases installed. A lot of places are simply unaware.
I got a chuckle out of that for my own reasons as a long time Mac user as “Mac OS X is Unix” was the brand back in the 10.0-10.3 days, to the point I believe they got a Unix certification by someone, and then again with macOS 15 they got an Open Group UNIX certification.
Funnily enough, they had no certification and weren’t compliant in 10.0-10.3 days, so what they were doing was trademark infringement, hence the lawsuit from the Open Group. 10.4 was the first compliant version. And oh boy they really milked it for several years afterwards.
Sure, but they did so by going to the Teensy forum, which is not a SparkFun site, and really made a stink. If going public is reasonable, they did it in the least reasonable way.
That’s not what I’m seeing.
They requested comments from the public about the product, only mentioning that the fact that they weren’t allowed to purchase more from Sparkfun [0]. Sparkfun then jumped into the discussion with accusations of a Code of Conduct violation, and only then did they respond publicly. Sparkfun made it public first in that 3rd party forum.
If you have the freedom to buy from Best Buy, Amazon, etc, this is certainly the case.
However, depending on how you procure this hasn’t been the experience for over 20 years. By the time you’re done with CDW or whomever is your VAR, you’re not comparing a $600 basic PC laptop to a $1200 basic Mac Laptop. They know you’re like the GP and going to pay $1500 minimum and are probably game for $2000. They sell the “Business” line with whatever terms added.
When I did this in K12 in the late 00s the price for a truly terrible Dell or IBM/Lenovo was the same as an iMac.
For the corporate world there have been times you couldn’t get Virtualization support, hardware dock ports, and various other bits of support until you moved to buying the “Business” line and after a certain number of units the direct to retail options send you down the VAR path. There’s simply too much money involved for them to make it easier for you.
I have not had to deal with this as a buyer since 2019 but the song seems to be the same as I work for a company that sells through CDW. Per the reps, the same stupid games are being played.
The only times I haven’t had to deal with this is when the companies I’ve worked for just hand you a credit card to walk down to the Apple Store or are using Apple’s program which is basically the same thing but comes with a shared App Store account and some better support for swap outs.
You get to make your own health choices here, but as someone who got the vaccine in my 30s, I am glad as I didn’t know about my future divorce when I got vaccinated.
Consider that it's possible that the person's partner may have exposed them to their then-unknown extra partners, creating one of the conditions for the divorce.
There are other STDs that you'd still be at risk of getting/giving in the case of infidelity, so getting this one vaccine doesn't actually make things all good. I imagine for some people, the thought of possibly bringing home a disease would actually be a sufficient deterrent to prevent infidelity. Not just because they wouldn't want to infect their partner, but because they know it could lead to them getting caught.
I'll elaborate: if you are worried about being unfaithful, or your spouse being unfaithful, then protecting yourself against one STD might seem like a good idea. And if the risk of unfaithfulness is very high, then it is better to mitigate one STD rather than none.
But the fact remains that you are still at risk of many other STDs, so you can still bring home (or have brought home) plenty of other diseases.
The last point, which I knew some people here would dislike, is that the possibility of HPV transmission could, on the margin, discourage some people from being unfaithful. This is because it would be a telltale sign of infidelity, and would cause the spouse to investigate.
Granted, this is only the case where the spouse knew he/she did not have HPV before (mostly people who remained celibate before marriage). If you had many partners before marriage, this advice probably doesn't resonate, but for people who did it makes perfect sense. It acknowledges the risk of infidelity and creates additional accountability by not shielding one's self from a likely telltale sign.
Think about your future health while your mind is clear. After the trauma of divorce is not the time.
Also, I think these questions are in bad faith.
It is actually hard to get people to change any behavior. The public health benefits should be a primary concern. Avoid vaccination if there is a downside to you personally, but that isn’t what I’m hearing from your comments.
Exactly this. When I was in my best shape my deadlift and squat were in/on the way to 2.5-3x my body weight. You don’t want to fail that without a lot of help and safeties.
Note for the uninitiated: That figure is not even impressive or competitive with competition lifters. This is just “guy who put in the time and work” numbers.
Yeah I was doing fine for the usual people going to the gym. I’d be last in a competition. I’m neither on steroids or an elite natural athlete. My point isn’t to say I’m weak, only that I’m not unusual for someone who went to the gym 5x per week and had a personal trainer/coach.
I don’t see Keynes’ theory we would all be working drastically fewer hours per week suddenly materializing due to AI. As always we’re just going to try to output more in the same time. The fact I, a manager, can “vibe code” some bugs away between meetings does not mean I will benefit from having one less dedicated engineer.