Comment by SimianSci
18 hours ago
I think there is alot of baseless fury behind your words, but my regular interactions with my leadership dont lead me to think they have the end goal of replacing labor. We're blessed to have leadership with technical backgrounds, so the tools are regarded more as significant intelligence enhancers of already exceptionally smart engineers, rather than replacements.
Doesnt seem to us to be wheelbarrows of money, when you consider the average AWS/Azure bill.
Not ever hiring juniors and eventually mids is just replacing labor with extra steps.
Throwing bodies at a problem doesn't always scale. There are many difficult problems that do not get easier by throwing more juniors or mid level engineers at them.
Having just worked my behind off for the last months to deliver on an impossible deadline, successfully: more bodies definitely would have helped.
Even just to keep the fluff off my back and to allow me to fully concentrate on what's important.
The situation will repeat itself in 6 months and I'm not going to do that again. Hiring now would fix that.
I think the message you responded to already refuted your point of view.
Huh? Your other comment explicitly said you were replacing labor: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47939146
> the increases that we have seen suggest a better ROI than if we had hired 12 developers.
You can’t argue “we were able to get away with not hiring more developers” and also say you aren’t replacing labor.
Morally I trend towards your side of things, but it’s also important to be realistic about what you’re actually doing. Money is going towards Anthropic and not towards new hires. That’s a replacement of labor. It doesn’t matter what the end goal was.
> I think there is alot of baseless fury behind your words,
Hardly baseless when people have been gloating about how programming as a job is ending any day now for the last year at least.
> Doesnt seem to us to be wheelbarrows of money, when you consider the average AWS/Azure bill.
You didn’t mention the size of the company so yeah.
“Baseless fury”
I’m glad your leadership isn’t trying to fire everyone. But in case you live under a rock, tech layoffs are at all time highs. Companies are rewarded by the public markets for laying off workers.
Simultaneously we have AI industry leaders warning of an employment apocalypse once AGI is achieved.
And you think it’s baseless. Have some class bro.