Comment by arrowleaf
17 hours ago
I'm a developer at a company who has signed contracts to use Claude. I wish I had a choice in model providers, especially considering I spend around $4k in API tokens each month, my company as a whole is around a million. I desperately wish I could use OpenAI models or open weights, Claude's writing style is definitely contributing to my sense of burnout.
I'd be burned out too if 48k of my comp went to what amounts to a facilities spend. Crazy. You think the models actually give you ROI, or this is a sort of jumping with the lemmings thing your company is doing, and you could probably deliver the same output working in "The Old Way" with another 48k on top your base?
My output is easily 2-3X what it was two years ago. With the introduction of Claude to everyone in the company (HR, finance, marketing, product, dev, etc), so came the expectations of what used to take 2 quarters can now be done in a couple sprints. I would be even more underwater working in "The Old Way" regardless of comp, with how deadlines are being set now. That being said, I don't know how long this will last, I'm not the only 'top talent' at the company facing warning signs of burnout.
Longterm, I believe my total output would be higher working with minimal AI when you consider the impact to motivation and how long I anticipate staying with the company.
>Longterm, I believe my total output would be higher working with minimal AI when you consider the impact to motivation and how long I anticipate staying with the company.
That makes sense. The increased theoretical output certainly makes it tempting to squeeze the developers for all they are and to keep testing how close deadlines can be made. But of course, to what end? A lot of dev work, probably most of it if we are being honest beyond building the initial product-market fit function, doesn't really impact sales at all, and sometimes too much can even hurt sales. And as you say you hit a point where this burns out your talent and makes them seek greener pastures.
Factory sort of thinking towards a job that is not really analogous to a factory anyhow. I'm not saying dev work is one of those 'bullshit jobs', but lets be honest about the job and its role in the business model. Your customers are probably going to be there all the same if you fix the bug today or next month, and you also won't get more customers fixing the bug today vs next month. Feature shipment might be a little different but even then it would take the right feature and the right customer for that one function to really drive the needle in sales compared to being lost in the changelog, and that isn't what a coding model solves for you after all.
That's not really how it works. I'm able to get 5-10x more work done, perhaps more, it's a significant accelerant to those that know how to be productive. The problem is more for those who don't - and we bring them up to speed or help them pivot to other work.
How does that shake out for your company? Are you growing 5-10x in sales? I'd guess not and that is sort of the rub with all this. Yes we can push more frequently to the git repo but that wasn't the limiting factor of scaling the business.
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