Comment on Exactly Six Months Ago, the CEO of Anthropic Said That in Six Months AI Would Be Writing 90 Percent of Code

• UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Would I be happy with new-hire code out of a $80K/yr headcount, did I have a choice?

  If I get that same code, faster, for 1% of the cost?

  The theory is that the new hire gets better over time as they learn the ins and outs of your business and your workplace style. And they’re commanding an $80k/year salary because they need to live in a country that demands an $80k/year cost of living, not because they’re generating $80k/year of value in a given pay period.

  Maybe you get code a bit faster and even a bit cheaper (for now - those teaser rates never last long term). But who is going to be reviewing it in another five or ten years? Your best people will keep moving to other companies or retiring. Your worst people will stick around slapping the AI feed bar and stuffing your codebase with janky nonsense fewer and fewer people will know how to fix.

  Long term, its a death sentence.

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  • Mniot@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    The theory is that the new hire gets better over time

    It always amazes me how few people get this. Have they only ever made terrible hires?

    The way that a company makes big profits is by hiring fresh graduates and giving them a cushy life while they grow into good SWEs. By the time you’re paying $200k for a senior software engineer, they’re generating far more than that in value. And you only had to invest a couple years and some chump change.

    But now businesses only think in the short-term and so paying $10k for a month of giving Anthropic access to our code base sounds like a bargain.

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  • MangoCats@feddit.it ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Agreed… however:

    The theory is that the new hire gets better over time as they learn the ins and outs of your business and your workplace style.

    The practice is that over half of them move on to “other opportunities” within a couple of years, even if you give them good salary, benefits and working conditions.

    And they’re commanding an $80k/year salary because they need to live in a country that demands an $80k/year cost of living

    Not in the US. In the US they’re commanding $80k/yr because of supply and demand, it has very little to do with cost of living. I suppose when you get supply so high / demand so low, you eventually hit a floor where cost of living comes into play, but in many high supply / low demand fields that doesn’t happen until $30k/yr or even lower… Case in point: starting salaries for engineers in the U.S. were around $30-40k/yr up until the .com boom, at which point software engineering capable college graduates ramped up to $70k/yr in less than a year, due to demand outstripping supply.

    stuffing your codebase with janky nonsense

    Our codebase had plenty of janky nonsense before AI came around. Just ask anyone: their code is great, but everyone else’s code is a bunch of janky nonsense. I actually have some hope that AI generated code may improve to a point where it becomes at least more intelligible to everyone than those other programmers’ janky nonsense. In the past few months I have actually seen Anthropic/Claude’s code output improve significantly toward this goal.

    Long term, its a death sentence.

    Definitely is, the pipeline should continue to be filled and dismissing seasoned talent is a mistake. However, I suspect everyone in the pipeline would benefit from learning to work with the new tools, at least the “new tools” in a year or so, the stuff I saw coming out of AI a year ago? Not really worthwhile at that time, but today it is showing promise - at least at the microservice level.

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    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      The practice is that over half of them move on to “other opportunities” within a couple of years, even if you give them good salary, benefits and working conditions.

      In my experience (coming from O&G IT) there’s a somewhat tight knit circle of contractors and businesses tied to specific applications. And you just cycle through this network over time.

      I’ve got a number of coworkers who are ex-contractors and a contractor lead who used to be my boss. We all work on the same software for the same company either directly or indirectly. You might move to command a higher salary, but you’re all leveraging the same accrued expertise.

      If you cut off that circuit of employment, the quality of the project will not improve over time.

      In the US they’re commanding $80k/yr because of supply and demand

      You’ll need to explain why all the overseas contractors are getting paid so much less, in that case.

      Again, we’re all working on the same projects for the same people with comparable skills. But I get paid 3x my Indian counterpart to be in the correct timezone and command enough fluent English language skills to deal with my bosses directly.

      Case in point: starting salaries for engineers in the U.S. were around $30-40k/yr up until the .com boom, at which point software engineering capable college graduates ramped up to $70k/yr in less than a year, due to demand outstripping supply.

      But then the boom busted and those salaries deflated down to the $50k range.

      I had coworkers who would pin for the Y2K era, when they were making $200k in the mid 90s to do remedial code clean up. But that was a very shortly lived phenomen. All that work would have been outsourced overseas in the modern day.

      Our codebase had plenty of janky nonsense before AI came around.

      Speeding up the rate of coding and volume of code makes that problem much worse.

      I’ve watched businesses lose clients - I even watched a client go bankrupt - from bad coding decisions.

      In the past few months I have actually seen Anthropic/Claude’s code output improve significantly toward this goal.

      If you can make it work, more power to you. But it’s a dangerous game I see a few other businesses executing without caution or comparable results.

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      • MangoCats@feddit.it ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        You’ll need to explain why all the overseas contractors are getting paid so much less, in that case.

        If you’re talking about India / China working for US firms, it’s supply and demand again. Indian and Chinese contractors provide a certain kind of value, while domestic US direct employees provide a different kind of value - as you say: ease of communication, time zone, etc. The Indians and Chinese have very high supply numbers, if they ask for more salary they’ll just be passed over for equivalent people who will do it for less. US software engineers with decades of experience are in shorter supply, and higher demand by many US firms, so…

        Of course there’s also a huge amount of inertia in the system, which I believe is a very good thing for stability.

        But then the boom busted and those salaries deflated down to the $50k range.

        And that was a very uneven thing, but yes: starting salaries on the open market did deflate after .com busted. Luckly, I was in a niche where most engineers were retained after the boom and inertia kept our salaries high.

        $200K for remedial code cleanup should be a transient phenomenon, when national median household income hovers around $50-60K. With good architecture and specification development, AI can do your remedial code cleanup now, but you need that architecture and specification skill…

        I’ve watched businesses lose clients - I even watched a client go bankrupt - from bad coding decisions.

        I interviewed with a shop in a University town that had a mean 6 month turnover rate for programmers, and they paid the fresh-out of school kids about 1/3 my previous salary. We were exploring the idea of me working for them for 1/2 my previous salary, basically until I found a better fit. Ultimately they decided not to hire me with the stated reason not being that my salary demands were too high, but that I’d just find something better and leave them. Well… my “find a new job in this town” period runs 3-6 months even when I have no job at all, how can you lose anything when you burn through new programmers every 6 months or less? I believe the real answer was that they were afraid I might break their culture, start retaining programmers and building up a sustained team like in the places I came from, and they were making plenty of money doing things the way they had been doing them for 10 years so far…

        it’s a dangerous game I see a few other businesses executing without caution or comparable results.

        From my perspective, I can do what needs doing without AI. Our whole team can, and nobody is downsizing us or demanding accelerated schedules. We are getting demands to keep the schedules the same while all kinds of new data privacy and cybersecurity documentation demands are being piled on top. We’re even getting teams in India who are allegedly helping us to fulfill those new demands, and I suppose when the paperwork in those areas is less than perfect we can “retrain” India instead of bringing the pain home here. Meanwhile, if AI can help to accelerate our normal work, there’s plenty of opportunity for exploratory development of new concepts that’s both more fun for the team and potentially profitable for the company. If AI turns out to be a bust, most engineers on this core team have been supporting similar products for 10-20 years… we handled it without AI before…

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• korazail@lemmy.myserv.one ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  That new hire might eat resources, but they actually learn from their mistakes and gain experience. If you can’t hold on to them once they have experience, that’s a you problem. Be more capitalist and compete for their supply of talent; if you are not willing to pay for the real human, then you can have a shitty AI that will never grow beyond a ‘new hire.’

  The future problem, though, is that without the experience of being a junior dev, where do you think senior devs come from? Can’t fix crappy code if all you know how to do is engineer prompts to a new hire.

  “For want of a nail,” no one knew how to do anything in 2030. Doctors were AI, Programmers were AI, Artists were AI, Teachers were AI, Students were AI, Politicians were AI. Humanity suffered and the world suffocated under the energy requirements of doing everything poorly.

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  • MangoCats@feddit.it ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    If you can’t hold on to them once they have experience, that’s a you problem.

    I work at a large multi-national corp with competitive salaries, benefits, excellent working conditions, advancement opportunities, etc. I still have watched promising junior engineers hit the door just when they were starting to be truly valuable contributors.

    you can have a shitty AI that will never grow beyond a ‘new hire.’

    So, my perspective on this is that : over the past 12 months, AI has advanced more quickly than all the interns and new hires I have worked with over the past 3 decades. It may plateau here in a few months, even if it does it’s already better than half of the 2 year experienced software engineers I have worked with, at least at writing code based on natural language specs provided to it.

    The future problem, though, is that without the experience of being a junior dev, where do you think senior devs come from?

    And I absolutely agree, the junior dev pipeline needs to stay full, because writing code is less than half of the job. Knowing what code needs writing is a huge part of it, crafting implementable and testable requirements, learning the business and what is important to the business, that has always been more than half of my job when I had the title “Software Engineer”.

    the world suffocated under the energy requirements of doing everything poorly.

    While I sympathize, the energy argument is a pretty big red herring. What’s the energy cost of a human software engineer? They have a home that has to be built, maintained, powered, etc. Same for their transportation which is often a privately owned automobile, driving on roads that have to be built and maintained. They have to eat, they need air conditioning, medical care, dental care, clothes, they have children who need to spend 20 years in school, they take vacations on cruise ships or involving trans-oceanic jet travel… add up all that energy and divide it by their productive output writing code for their work… if AI starts helping them write that code even 2x faster, the energy consumed by AI is going to be trivial compared to the energy consumed by the software engineer per unit of code produced, even if producing code is only 20% of their total job.

    I would say the same goes for Doctors, Teachers, Politicians, etc. AI is not going to replace 100% of any job, but it may be dramatically accelerating 30% or more of many of them, and that increase in productivity / efficiency / accuracy is going to pay off in terms of fewer ProfessionX required to meet demands and/or ProfessionX simply serving the world better than they used to.

    My sister in law was a medical transcriptionist - made good money, for a while. Then doctors replaced her with automatic transcriptionists, essentially the doctors quit outsourcing their typing work to humans and started trusting machines to do it for them. All in all, the doctors are actually doing more work now than they did before when they had human transcriptionists they could trust, because now they are have the AI transcription that they need to check more closely for mistakes than they did their human transcriptionists, but the cost differential is just too big to ignore. That’s a job that was “eliminated” by automation, at least 90% or more in the last 20 years. But, it was really a “doctor accessory” job, we still have doctors, even though they are using AI assistants now…

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• homura1650@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  New hires are often worse than useless. The effort that experienced developers spend assisting them is more than it would take those developers to do the work themselves.

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  • MangoCats@feddit.it ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Yes, this is the cost of training, and it is high, but also necessary if you are going to maintain a high level of capability in house.

    Management loves the idea of outsourcing, my experience of outsourcing is that the ultimate costs are far higher than in house training.

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