It’s been like that for a while, economic gains went to a small fraction of people, before software developers were among those that were on the winning side, now they’re on the losing side. Think about how much the US economy is growing right now and who really profits from that growth. My guess is that 90 % of the growth goes to 10 % of people, with AI maybe 99 % might go to the 1 %. Or who do you think will gain from the tokenization of development? You’re just supposed to be more productive and the gains the company achieves will just go to the owners as they are in a great position right now and developers are scared shitless to get fired, so no one is increasing salaries or time off, instead most companies hang the threat of layoffs over people’s head to keep them in line. And the funny thing is we developers did this to ourselves, by doing free open source work for the greater good, which now feeds AI models that are replacing many of us. But I guess most people didn’t care as they made good money while it lasted.

> But we should be seriously asking in our next all hands meetings if 10x’ing our productivity can get us some days off.

Pretty sure if you ask this that they'll give you all your days off.

One possibility is once AI becomes profitable and wildly successful, and we all lose our jobs, we vote to nationalize the AI companies, and send some good vibes (but no money) to the VCs who paid for it, and remember that the AI was only built by breaking copyright law at an industrial scale and so it's fair to nationalize it.

I think it’s pretty naive to ask your employer for a day off. As experienced by companies, the market is more competitive than ever. Whoever slows down will get eaten by some hungry upstart that is willing to work 996 to eat the incumbent’s lunch. It’s a Prisoner’s Dilemma.

The only way to get this outcome is to coordinate at a level higher than individual market participants.

In other words, get your government to implement UBI - tax all companies (or if AI really takes off, just compute) and redistribute to the people.

The reality is that most people are paid for their time, not for their output. I think most contracts for salaried employees are along the lines of "work n hours a week". If you want to get paid for output, you can't be a salaried employee.

Right, the AI companies don’t even try to pretend it’s good for the average person.

The message could be “we’ll all do more by working less.” Instead it’s, “some people will lose their jobs while everyone else works the same amount or more”

I think the feeling is if we want to even keep our current footing in the market we have to increase productivity by 10x because everyone else is as well.

And if everyone else is, the productivity floor is raised but every other competitor has done the same so we don't have 10x the economic output, maybe only a marginal increase. If that is true, then there will be no days off because we have just reset the status quo.

edit: spelling

When your labor force makes gains in productivity you can choose to do one of two things:

1. Reduce working hours 2. Grow the economy

Guess which option was last picked in 1868 and never again despite massive gains in productivity?

Meanwhile my employer still has not given us any AI tooling. I build more things for personal use and for niche hobbies that are more refined, polished and documented than most employers have ever given me in terms of project requirements. Everyone keeps saying the bottleneck was not how fast you can write the code. I believe the bottleneck is two-fold: coding without architecting and no solid business requirements.

I do agree though, give me AI tooling, and I will build you cities, but pay me to match it.

You got into a contract. This contract specified what you will do and usually for how long. Unless this contract specified you need to get X done, I don’t see any way you can argue for this in any way that makes sense.

_Nothing_ I do that benefits my employer directly benefits me. AI or not. That was the whole idea of the relationship: I show up, perform some type of labor and am shielded from the bullshit of doing business (to some tolerable extend). The employer in turn forks over hard cash. The exact, same F amount every month and on time, no discussions about it.

If your actions directly or indirectly caused a loss to the business do you give up free days or pay? I don’t think you should. This works both ways.

However, that’s on the level of the individual. If you’re saying we should unionize, then, hell yes.

Computers and the Internet ushered in huge productivity gains. Despite many people losing their jobs as a result, it's tough to argue society isn't better off.

I think that's the key difference with AI, though. It's not like I'm losing my job, but at least I have a robot at home that cleans the house and does my laundry. People are having their livelihoods threatened while their utility bills go up because of datacenters, and the only substantive impact in their personal lives is that now they have to deal with chatbots and low effort automated customer service agents even more.

I'm OK with accepting a job that pays 10x less if the efficiencies from AI mean we're all living in abundance and life is >10x cheaper. But it's unclear if/when we'll move beyond marginal business impact, aside from in software development, I suppose.

Same answer as for most hope-filled employee questions sadly:

You get to keep your job. You agreed to accept X pay for 40 hours, do it or we'll find someone else who will.

> Or when our paycheck is going to be multiplied accordingly.

And when/if it doesn't, unionize. I know the HN crowd historically hasn't looked favorably on Unions, but times are changing. It's long past time for unions in tech. We've fared well individually for a long time, but that time is coming to an end.

I think it's a fair question to ask ourselves.

But it's worth noting how leisure hours have been allocated after the invention of the 5 hour work week: we've reduced working hours at the end of life (longer retirements), start of life (longer education), and some amount of people simply do not work.

There hasn't been a reduction in hours during peak earning potential because many jobs are competitive, because firms are in competition with each other.

Maybe some companies will start doing 4 day work weeks because they find that productivity doesn't actually increase from 4 to 5 days and then start outcompeting other companies for talent. But unless 5 days is actually not more productive than 4 days, we're going to have the most competitive organizations continue to be 5 days a week.

> 10x’ing our productivity

Normalizing this "10x" language (well before AI) is a factor in this problem.

It's been so loosely and casually thrown about in this industry. 10x engineer... 10x mindset... 10x growth... 10x this... 10x that...

All paraded around by people who fancied themselves to be their own version of 10x whatever.

Well, keep parroting this long enough, and it's just a matter of time before people not only believe it to be commonplace, but they start to expect and demand it.

So now we have AI as the next thing foisted upon us to force everyone to be 10x or die trying.

Should've just settled for being 3.14x engineers like reasonable people.

If workers got time off relative to the productivity gains achieved of the past fifty years and considering the comparatively stagnant wages over that time period, we’d only be working 2 to 3 days a week, tops.

The author might be being playful, but an increasing amount of folks at or past their breaking points definitely aren’t.

It won't get you days off because you (rather, your employer) will fall behind those who didn't opt to take days off.

You'd only get days off if it was only you who got a 10x increase. But it's everybody. So it's status quo: technology advances, and you have to keep up if you want to stay in the industry.

> We’re being asked to usher in huge productivity gains by introducing AI to our workflows, but we’re not asking how does it help us? Not a lot of us stand to directly gain from our employers becoming more productive.

How much money do you think the average developer would be making if we all were using punchcards instead of typing? Inputting machine code instead of using a compiler?

Every time we increase our productivity, we can build bigger and better things for the same amount of effort. This makes us more valuable than before. Our output grows and the world’s appetite for software grows with it.

This has been true for the entire history of the software industry and it’s the reason why developers are very well paid. You may not see it at the individual level, but we are reaping the rewards of increased productivity at the macro level.

The question is are we more like farm workers who will be unemployed because of the farm or accountants who become much more valuable and high paid because of the spreadsheet?

And I am grateful for not working on a farm, it’s hard work!

You are not the 10x factor and can't use it to increase your wage. If you leave the next person is a 10x factor because of ai. Now if AI providers all increased prices they could get a raise.

I think equity compensation should be normalized (or ideally allow employees to choose the % of their compensation is equity vs. cash) so every employee can partake in the upside of the company.

This is why we need to be unionizing en masse.

There have been movements toward this in the US, but particularly in the tech sector, far too many people are still stuffed full of decades of anti-union propaganda (like the idea that the union is a "third party" rather than being the workers themselves, or that it would bring down their salary because they're such a special awesome 10x developer and 10x negotiator).

The executive class has taken roughly all the productivity increases since 1980 and slid them straight into their bulging pockets, at our expense. The only way we get any of that back, or prevent them from taking this new increase from us too, is to stand together against them.

Working out why the workweek is 5 days, non-negotiably, even if you'd be willing to be paid less in proportion, comes down to realizing that it's being maximized subject to the constraint that everybody would flip out if it was 6, and then working out why it's being maximized.

What it's telling you is that a company would rather have 4 people working 5 days a week than 5 people working 4 days a week. The reason for that is, productivity drops a lot when it's spread out over multiple people. The reason behind that is communication overhead - the more context an individual carries in their heads, the less likely their role will exist on an hourly basis in the industry.

So, if anyone wants AI to give us another day off, we need to think about how it can reduce the cost of "context switching" a whole person on and off a task, without simultaneously formalizing our roles so much that it gives us all five. ;-)

I will be automating the things that annoy me so I can spend time on the things I like.

just don't call it organized labor.

> productivity can get us some days off.

Days off might be a challenging ask as the AI needs feedback more often than that. Working sporadically throughout the day, able to do what you please between the AI asking questions, is realistic. We're already there, frankly.

While I agree with the playful sentiment of the post, this isn't what happened for factory workers as their work has been augmented by automation. Ford makes twice as many vehicles per worker in 2025 than they did in 1960. Did the auto workers get 20-hour work weeks? Nope.

I have to ask myself why we think us white collar knowledge workers are so special? Even if I do dream of a time where automation leads all of us to a 3-4 day work week.

> We’re being asked to usher in huge productivity gains by introducing AI to our workflows, but we’re not asking how does it help us?

More flour more water. More water more flour.

> Or when our paycheck is going to be multiplied accordingly.

That doesn't increase shareholder value, so it would be a violation of the c-suite's fiduciary responsibility. Sorry, the extra capital will instead be used on stock buybacks.

I think people should use AI to start their own business instead of working for someone else's vision. I mean if you're working for someone else your choices are limited. And I'm not saying that you should be mistreated. I'm just saying you have more control of your life when you're working for yourself.

Tech workers _are_ a bunch of chumps. Temporarily embarrassed billionaire startup founders. The vehicle for this is a union, and tech workers abjectly refuse to unionise.

Right. If I am producing 10x more output then I expect to be getting paid about 8x more or working 8x less.

Benefits from productivity gains only go to shareholders gp, it’s the foundational principle that underpins the whole world economy :-D

10x productivity with layoffs to compensate. throw in more AI slop causing more outages and you’re working more than before

I mean productivity gains don't usually go towards making the workers life any better. Also I'm still less than convinced there are any net productivity gains from AI anyway.

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well productivity gains are largely met with higher standard of living, quality of life and the upward movement of the lowest classes, for one.

Wow. Yes.

It's a modern version of: "we're firing you, but your last task will be to train your lower-cost replacement".

> This article is kind of playful, but I think there’s a serious point here that’s not discussed enough. We’re being asked to usher in huge productivity gains by introducing AI to our workflows, but we’re not asking how does it help us? Not a lot of us stand to directly gain from our employers becoming more productive.

And we shouldn't. Workers should only get the wages they can command in the marketplace and not a penny more, and the smaller the better.

> I know everybody is afraid of getting fired and replaced with AI or whatever right now. But we should be seriously asking in our next all hands meetings if 10x’ing our productivity can get us some days off. Or when our paycheck is going to be multiplied accordingly.

Morally, all benefits of any technology or productivity gain must flow up to the owners, who deserve it all.

But this should be comforting to all of you. I'm sure everyone here owns at least a few thousand dollars in shares. You'll get some dividends and/or capital gains!