alt Hacker NewsI know this isn't exactly related, so maybe a low value comment, but it itches in my mind. Years ago I talked with a recruiter at Facebook and they bragged about how many floors of developers they had working on Messenger in just one location (Seattle).
What on earth do you do with that many devs on a project like Messenger? I mean, really?
I feel like in a way, AI just adds to that weird situation of overcapacity. Maybe we were already oversupplied with talent. In which case why the heck were we still hiring more, more, more developers? Before the AI craze, Musk chopped an awful lot of headcount at Twitter, right, and proved it was overkill, has that panned out?
I just struggle to imagine how the economics of SWE really work in reality, outside of the niche that I am in. I have never worked for a pure software company on products that ship directly to outside customers, I've always been an internal developer. Maybe that is why I have such a big blindspot.
I won't be surprised if the net result of this wave of LLMs is ... not much. A change in tooling, but otherwise not revolutionary. On paper it should be revolutionary, but the more I use it (for both coding and non-coding tasks) the more I think it isn't anywhere near magic enough for that. It does have its moments though.
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The economics of a service economy really just don't make sense. We pay way too much for software (which should trend towards zero-cost to distribute), we pay too much for ads. The value of it is inherently downstream of the real economy, which is about making and distributing goods and stuff people actually need to live. Especially a company like facebook only provides a glorified forum, which should be free or collectively subsidized.
DEC filled The Mill in Maynard and multiple huge office buildings along 495. How many people did it take to write code for the next version of VAX VMS?
If it's any consolation, this is also a mystery to non developers like me. And developers likewise wonder why a business needs so many managers and what they do all day.
> What on earth do you do with that many devs on a project like Messenger? I mean, really?
Multiply those floors by number of Facebook campuses and generous remuneration, and Messenger was probably very profitable. Being a global 800-pound gorilla is a sweet gig, having tubes sucking money from most countries on earth and depositing it to dozens of campuses makes a lot of sense.
>What on earth do you do with that many devs on a project like Messenger? I mean, really?
What makes you think it's a simple system to develop at scale?
Its not that we are oversupplied with talent, I believe we are globally software constrained, the issue is that Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc make too much money. They take too large a share of profit and then overhire talent and take it away from other places that could use it. I had a post a while ago where I went into detail about how much money google makes off of home services, but the tldr is getting my house cleaned cost $350 (yes it was too high), but only 1/3 went to the person doing the actual cleaning, 1/3 went to google and 1/3 went to the lead generator. Google and the lead generator do not provide 2/3 of the value of getting my house cleaned, but that is how it stands. If companies can spend less on advertising then they could theoretically spend more on paying for software, but its all a bit pie in the sky.
I’ve asked a thousands of things out of Claude/Codex over the last month that it essentially returns in hours if not minutes. To put that into perspective, each of those changes would have to go into a sprint cycle and I might get what I wanted two weeks from now.
>What on earth do you do with that many devs on a project like Messenger
I thought the point was to minimize the amount of talented devs who instead try to do their own startups that could compete with Messenger, by hiring them and paying them well so they've got no appetite to try their own thing.
I thought about that a lot too, and in the end I think it just comes down to stupid economics: What do you want them to do with all this money?
1) Most top US tech companies are flooded of money. Everyone dumps money in the SP500.
2) This money has to go somewhere. You can't just redistribute it as dividends, otherwise it's an admission that you won't grow and giving you more money would be a 0 sum game.
3) So you have to invest it somehow, somewhere.
4) Obviously you can spend that money buying whatever company you can.
5) Once you've bought realistically enough, you just hire more, and people will think that there should be some kind of linear relationship between resources spent and revenue growth.
6) You can also do grand projects, like the metaverse, convert all you software to blockchains, become AI native, etc. and dump billions on these.
So essentially it's all about projecting growth and potential.