alt Hacker News> it's WTF did Uber build with all of that spend?
You can ask the same for the median 330k salary in the US for Uber Engineering... and being a bit snarky, attending Uber engineers talks here and there at a few conferences, looks like. they love to (re)invent internal tooling/platforms. That's pretty expensive on its own.
EDIT: I'm not saying that Uber's engineers didn't add value to the company, they absolutely did and handling the scale up they had to handle is not an easy feat. But I do challenge the notion of "what features did they create with that (LLM) spending?" of GP.
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Sure, but has their rate of value added increased as a result? It's a good question to ask. They added value before LLM coding, and now are more expensive than before thanks to token costs.
This is what all "platform engineers" have to do once things are working nicely: you have to keep inventing work.
I don't know; I'm a Ron Popeil "set it and forget it" kind of guy. Make the dumbest, simplest thing that's going to work with some clear path for scaling. Then go do valuable things instead.
you don't get promotion for supporting existing things, but for "inventing" you can get promoted. also for large migrations
This is a very good answer but there's a flip side too.
The idea of "if you add intelligence you make more money" is contradicted by the fact companies don't just always hire more people. Wy doesn't google just hire everyone?
> You can ask the same for the median 330k salary in the US for Uber Engineering
People DO.
It's well known that most tech companies are ran incompetently. As you say, it's not the engineers' fault.
But most projects and hiring in these companies exists to juice promotion criteria. And that, depending on perspective, these companies are either massively overstaffed or massively underproductive.
The comparison to AI spending being wasteful holds up pretty well, these are companies that readily piss away billions in pointless spending.