alt Hacker NewsUber cutting back to ~$1,500/engineer/tool/month makes it look to me like they think there's at least $1,500 of monthly ROI to be had per engineer.
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NichoPaolucci • today at 1:49 AM
1500/Mo per engineer is such a small price considering the base salary of these employees, Maybe Uber knows something we don't (the 5X engineering ROI isn't there for them?).
Judging the ROI of an engineer is hard. Adding AI on top of that makes things worse, I think. I've heard AI makes engineers 3X, 5X, 10X and even 100X.
If I told my CEO that I was 4X more effective with AI, I am doubtful he would be willing to spend even 1X my salary on tokens. Even though he would be making out in the end.
At some point the ROI is pretty much vibes, man.
So touche, but since it's usage per task it's kind of weird.
This means that the average engineer is efficient at (say) identifying the first 10 tasks they should do but there are diminishing returns after that? That seems like a weird pattern. Wouldn't it be more likely that certain tasks have a ROI based on how efficient the task is generated?
Like I'm trying to imagine in my head, if you think an engineer is more efficient with the tool, why deny them more tokens. I guess so they think to use them more efficiently?
So, maybe I conclude that I think your conclusion that there must be $1500 per engineer is flawed. And even if it were true, I don't think the benefit would be evenly distributed. I suspect this is a first pass at figuring how to budget them and there will be a second pass.
While it certainly reeks of motivated reasoning, Jensen Huang assertion that an expensive engineer should be using at least their salary in tokens feels more logically sound to me (assuming the average engineer is efficient at using tokens, I have a feeling it's a normal distribution)