alt Hacker NewsOn the plus side for us worker bees, this is why I never really bought in to the narrative that our jobs were inevitably doomed. A question I've posed a few times: Consider two reasonably similar competitors with 100 engineers two years ago. Suppose AI really does accelerate development 10x times. It doesn't (at least not yet) but the larger number helps bring the question into focus. One company fires 90 engineers and does the same work with the remaining 10. The other company keeps all its engineers and does 10 times the work.
Who wins in the market?
It's not a uniform answer. There are times and places where the first one wins, as well as a mixed strategy. But I think broadly speaking the majority answer is the second.
Replies
10x the work requires exponentially more communication and coordination. At least according to Brooks "Mythical Man-Month" thesis. There's more to creating a marketable product than churning out code. I'm not aware that AI really changes this.
Most non-commoditized reasonable paying jobs are a product of information asymmetry. Anything that shrinks that asymmetrical surface is a threat to jobs. The company you are missing is the one that fires 99 of their engineers, hires 200 generally lower performing but far cheaper engineers and uses AI to accelerate their output.
Now whether or not that would actually work given the reality of the AI output is a question, but that's the general premise.
There's just one small problem. The AI costs money, and the premise is AI is cheaper than people. If you augment your 100 engineers with AI, they'll cost what, 10% more? That's +10 percent to your cost center, and would be considered very bad. There are tons of tools that make us more productive - think about it, how many of them did we have to beg demand or leave for? You assume they care to maximize productivity, which is your first mistake.
There is an assumption being made that more engineering leads to more company growth. It just isn’t true though. Sales sure. But doubling the engineering floor does not double sales. You can sell a bug filled product with an unbuilt roadmap still.
I suspect the one who fires 80, does twice as much, and (maybe optionally) pays the 20 125% (as if they were 25) probably handily beats them both.
I don’t think anyone has figured how to do 10x the work yet as we don’t know what the work is. AI cannot (yet) define the work that needs to be done, for some definition of needs to be done, and we need humans to figure that out for now. Us humans cannot work fast enough so we still build the same stuff but with less people.
Consider two reasonably similar competitors with 100 horses two years ago. Suppose AI really does accelerate development 10x times. One company fires 90 horses and buys 10 cars. The other company keeps all its horses.
Do the horses win in the market?
The one who fires 90 engineers, just to see how things go with the 10, and then scales back up with cheaper off-shore talent if they can't keep up with demand.
>On the plus side for us worker bees, this is why I never really bought in to the narrative that our jobs were inevitably doomed. A question I've posed a few times: Consider two reasonably similar competitors with 100 engineers two years ago. Suppose AI really does accelerate development 10x times. It doesn't (at least not yet) but the larger number helps bring the question into focus. One company fires 90 engineers and does the same work with the remaining 10. The other company keeps all its engineers and does 10 times the work. Who wins in the market?
The one who understands that "10 times the work" is not necessarily absorbable by the market, and adjust to whatever lesser value still works, and still fires a lot of the 100.