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0 pointsm00dy11mo ago0 comments

Seriously? That’s wild. What kind of CS field could even handle that kind of daily spend for a bunch of people?

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Consider L5 at Google: outgoings of $377,797 USD per year just on salary/stock, before fixed overheads such as insurance, leave, issues like ramp-up time and cost of their manager. In the hands of a Staff+ engineer, these tools enable replication of Staff+ engineers and don't sleep. My 2c: the funding for the new norm will come from either compressing the manager layer or engineering layer or both.

malfist11mo ago

LLMs absolutely don't replicate staff+ engineers.

If your staff engineers are mostly doing things AI can do, then you don't need staff. Probably don't even need senior

ghuntley11mo ago

That's my point.

- L3 SWE II - $193,712 USD (before overheads)

- L4 SWE III - $297,124 USD (before overheads)

- L5 Senior SWE - $377,797 USD (before overheads)

These tools and foundational models get better every day, and right now, they enable Staff+ engineers and businesses to have less need for juniors. I suspect there will be [short-to-medium-term] compression. See extended thoughts at https://ghuntley.com/screwed

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cpursley11mo ago

Oh but they absolutely do. Have you not used any of this llm tooling? It’s insanely good once you learn how to employ it. I no longer need a front end team, for example. It's that good at TypeScript and React. And the design is even better.

mmikeff11mo ago

The kind of field where AI builds more in a day than a team or even contract dev does.

ghuntley11mo ago

correct; utilised correctly these tools ship teams of output in a single day.

rudedogg11mo ago

Do you have a link to some of this output? A repo on Github of something you’ve done for fun?

I get a lot of value out of LLMs but when I see people make claims like this I know they aren’t “in the trenches” of software development, or care so little about quality that I can’t relate to their experience.

Usually they’re investors in some bullshit agentic coding tool though.

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