[ghuntley]

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.

[malfist]

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

[ghuntley]

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

[StefanBatory]

I wonder what will happen first - will companies move to LLMs, or to programmers from abroad (because ultimately, it will be cheaper than using LLMs - you've said ~$500 per day, in Poland ~$1500 will be a good monthly wage - and that still will make us expensive! How about moving to India, then? Nigeria? LATAM countries?)

[throwawayb299]

> in Poland ~$1500 will be a good monthly wage

The minimum wage in Poland is around USD 1240/month. The median wage in Poland is approximately USD 1648/month. Tech salaries are considerably higher than the median.

Idk, maybe for an intern software developer it's a good salary...

[StefanBatory]

Minimal is ~$930 after taxes, though; I rarely see people talk here about salary pre-tax, tbh.

~$1200 is what I'd get paid here after a few years of experience; I have never saw an internship offer in my city that paid more than minimal wage (most commonly, it's unpaid).

[ghuntley]

The industry has tried that, and the problems are well known (timezones, unpredictable outcomes in terms of quality and delivery dates)...

Delivery via LLMs is predictable, fast, and any concerns about outcome [quality] can be programmed away to reject bad outcomes. This form of programming the LLMs has a one-time cost...

[breckenedge]

> These […] get better every day.

They do, but I’ve seen a huge slowdown in “getting better” in the last year. I wonder if it’s my perception, or reality. Each model does better on benchmarks but I’m still experiencing at least a 50% failure rate on _basic_ task completion, and that number hasn’t moved higher in many months.

[cpursley]

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.