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Comment by macspoofing | Hacker News Reader

>The productivity benefits are worth more than $10/month easily, but somehow I still don't want to pay for it..

Are the productivity benefits worth more than $10/month?

I've easily saved a couple of minutes each day by not having to search some API docs, since Copilot already knows how my variables should fit into the function call. Even if it's just a minute a day, 20 days a month, it works out being worth $10 easily if you're on a typical western software dev salary.

Uh, yeah. Consider how much programmers are paid per hour. Or how often you look up Stack Overflow or language documentation.

If a programmer is paid per hour, then this is only worthwhile if it increases their hourly wage. Otherwise, it's just another cost.

Now, if they are paid per job and it makes them more productive... That's different.

The majority of programmers in the US are salaried.

Isn't the lookup part of the learning?

If you just get the solution the learning gets smaller.

Yes, but I do not want to learn all the internals of every random API, if copilot can help me with avoiding some, I am interested.

That one would be easy to measure for yourself, because that "worth it" depends on your number of hours worked a month and your compensation.

Let's be on a more conservative end and say that an engineer gets paid $60/hour (i know that most engineers are salaried, so you will need to divide the monthly pay number pre-tax by 160 hours to get that hourly number). If copilot saved more than 10 minutes of your time a month, then yeah, it is worth more than $10/mo.

Do the math on this one yourself, based on how many hours you work in a month on average + your compensation for that time period.

Yes, for sure. I’m entry level but given variable overhead (cost of HR, health insurance, time spent not coding, etc.) it only needs to save me about 5 minutes/month to be break even.

I’ve been trailing the beta for the past few months and plan to recommend a corporate account to our leadership once it becomes available.

As a graduate student on a very small salary? absolutely.

The calculus is $10 for a pizza or something for myself, or copilot.

Given that copilot has saved me too many hours to count, i.e. the 1 thing that truly matters, then it's a no-brainer.

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