You use it consistently during the workday and it's still not worth $20/mo?
You own your life - why not spend your own money for the things that make you and your life better?
Who cares?
I worked at a job where I had a small, crappy monitor. I made decent cash. I just bought a large decent monitor and brought it into work. I ended up using it for many years. My life was significantly better. I've done that at several jobs since then, and NEVER regretted it, in fact it was one of the soundest decisions I've ever made. Also keyboard and mouse.
There are so many people using the default keyboard, the default monitor, the default tools.
If you push work to do it for you, you need to challenge the "everone gets a dell 19" monitor" b.s. If you push your boss, he might have to do justification paperwork.
Just become what you are.
A one-off purchase is very different from making a hole in the bucket.
Obviously this all depends on how financially comfortable you are. But still.. time is money. Money you're spending today is time you're committing to work to earn back tomorrow.
$20/mo for a subscription of NYT, or Netflix is not one of those things. But ChatGPT in many cases can save whole days of work over each month, so - especially when you're a freelancer, it will pay itself off.
I think that's the big qualifier here. The productivity paying off the price is only meaningful if your time and money are arbitrarily fungible for each other, and for most people they are not. There's a good chance they won't be able to find a way to convert that saved time into the corresponding $20+ needed to pay the bill. And if finances are tight, $20/month might be a deal breaker.
Even if you're a freelancer, if your projects have billing caps related to the number of hours you expect to work then you don't necessarily have adequate time/money fungibility. $20 a month also might not be worth the cost of going out and acquiring a new project.
It's like paying for Jetbrains IDEs. I'm a bumbling idiot writing Symfony and Wordpress code and PHPStorm is 150 Euros a year. It probably increases my productivity by that much per day.
If ChatGPT saves you more than 60 seconds a day, or makes you work more comfortable, it's easily worth $20.
I earn 2000€ per month as a C# dev in France, (assuming $1 == 1€) I just need a hundred subscriptions like that to have no money left at the end of the month. While I'll admit a 100 subs is a bit much, it's very easy to have 10 or 15.
> If ChatGPT saves you more than 60 seconds a day
Even if it saved me 4 hours a day I wouldn't be paid more.
If you really don't like using your brain to write, then why not spend a bit of money to offload some thinking to this service?
I had found a high paying job in Switzerland that was close enough but it was canceled due to Covid.
Is this a norm in your country? Which part of France do you live in, if you don't mind me asking?
If you’re an employee then use that additional 4hrs to focus on other things.
I still cannot afford, after house, car and living expenses, to spend 20 euros a month for an AI chat app, or 150 a year for an IDE.
For reference, I do most of my work in standard vscode with almost no plugins and/or emacs, depending on what I'm doing, on the company provided dell/windows laptop. The only subscriptions, personal or work, that I pay for are netflix, spotify, xbox game pass, nintendo online and amazon prime - and we're thinking of dropping netflix and spotify lately since they're increasing prices and lowering in value.
edit: This is funny just after i wrote this I've seen so many references to Poland in this thread. But yeah it's interesting as working in UK as developer in small company I was earning 2500 pounds after taxes (Liverpool). And I thought that it's a dream job back then. But it was 10 years ago. And I think I am rather average developer just on level III on 6 level scale. So right now living in Poland my wage expectation is around 6k euro as Backend Java developer.
You're absolutely getting ripped off if this a real devops specialist role (some companies use that word for manual server admins) and your employment history is not an indicator of anything. Only the market is and where are you in the salary range for a given role.
I'm an average dev from Poland (basically 1/4 GDP of Italy), working for a Polish, not international company (clients are international), having less than 10 years of documented commercial experience and I'm making about 5k EUR after taxes (converted from PLN) and I'm not even close to the cap.
At my first company I made about 500 EUR a month, and whilst the second paid me twice as much, it was still absolutely ripping me off.
I'm just a full-stack .NET + React developer working in a mid-sized city as a contractor (but that's complicated, because in Poland most companies basically evade taxes by hiring via contracts with the same benefits and responsibilities as regular employees). I work up to 40hrs a week just like a normal employee.
Just take a look at one of the many job boards and search for "devops" or my role which is ".net full-stack": https://nofluffjobs.com/pl
Most oscillate around 20k PLN gross, which is definitely a lot more than 1700 EUR. Some rates given by devs in this thread are shocking and something isn't right. 1700 EUR net (i hope net) would be 8k PLN which is about what my car mechanic friend without a degree earns in my city... and what I earned 1 year after my degree. It's perfectly fine to begin with, but we're talking about 10+ years of experience and that's baffling.
Yes, I definitely hear you. If you're living well within your means then sure. But on the other hand, a shocking number of Americans don't live within their means and are strapped with credit card debt. In those situations even a small number of instances of this kind of "oh, it's just $20 / month" reasoning start to add up.
> It probably increases my productivity by that much per day.
Again, this doesn't matter if you're on the edge of cash flow positivity and can't actually turn that productivity into dollars. Your employer isn't going to pay you $20 / month more because they can't measure your productivity with that much granularity.
You're probably right that it's a medium-term game for employees (if their employer isn't ready to pay the $20, which I assume they would be), but you will certainly be more productive and get things done quicker than others (and probably measurably so), which should give you a good spot for a promotion or negotiations. But of course, that only really works if you derive value from ChatGPT. If it's more of a "my work is easier but not faster or better", then it won't make sense.
Previously I'd fall back to asking in a forum and getting a (tbf) much better answer a few hours or days later, but ChatGPT may be enough to point me in the right direction in a few minutes
It wasn’t meaningful enough to spend a lot of time researching or to pay someone to solve it so I was just going to give up on it.
Asked ChatGPT and it was able to unblock me by pointing me in the right direction.
Now I have a working tool to solve a very specific problem of mine.
Anthropomorphising statistical models is a bad idea...
I work mostly alone on projects, at least currently. While I have friends I can bounce back general ideas on, it‘s hard to get good feedback on a small problem that I‘d be stuck with for, let’s say, 5 minutes.
So far, the choice has been between disrupting others‘ flow (who might not even work with the tech I‘m using), or exploring the issue myself. Problem solving is certainly not a skill I want to atrophy, but figuring out framework specific intricacies is more a chore than an interesting problem. A chore I can get stuck on. And that’s where the bot often points me in the right direction.
An example: I‘m dabbling in the PETAL stack with a side project, and Ecto‘s DSL still feels foreign to me. ChatGPT is actually really good at fixing my Ecto queries and recently made the suggestion to use the „dynamic“ function. It applied the function in a slightly wrong way, but that made me read up dynamic query building, which is already bearing fruit.
I could have read all of Ecto‘s documentation and wouldn’t need the bot, but that’s out of scope right now. I‘m currently working with native iOS, Android, JS/TS (Next), Flutter, and Elixir - if I read all the documentation, I wouldn’t write any code.
Entertainment is an expense.
Sure, there's wiggle room in each but in a nutshell, that's the framework.
Unless you are salaried?
1. increase productivity 2. ask for a raise 3. profit or change company
and it worked pretty good last 7 years. Certain investments in tools definitely helped with that.
Or you're just treading water.
Not everyone gains some super power productivity or an excess of free time when utilizing tools...
Some people just being able to actually scrape by BECAUSE of said tools.
Your results may vary.
If you really are staring at strings and wanting those letters counted, you can easily ask it to write you a Python, JS, Ruby program that will do so, and in my experience for a task like that it will NAIL that task perfectly 100% of the time, and can even explain how it works to boot!
Natural language is ambiguous and ChatGPT can handle that pretty well, if you want to count letters use Python or something.
Also, a friend physicist tested ChatGPT on the basics of quantum physics and he was surprised at how much it knew.
IMHO the chat is at a level of 1st year university student - of any subject available. The only issue being that it always sounds super confident, even if it's wrong.
Which isn't to say that ChatGPT fits that bill for me - I think it requires too much supervision to save time. But people are too cheap about genuinely useful tools.
It does make me more efficient which is something I do care about.
It's the opposite. A salaried developer on an agile team commits to a certain amount of work per sprint. If they can get it done in 2 hours less time, that's a net gain for the developer.
I suffer from this. Currently paying $30/mo for midjourney but get zero value. need to go delete that sub.
Everything we spend money on has a price that is set by what we are willing to pay collectively. Just because you don't want to pay the price doesn't mean it's not the right price.
It's a bit amusing that we find any price objectionable considering this ChatGPT experience didn't even exist a few months ago!
A monitor is relatively cheap, I would own it, and it will primarily improve my life and secondarily improve my productivity.
In contrast, with ChatGPT, if I'm working on a difficult programming job, I spend X time thinking deeply and Y time actually typing the solution. A system that can type for me is convenient but it may not speed things since I can only think so fast, so many hours a day. And the situation of renting a thing for $20 isn't just a constant expense but a bit of a feeling of being beholden - the price could be and probably will be raised, there is a pressure to get value out of the thing by using it more, etc.
And there's no guarantee that a code generator will make my life more pleasant - the time saved typing may be absorbed by meetings or whatever.
It's a bit like home automation or car dongles - some people might like never throwing a switch as they walk into a room but I think fewer people would see a benefit they'd pay for since they still have to walk into the room.
And it's good to keep in mind, the comparison is not $20 for ChatGPT versus nothing. It's $20 for ChatGPT Plus, versus my API-hacky-solution for $2, versus ChatGPT free, for $0.
Anyway, a counter-example is that the arguments above would not be against some broad framework that reduces both the thinking and the writing needed to construct programs - say a combination of a good programming, a good software engineering framework and a management that forced client requirements into a structured format. That sort of thing can reduce the needed programmer activity in a project on both the low and the high level and none of the arguments above object to this.
Haha, exactly my thoughts (https://github.com/rikhuijzer/ata). Davinci is nicer (more succinct) than ChatGPT anyway.
It'll be absorbed by reviewing the generated code, which you are ultimately responsible for. Is typing speed actually a bottleneck to many programmers, beyond certain point of expertise?
To be clear, I am not judging you. You did what was good for you and took the path of least resistance, as we all do many times a day. I am just trying to answer your question of "who cares?" We should all care a lot about this!
I'm an in-house producer at a tech company. I own a lot of film and audio equipment. I made it very clear in my initial negotiation that my gear was to be used solely at my discretion that and within 12mo we will fully transition off of it. I also used it to negotiate a slightly higher salary. It would've been easier to just give it away, but then why would they ever stop? I could've easily slipped into a position where they just use all my film equipment rent free and then I am on the hook to replace it as it breaks at a faster rate. That's not right without proper compensation.
If I have a nice dual-monitor setup, in a business where everyone gets a 19" Dell, I will be more productive. That will lead to more promotions, lower odds of being fired, etc. I will come out ahead. Plus, I'll be happier.
If my employer benefits too, how does that hurt me?
It all got restricted due to covid, and I doubt they’re going back :/
Another lesson from my career: No place is perfect. Don't make simplistic judgements.
At an organizational level, it's often not so much about money as about fairness, controls to avoid corruption, IT/supplier overhead costs, or similar sorts of reasons. I've been in C-suite, individual contributor, and everything in between. To flip things around, it's often cheaper to by a standard $3000 thing than a non-standard $1500 thing. Equipment costs are much lower than labor costs.
From my perspective, given three choices:
1. Spend $2000 of my time and $2000 of my boss' time to make an exception for a $500 monitor purchase
2. Be less productive
3. Drop $500
Often, I pick #3. I like my manager, and I don't want to complicate his life over a monitor. That lets me complicate his life over more important things, by the way.
When I was a director, I'd occasionally even spend personal dollars to buy things employees needed too. Dropping $20 is often easier than making a case to expense $20.
That being said, this is not that situation. I am a salaried employee at a small tech startup. It's always either "we have the money/don't have the money" or "I don't see the point." Luckily the latter is rare because they trust my judgment. But in the case of the former, while i get it's about resources, I'm not going to make it my problem. I am not going to fund their startup with my hardware. Which is why they are reasonable with me and just change their expectations when the resources aren't there. Of course I always try to find a solution that accomplishes the goal because I want us all to succeed, but I am not going to do it the way they want if they can't pay for it and it will only happen on my own dime.
It wasn't touchy, it was reasonable. I guarantee you not one engineer at our company uses their personal computer. It's no different than saying "I want a work computer." They were going to buy me film equipment but hadn't determined exactly what we needed yet and hadn't set aside enough resources (cash) for it yet. So this was a useful stopgap that worked for everyone. Plus it's not like I got 10k more or something absurd. It was a modest amount that made me happy and got them what they needed.
>If they cared about the equipment they would have preferred to purchase/finance it or lease it.
Wasn't for sale and neither of us wanted to get into a lease. Plus they absolutely made out like bandits if we put dollar costs on this. I was just happy to have some cash for using my gear that made my life easier while also establishing a precedent that my gear isn't there for them to joyride.
About monitors and larger stuff, you may argue. Employers can find and buy good ones in bulk, instead of making everyone individually spend hours being annoyed, searching and comparing and buying better equipment. Either way, for monitors the financial hit will be way less than 1% of a typical salary (okay, may depend on location, but a monitor lasts 5+ years).
I agree it has to stop somewhere. For me that would be stuff like Unity3D subscriptions, or tables, or FPGA tools and oscilloscopes. But monitors... shrug
This is nevertheless a great point. This culture is coming if it isn't here already especially when you add WFH to the mix
Frankly, I’ve been surprised at the results. Generally, they just say “OK” and the matter is settled and I don’t have unrealistic expectations saddled on me. It’s what I like about my company, they don’t dance around things. There’s a lot of trust and open communication. Plus every now and then they give me what I need. Because they know I’m being honest and not just trying to buy myself new toys.
Objectively, a few reasons:
- You can't afford it.
- Paying for it doesn't let you "own" anything
- It's not reliable
- It's legal compatibility is not fully decided yet
- It can preclude opportunities for learning and even teach you entirely false things under the guise they are true
The list probably goes on, but I don't think we should buy everything that stands to make our lives better. If we applied that logic to everything in our lives, we'd all use computers from Skymall and eat food we see on QVC.
Pretty sure GP didn't say "completely give in to all impulse purchases and cease to use your brain about the worth of things."
I agree with GP. I bought my own monitor. It's great. It significantly improves my workday, and I get to take it with me if I quit. It generally gets two reactions: first, "how did you manage to get a better monitor than everyone else" and second, "why would you spend your money to help the company?" Not sure how something that contributes directly to my comfort while performing my job is helping the company more than it's helping me, but whatever. Seems very much like cutting off your nose to spite your face to just stick with the standard monitor to avoid "giving" the company something. Same as the folks who spend time every month filing expense reports and having corporate mobile device management profiles on their phones so they can get reimbursed $20/month for their mobile data.
An example? The OP was talking about purchasing a monitor/keyboard/mouse.
There's something to "owning" a thing. You can resell it and rent it out, etc. It's an asset. SaaS is not an asset. It's a service.
It still makes sense for me to pay because I get more value compared to if I didn't.
Reminds me of the Built to Spill lyric. “It's barely yours on loan What you think you own”
Not wanting to spoil it, I’ll just say that if you haven’t seen this show then you’re in for good laugh:
I have no issues paying for thing I can use for a long time or re-sell if it turns out not being that useful, but spending money and investing time using cloud-based tools that can be discontinued by next month, thanks but no thanks.
I wish I could do the same with my laptop, WFH would be better, but it is against security.
It’s a few thousand dollars, but I make a comfortable six figure salary, and I think it’s worth it.
Recently, I've been gasp paying for software. Open source and free tools have come a very long way, but paid tools can be better. Especially when those tools are used daily as part of the job.
The paid tools often have free usage, albeit with some limits, so they are still useful to the defaults.
For example, TablePlus vs SQL Server Studio. I'm not a DBA and most often just need to run a quick query or two to check things. In this regards, TablePlus is light years ahead. No need to load a dinosaur for that.
"Consoom more tech hardware made in China!"
"Don't think too hard about your monthly expenditures!"
"Trust the science!!!1!"
Well you've convinced me, buddy.
And not for nothing you probably will have better luck scoring a promotion by spending $20 a month on doughnuts for the team than on ChatGPT.
If you're contracting agency, it could be in your explicitly laid out in the contract that you might use information from 3rd party sources such as Google, Stack Overflow, and yes ChatGPT.
I am also a salaried employee and if I can save a minute of work time that’s one less minute I have to work.
I have a body of work I need to complete and sometimes that takes me 40 hours and sometimes much more.
The only way I can think of that $20 per month for increased productivity doesn’t help is if your company’s metric of success is being present/working 8 hours per day.
This is why productivity improvements feel so meh. For people that are hyper competitive and ambitious, it's a way to tackle more and bigger challenges. Fine.
For others though, the benefits do not really materialize in meaningful ways. Maybe you can win some slack/recovery time, but it's not really truly free time. You're still working and on call.
In fact, in quite a lot of teams being productive is actively punished. Say that in agile you do a great sprint, and execute 10 story points instead of the normal 5.
Nice. Oh...so you can do 10? 10 it is then for all the future sprints. Without a pay increase, obviously.
I agree that hyper competitive and ambitious people might do this. I would add though that curious and passionate people will also do this.
I'll be honest... if I weren't getting paid to be a software engineer I'd do it for free. Like I did when I was 13 years old with my 300 bps modem creating a BBS program.
This leads me to do all kinds of crazy things like work 6 hours on a Saturday because I am quite simply fascinated about the level of engineering I can do to turn an 18 hour batch process into 4.
It's been extremely lucrative for my career. I'm fortunate to work somewhere that is truly pay for performance. But not in a million years is that why I do it.
You've just described most office jobs.
I use my keyboard everyday but I wouldn't pay $20 per month for it. In fact, I paid around $4 total for it, as paying more would bring significantly more diminishing returns.
I use my phone every day and have used it for the past 5 years with no issue, it has brought me so much value and yet, if I draw the line, it didn't even reach $20 per month (price divided by time used), not even mentioning that I expect it to last another 2-3 years, bringing the cost down even further.
What kind of crazy value would you expect something to have in order to be worth $20/mo?
if it makes you more than $20 or saves you more than $20 then it’s worth it. Simple as that. That’s it. That’s the test. For some, the time they save and spend with family is “worth” $20, for others, productivity increases don’t lead to free time, while others still don’t have $20 to spend.
Fwiw I get my teeth professionally cleaned once a month and spend more than $20 on it. Because it’s worth it to me and because dental care is expensive. Toothbrushes are cheap not because they’re worthless but because they’re undifferentiated. All toothbrushes are the same. ChatGPT… isn’t.
If he wouldn't pay $20 a month to prevent tooth decay, he clearly is the type who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
> What kind of crazy value would you expect something to have in order to be worth $20/mo?
The implication of that is that of tootnhcare cost more than $20 a month he wouldn't do it. Which is crazy, the expected return from brushing your teeth is well above $20 a month.
Brushing your teeth takes time. If you could pay $20 p/m to get the same results from say a stick of gum (i.e., no time)...is that then worth it?
The KB "as is" makes sense. But that's a fairly generic item. Adding value / differentiation is minimal.
Phone? Maybe. Put what's your service p/m? Is one worth considering without the other?
What crazy value? At $1 per work day?? It doesn't have to be crazy. Just 5 minutes per day is breakeven (and that's generous). In many cases, ChatGPT is more helpful than the ever polluted Google SERPs. One buck a day to avoid that? With the weekends free? Perhaps not crazy value but worthy of reasonable consideration.
No, because I start the kettle (or coffeemaker, depending on what I want) before I start brushing. I brush my teeth while waiting for the kettle to boil.
I don't get that time back if I don't brush my teeth; I still have to wait for the coffee anyway.
I wouldn't pay $20 per month for a keyboard either, but I doubt that a $4 keyboard is even close to diminishing returns unless you got a really good deal. Even $100 for a decent mechanical keyboard is not much if you use it for many years.
And I paid 220 for my phone, which easily lasts 2 years.
That said: As a self-employed programmer, I think 20$/month for increased productivity is a steal!
Are you serious? If you had to pay $20 per month to brush your teeth you would stop doing it?
This would be the fast track to dentures by the time you're 45.
When you're a high schooler, yes, even Steve Jobs did it. But when your monthly salary is easily in the thousands, it's not a matter of pride to get it for <$20, it's a matter of stupidity.
> $20/mo, for the people in this situation, is not an amount of money worth thinking about.
I don't follow this logic. In this case everything that is currently sold for 2 cents can also be sold for $20, because "it is not an amount of money worth thinking about" (at least for some people).
Frivolously throwing money at unnecessary subscriptions isn't something for me.
Interesting.
As ever the whole sentence is important, rather than just picking out a part of it.
He's a thought experiment: imagine a device that changes the scent of the air I breathe to something I find pleasant. I could use this device all day everyday for free (or on the cheap), but I will not pay $20/mo for it. Losing access to the features really isn't worth that much. On the flip side, many people pay thousands of dollars to rent machines that helps them breathe, even if that adds up to total of less than an hour of their lives - which is nor much.
$20 a month for ML tool that is only sometimes useful is a tough sell, especially in a world where a lot of people feel like $80 a year for IntelliJ is too much.
Coders are thrifty bastards, except when it comes to their personal vices in which case financial responsibility goes out the window...
Obviously if they start charging for the free version, they may also jack the price for the premium one.