$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.
If you’re an employee then use that additional 4hrs to focus on other things.
Is this a norm in your country? Which part of France do you live in, if you don't mind me asking?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Natural language is ambiguous and ChatGPT can handle that pretty well, if you want to count letters use Python or something.
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!
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.