Hacker News Reader

Comment by mightybyte | Hacker News Reader

> especially when you're a freelancer

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.

View on HN

But for anyone in IT or related fields? $20/month feels like a nobrainer if you're in the West.

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.

> $20/month feels like a nobrainer if you're in the West.

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.

You're not part of the target market, then. Think of it like any other recurring service, e.g., pickup/drop off laundry. It costs way more than doing laundry at the neighborhood laundromat and doesn't save very much time, maybe a couple hours a week. But, if you don't enjoy doing laundry, and you don't have an in-unit washer dryer, it may be worth it.

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?

My point was that I'm not a rarity, not everybody makes 100k+ a year even in the "West", there are a lot of people like me that have to watch carefully what they spend.

If ChatGPT saved you 4 hours a day, you could be less stressed and have more time to do other stuff like exercise

No I would still have to sit at work waiting for the clock to be at the right time to be allowed to leave.

You're severely underpaid, juniors with 1 year experience can get more in Poland after tax.

I have 14 years experience, same job. But as I said in another comment I have aging parents that I have to take care of and I live in a small town without opportunities.

I had found a high paying job in Switzerland that was close enough but it was canceled due to Covid.

Well, I'm talking about remote jobs which are absolutely prevalent here, so where you live does not matter.

If it saved you 4hrs/day you could serve more clients if you we’re working as freelancer and therefor more than offset the cost.

If you’re an employee then use that additional 4hrs to focus on other things.

2000€ per month? In France? That's slightly less than software devs earn in Poland, with way lower living costs!

Is this a norm in your country? Which part of France do you live in, if you don't mind me asking?

I live in Belfort in eastern France near the Swiss and German border. It's a small town, there's not many opportunities here but I have aging parents I have to take care of so I can't move.

And you decided to not work remotely and 10x your income instantly, because you'd miss your office and colleagues. Got it!

> But for anyone in IT or related fields? $20/month feels like a nobrainer if you're in the West.

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.

I see what you mean, but I wouldn't compare $20 for work to e.g. $20 for Netflix Pro Gold Premium; it's business vs entertainment.

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.

Everything is relative. I'm in IT - in fact in a decently high paying and relevant part of it, being a devops specialist - in the West (in Italy) and I make ~1700 euros a month, and this is with 10 years of experience in the sector. I'm not getting ripped off, this is by far the highest salary I've had and I make about as much as my parents do after working for 45 years.

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.

> I'm not getting ripped off, this is by far the highest salary I've had and I make about as much as my parents do after working for 45 years.

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.

You’re making 2.5x the UK average salary. That’s not what happens to an average dev in an average role here; are you a consultant or doing 100 hour weeks or have expertise in some specialist field?

The general average salary is low everywhere as most jobs don't require any kind of "higher" education, so of course devs earn more. I'm earning 4-5x of Poland's average but that's meaningless. I sure as heck don't earn more than an average UK dev, because I've worked with some of them and I know their rates.

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.

So you making only 1700 euros a month? Sorry I think you are getting ripped off, as a programmer in Poland/Warsaw you would make around 5k+ euros per month. Change you work you are worth much more.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com