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Comment by thw09j9m | Hacker News Reader

I'm a staff level SWE at a company that you've all heard of (not a flex, just providing context).

If my manager said to me tomorrow: "I have to either get rid of one of your coworkers or your use of AI tools, which is it?"

I would, without any hesitation, ask that he fire one of my coworkers. Gemini / Claude is way more useful to me than any particular coworker.

And now I'm preparing for my post-software career because that coworker is going to be me in a few years.

Obviously I hope that I'm wrong, but I don't think I am.

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Interesting that this guy claims to be a "staff level SWE at a major company", yet one year ago he was on HN posting about how horrible of a time he was having getting a SWE job, how he's failed multiple interviews, including at FAANGs, was being rejected for even no-name small startups, had failed multiple interviews because of inability on algorithm questions ... and yet within the last year he was supposedly successfully hired on at a "major company" for a staff-level senior coding position.

Maybe the company is Red Lobster?

That would be a flex.

Pay me in biscuits

Don't forget he's also

>been considered top 10% of attractiveness in one country

Funny call out. I always see people brag about working at a fortune 500 company, also meaningless with companies like Lululemon on their lol

Damn you got his receipts

What I think is the strangest part of it is that they don't respond to a single comment. They've only done it twice in their entire comment history (3 pages). Once 2 years ago where they talk about banging women and the other being a few months earlier talking about HFT (which the comment previous to that says they work at a HFT firm)

But I think I found the answer...

  That's a mistake. A lot of people lie on their resumes.

  Source: I've lied on every resume I've ever sent out.

  - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33903978

Something tells me they aren't the most honest person. That something is thw09j9m...

Seriously... why lie about these types of things on an anonymous forum? There's literally nothing to gain

Back in my days this was called "trolling".

Trolling is more than lying. It requires having bait. And sometimes a boat.

Post your blind username. I'll message you morning time EST with receipts.

It's not necessarily inconsistent though. People get rejected for so many different reasons and the job market is tough recently. And there's a post about getting lucky with the offer.

seems like replacing him with AI would be blessing for his team

Is that a useful thought experiment? Claude benefits you as an individual more than a coworker, but I find I hard to believe your use of Claude is more of a value add to the business than an additional coworker. Especially since that coworker will also have access to Claude.

In the past we also just raised the floor on productivity, do you think this will be different?

There’s often the question of communication overhead between people; Claude would remove that.

No that’s not true at all. Humans can deal with ambiguity and operate independently. Claude can’t do that. You’re trading one “problem” for an entirely different one in this hypothetical.

> There’s often the question of communication overhead between people; Claude would remove that.

... and replace that with communication overhead with claude ?

If you’re already communicating with Claude, it’s not additional overhead.

Isn't that what polishing 'the prompt' does? Refine the communication like an editor does for a publication? Only in this case it's instructions for how to get a transformer to mine an existing set of code to produce some sort of vaguely useful output.

The human factor adds knowledge of the why that refines the results. Not just any algorithm or a standard pattern that fits, but the correct solution for the correct question.

people talking as if communication overhead is bad. That overhead makes someone else able to substitute for you (or other one) when needs happen, and sometimes can discover concerns earlier.

I get the point you are making, but the hypothetical question from your manager doesn't make sense to me.

It's obviously true that any of your particular coworker wouldn't be useful to you relative to an AI agent, since their goal is to perform their own obligations to the rest of the company, whereas the singular goal of the AI tool is to help the user.

Until these AI tools can completely replace a developer on its own, the decision to continue employing human developers or paying for AI tools will not be mutually exclusive.

Im there with you at the govt contracting company i work for we lost a contract we had for ten years. Our team was 10 to 15 employees and we lost the contract to a company who are now doing the work with 5 employees and AI.

My company said we now are going to being bidding with smaller teams and promoting our use of AI.

One example of them promoting the company's use of AI is creating a prototype using chatGPT and AntiGravity. He took a demo video off of Youtube of a govt agency app, fed the video to chatGPT, GPT spit out all the requirements for the ten page application and then he fed those requirements to AntiGravity and boom it repilcated/created the working app/prototype in 15 minutes. Previously that would take a team of 3 to 5 a week or few to complete such a prototype.

Sweet then your fired coworker goes “i will do the same work for 80% of thw09j9m’s salary”.

For your answer to be correct for your employer, the added productivity from your use of LLMs must be at least as much as the productivity from whichever coworker you're having fired. No study I've seen claims much above a 20% increase in productivity, so either a) your productivity without LLMs was ~5x that of your coworkers, or b) you're making a mistake in your analysis (likely some combination of thinking about it from your perspective instead of your employers and overestimating how helpful LLMs are to you).

It makes him (presumed) 20% more effective than his coworker makes him. Overall effectiveness of the team is not being considered, but that's why his manager isn't asking him :)

That fits, except later on they say

> And now I'm preparing for my post-software career because that coworker is going to be me in a few years.

Which implies they anticipate their manager (or someone higher up in the company) to agree with them, presumably when considering overall effectiveness of the team.

You would probably have the same answer if your boss said, I have to get rid of one of your co-workers or your use of editing tools - ie all editors. You either get rid of your co-worker or go back to using punch cards.

You would probably get rid of your co-worker and keep Vim/Emacs/VsCode/Zed/JetBrains or whatever editor you use.

All your example tells us is that AI tools are valuable tools.

In some companies, “one of your coworkers” have the skills to create & improve upon AI models themselves. Honestly at staff level I’d expect you to be able to do a literature review and start proposing architecture improvements within a year.

Charitably, it just sounds like you aren’t in tech.

But isn't living in a stable society, where everyone can find employment, achieve some form of financial security, and not be ravaged by endless rounds of layoffs, more desirable than having net productive co-workers?

You're forgetting that corporations have only one responsibility & it is to make profits for their shareholders.

Whereas a government's responsibility is to ensure peace and prosperity for as many of its citizens as possible. These things will be at odds when increased profits for companies no longer coincides with increased employment.

You may be overlooking the fact that the US is an oligarchy.

Can you name a present-day country which isn't?

No, not Sweden where 40% of the population have been employed in some way by the Wallenberg family and its corporations in recent times. The other Nordic countries are not as egalitarian as they are presented either.

>a government's responsibility is to ensure peace and prosperity for as many of its citizens as possible.

I've never seen the US government behave as if this was a priority. Perhaps things are different in a nordic country?

It has been a priority, but only for a certain group of citizens (which only briefly became unfashionable to legislate for explicitly)

Yes. Perhaps the OP was speaking from a dream or a theory standpoint. We know our government in the US has lost its original intent.

Yes, believe it or not some of still believe in this and vote accordingly. Aspirational, as it has always been, with the understanding that we will always fall short.

A government's main responsibility is to protect and fund itself. All the rest is secondary in real terms. I know it shouldn't be that way.

I’ll make sure to pour one out in memory of all the lamplighters, the stable hands, night soil collectors, and coopers that no longer can find employment these days. These arguments were had 150 years ago with the advent of the railroad, with electricity, with factories and textiles, even if you don’t have net productive coworkers, if there’s a more productive way to do things, you’ll go out of business and be supplanted. Short of absolutely tyrannical top down control, which would make everyone as a whole objectively poorer, how would this ever be prevented?

The difference is that back then we were talking a few jobs here and there. Now we are talking about the majority of work being automated, from accountancy to zoo keeping, and very little in the way of new jobs coming in to replace them.

By the way stable hands and night soil collectors are still around. Just a bit harder to find. We used to have a septic tank that had to be emptied by workmen every so often. Pretty much the same.

What's most useful to you is not necessarily most useful to the business. The bar for critical thinking to get staff at this company I've surely heard of must not be very high.

Why would a company pocket the savings of less labor when they could reinvest the productivity gains of AI in more labor, shifting employees to higher-level engineering tasks?

Because shareholder value is more important than productivity to leadership. Thank Jack Welch.

I am truly, both as a being and having a manager, at loss as to how a manager would ask that, and would get such an answer… what is the rationale and the expectation?

Seems like a good test to see if the person who is ask should be fired. It's a test that clearly proves they are not a team player.

here's the thing, my manager won't need to do that. windsurf swe-1 is good enough for my use case and swe-1.5 is even better. Combined with free quotas of mixed openai, gemini and claude I don't really need to pay anything.

In fact I don't want to pay too much, to prevent the incoming enshittification

"I have to either get rid of one of your coworkers or your laptop, which is it?"

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