Why didn’t the boss ask the AI for the charts to begin with?
Everyone’s income is going to be below average, because they got fired.
No one has ever differentiated themselves based on how good of a ticket taker they are. Coding especially on the enterprise dev side where most developers work has been being commoditized since 2016 at least and compensation has stagnated since then and hasn’t come near keeping up with inflation.
In 2016, a good solid full stack, mobile or web developer working in the enterprise could make $135K working in a second tier city. That’s $185K inflation adjusted today. Those same companies aren’t paying $185K for the same position.
My one anecdote is that the same company I worked for back then making $125K and some of my coworkers were making $135K just posted a position on LinkedIn with the same requirements (SQL Server + C#) offering $145K fully remote.
I 100% agree here.
AI has been a huge boon for me personally, because I stopped spending most of my writing code years ago. I was reviewing code, writing procedures, handling incidents, and generally just looking for pain points across the entire company and solving them before they became critical.
Those skills have transferred directly to working with AI.
I might not agree with the point, but I can see that idea that many things just need to be "good enough" (which we might define as "average") and we save our real expertise for the things that really matter.
s/average/median
But it is useful to question whether that is true in all cases. The cases that aren't normal-distributed might be exactly the cases where it pays off to be neither average or median
Though usually "average" implies arithmetic mean.
the other being how well the ai can use it, and how ai SEO-ed you are.
vercel and next.js for isntance are absolutely loved by claude
That's like saying 'cars were better made in the 1950's because they used tons of steel'. Like they were 'heavier and more robust' - but that doesn't mean better.
Foundations are way better, more robust, especially weatherized. Windows today are like magic compared to windows 100 years ago.
What we do more poorly now is we don't use wood everywhere, aka doors, and certain kinds of workmanship are not there - like winding staircases, mouldings - but you can easily have that if you want to pay for it. That's a choice.
AI is power and leverage, it will make better things as long as it's directed by skilled operators.
The precision of how the wood or material meets is worse (when cut at the site). There is a huge amount of sloppy work in modern construction.
It seems to me that in the past there probably was lots of shoddy workmanship and just no-one paid attention to it.
But I have no proof of that.
You have to get a representative sample, that's the tricky part.
So there's that!
And we can accommodate for 'selection bias'.
We have all of the historical evidence we could ever want for 'how things were built', basically 'infinity examples'.
I think some things were more robust, particularly some of the old framing, like in Europe, with non load-bearing walls etc. Those will stand for 1K years, but arguably unnecessary.
The people who need to be above average and exceptionally are senior management and maybe a few bright sparks in middle management. Most of the value-add happens there that builds social machines that then do the work.
> If average is all we need, then anyone can do it.
Pretty much, yes. That is why the range of salaries on offer is pretty compressed compared to the range of returns capitalists get.
That is the dream. Upper management can get software made without talent.
But is seems to be the greatest ideas in the last 30 years didn’t start in board rooms. They started with a couple coders creating a new idea.
No boardroom could have invented Google. It was so fundamentally different than what other search engines were doing.
We have this myth that upper management is so important. It is as the business grows in size, they are excellent for coordination. But ideas come from people closer to the problems.
You might want to try a different example, that one rather undermines the point you're trying to make. PageRank [0] was developed by Page & Brin as original research/based on the work of other people who weren't employees.
How stable that is on the long term, I don't know any more than the next guy, but it is where I'm contributing now.