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Comment by sdevonoes | Hacker News Reader

Im your CEO. I see you and the rest of your peers have doubled your productivity in the last 2 months because of claude. Good job! Now since we don’t really need to go that faster, ill fire half of you so I and my investors friends can make more profit.

Now of course, you may think you are such a good engineer that companies will kill for you… perhaps that’s true now, but its not true for 90% of the engineers out there. And as the pool of engineers gets reduced, the chances of you being not as good as you thought go up. So the real question is: can you (we all) still make a good living by not using llms. You know support each other and fuck the higher ups? No, we cant. Wwe are full of ourselves, full of elitism (this is HN). We are rational folks, we believe in numbers, in data; we know what we deserve. fuck the rest. The ones who win are the higher ups, of course, not us.

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I understand and share your concerns but (without thinking I'm such a good engineer that companies will kill for me), I just don't share your conclusion.

To me, it's pretty simple. I have things to do. This makes it easier for me to do those things. Sometimes that means I can do more things, and sometimes it means I can spend less time on my work, and often both.

I have no idea what the future will hold. But to me, it would be very odd to avoid using extremely useful tools for my current work, because of that uncertainty about the future.

That’s fine. Some people cannot (don’t want to) think about the more profound consequences of their actions. No one likes to stop for 10min and think deep about what they are actually doing. The easiest path is always to stay in “robot mode”: my boss pays me $ for my job… therefore I need to satisfy that contract. No time to think”

No, see, this is the disconnect. Whatever happens with this in the future is not due to "the more profound consequences of [my] actions". Whether I choose to take advantage of these useful tools, or not, has absolutely no bearing on the hypothetical future consequences you're suggesting may come to pass.

If you're proposing an organized boycott, I would certainly entertain that proposal. But for me, the bar would be high for both certainty that the hypothetical consequences are likely and bad and that the boycott would have a chance of being effective.

At this particular moment, I'm pretty skeptical on both counts. And I'm flatly against the kind of vibes and guilt tripping driven "boycotts" that you're attempting here.

(And I'm way more bullish on the normal legislative and regulatory processes. I think organized boycotts are something to think about if those processes fail.)

> Good job! Now since we don’t really need to go that faster, ill fire half of you so I and my investors friends can make more profit.

Is this a thing? Are there companies out there that don't want to go faster?

The market can sneeze and suddenly there's a wave of hiring freezes, sounds plausible to me.

In reality, I think it's more likely that the lay-offs will be when the marginal rate of growth slows down. Once executives see that growth doesn't change much when hiring, they stop hiring, and once they see that growth doesn't decrease much when firing, they start firing.

There's still an opportunity for engineers to eat their bosses lunch and just start their own company. It's never been easier to start a lower cost competitor.

Employment isn't a social law of nature: it's a transaction of money for "units of work", just like the business might have with other vendors. Governments should be making it easier to become a vendor.

So now your competitors go twice as fast as you. Good luck with that.

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