Hacker News Reader

Comment by Aachen | Hacker News Reader

'only'? A web developer did not cost 12*30=360$ an hour in 2015, and that's assuming that going "ugh, whatever. I'll just hide the problem with overflow:hidden instead of finding the underlying cause" takes him or her 2 minutes and isn't already the dev's initial reaction

Another way of looking at it is using as much electricity as a normal person in a high-income country uses across ~3 days to add overflow:hidden in the end. Of course, the path to get there did a lot more, but you don't know that beforehand if you don't take a quick peek and make an architectural decision about what the solution should be that gets implemented

View on HN

It'd be $8.52 in 2015 dollars, but certainly they are the ones who mentioned the $12 amount not you, so I'll put that aside.

Far more importantly, you would not get billed for 2 minutes of work for this if you paid a developer to fix it. At best, half hour increments for the fix. But more likely, for the full hour. Also, in this comparison, the consultant is on call every day, morning, afternoon, evening, for whatever you wanted and will jump on the job immediately.

...and won't mind if you change your mind. And again. And again. And again for as long as you care to iterate your design, experiment with a business user over your shoulder, etc. etc. etc. People routinely avoid throwing away work because they get emotionally attached to it, even if they get paid by the hour. LLMs just do as they are told, and thats worth a lot.

Did OP get called to fix this bug and bill in half-hour increments for it? I was assuming the scenario where it's a hired developer doing their thing as part of their regular workday (they write "I noticed a glitch"), writing a new feature and noticing the problem as they look at what they made

In an expensive consultant scenario where this is the only thing they need to do that day for this customer, yeah sure if you can ask a computer to replace a whole billing cycle then that is cheaper, at least when ignoring the climate externalities that come due later (idk how to price that in)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com