Hacker News Reader

Comment by extr | Hacker News Reader

This was more true a few months ago but Fable has improved the situation considerably.

Also just remember - minimalist code looks and feels great but customers do not read your code. I have caught myself many times providing "corrections" to abstractions that were already ~fine, just not perfect. The average SWE costs $200/hr. Careful you don't burn $50 worrying about code that will likely be rewritten or can be better abstracted when that's actually needed.

View on HN

> The average SWE costs $200/hr

This is a pointless quibble but the hourly rate claim is not true--it's like ~$60 in the USA [0]. Maybe you meant at a specific Org but this is important context when comparing "pricing" between human and AI.

[0] https://www.salaryexpert.com/salary/job/software-developer/u...

$15, where we're going.

Federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour

How is this not true? Taking a Senior SWE @ ~$200K, even just the base salary cost / 2080 working hours is $100/hr. Fully loaded employer cost + accounting for non-coding time gets you to upper 100s easily.

Even for a junior making $100K, I have a hard time believe their time is worth less than $75/hr or so.

Edit: Fine, "Senior" is not "Average". But naive salary is not the true numerator.

Company time != Pay rate, if you're working somewhere that's publicly traded check out "revenue per employee" metrics sometime.

   I have a hard time believe their time is worth less than $75/hr or so.

In many places in Europe it is.

Western Europe is mostly consultancy, and the rate paid by client is usually higher, and doesn't matter if it's eastern Europe, Portugal or even India.

It is. And the quality is on par with any us eng. People here forget that the big comp packages are a minority even in the US. The cost tho is much higher than just salary.

Of course, the SWEs making that much (over 200k) are not representative of the broader field. That's the point.

Pay hits a ceiling, and that ceiling is moving lower regardless of experience. That has nothing to do with AI, but what the market will bear. Hiring counts of humans must increase no matter what. Moving some of the spend to AI reduces the risk of hiring less qualified employees they might have rejected a decade ago.

Wages at the top end are stagnating to subsidize this. That's undeniable.

I hire contractors for a large enterprise in the US. The going rate is typically $85-$100/hr for a senior dev, depending on specialization. Lead-level maybe $120 for the right skill set.

An MBA's rule of thumb is that a full time employee's hourly cost to a business is at least 1.5x to 2x times their salary depending on employer taxes, benefits, offices, travel, training, hardware, perks, etc.

Minimalist code is necessary to keep AI agents working well for longer than a month on a system IME. At a certain point, their own machinations overwhelm them and they both slow down, and make worse and worse decisions.

> The average SWE costs $200/hr.

And this is how I find out I'm woefully underpaid.

Whatever you are making this year as SWE you'll be making less next year if the current trend in improvement of AI coding aids is going to be sustained. Think about it : programmers used to derive a lot of their value from the fact that it was a hard skill to acquire. My kids can now 'vibe code' stuff faster (and better looking) than what I could come up with as the beginnings of a design plan. And then I still need to implement it.

There's a massive difference between your kids vibe coding something and an engineer using AI to implement something. If you're unable to discern the difference, that's something to reflect on :)

It doesn't matter if GP is able to discern the difference, it matters if your CEO is forced to care about the difference.

CEOs will always want someone who knows to implement so we're safe from kids vibe coding their way in but in a short while it becomes AI who knows who is managing less expensive AI.

If he is unable to discern a difference, then a paying customer almost certainly won't.

We're entering a market of lemons in software. It's going to be interesting indeed.

That "cost" includes all the overhead provided by the company: benefits, rent for offices, utilities, equipment, etc. The average SWE is not taking home anything close to that, outside of Silicon Valley and a few other limited areas.

You might be paid $100/hr but it costs the employee $200/hr. It’s worth mentioning because cost to the company is not just your salary, but the taxes, pension and contributions on the other side, plus a variety of other things that the employee doesn’t consider.

Also, you can probably think about it like this:

"Will I benefit from this code being minimalist before [date]", where [date] is whenever you think the agent will be good enough to come back and make the corrections you would make today.

I'd caution that some corrections become harder to make over time, rather than easier. A bad architecture now can become much harder to fix once other things have grown up around it.

Even as a self-contained unit, you can't step in the same river twice, and on [date] some important details may have seriously faded, both in terms of text that can be mined and also in terms of human "why did we do that" and "what was the reason we did it this way and not that way" etc.

The average SWE makes $400k a year? Are you being serious?

Costs, not makes. That includes employer taxes, benefits, offices, travel, training, hardware, any perks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com