Grindr CEO Says AI Is Doing the Work of 200 Engineers | Hacker News Reader

Grindr CEO Says AI Is Doing the Work of 200 Engineers

ai-updates.net

9 pointsashurandi29 comments

He may well be right, but 'more work' is rarely the answer. The key is doing 'the right work'.

In my experience of AI so far, it's really easy to just 'do more', but there's also very little value in the things people are doing. They don't make you more revenue or improve the product in a meaningful way, or even make the product better to work on. Price's Law[1] or the Pareto Principle[2], or whatever similar axiom you like, suggest that most people aren't actually contributing all that much.

If you apply AI to 'more work' you just end up with the same distribution of good to bad things - and it's highly likely that will lead to more outages, maintenance, and people burning out from the downsides. You have to make sure that the work is actually useful. That's hard, and something AI is terrible at.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%27s_law [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

> The company has used the amount of code shipped as a major indicator of engineering output. > That metric is controversial.

An important point that’s buried quite a bit down the article. Grindr seems to be measuring AI success not on features shipped or business value created, but on number of lines of code generated which seems a fairly flaky justification for such a large AI spend personally.

If you use a wrong metric you get wrong results.

Charles Simonyi Has that story about how a PM began publicly calling out engineering productivity by having them report weekly lines of code, and Simony one week put a negative number in for his line count. The PM stopped doing that afterward.

Related story about Bill Atkinson at Apple, reporting -2000 lines of code, at https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html . Perhaps that's the one you are thinking of?

It's certainly likely that it happened more than once, but I've not heard a similar one for Simonyi.

I heard this directly from someone who worked with simonyi back then, although she could have been making it up.

Alternatively, since Simonyi was at PARC, just up the road from Apple, he may have known the story and shared it, which got re-attributed, as happens in the game of telephone.

The story was from the time he was working on Microsoft Office, so after Parc in the early or mid 80s. I was actually just surprised someone who worked at Microsoft back then was still at Microsoft (I heard the story in 2009).

I'm having a tough time making the few pieces I know fit together.

When Simonyi started at Microsoft there were only 40 employees. He was the head of the then-new applications group, which I normally don't think of as being a programming job, nor one where LoC is all that relevant.

(That's not to say he wouldn't have written any code. The book "Showstopper! The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft" mentions that Cutler, the head of the NT project, wrote some of the code, but not much. And Simonyi, like Cutler, was an expert software developer.)

Wouldn't any PM for Word and Multiplan/Excel be under Simonyi? As the head, he could surely say "no" to the request, and even tell the PM to stop gathering that information, right?

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, Simonyi developed the "meta-programming" software production method in his PhD, which he brought to Microsoft. The meta-programmer does all the design work and architectural decisions, which the programmers then code up. If they get stuck, they take the problem back to the meta-programmer.

The meta-programmer doesn't actually write lines of code, or at least those LoC are much less than what the underlying programmers write, making that measurement even less relevant for someone like Simonyi who, of course, would be a meta-programmer.

Once had a coworker adding lots of safeguards to his code - that i knew would never trip - as he was measured by LOC in his prior workplace.

Software developers are famous for lamenting the high time preferences of business forcing them to make poor engineering decisions. The dynamic is common.

Therefore one should not expect higher quality out of many businesses using AI, but you should certainly expect such businesses to highly value AI. The arguments in favor of quality didn't seem to work before, I don't think they will now.

Yep. If your bosses don't care about the quality of the product then there's no reason for you to care either. Make the AI vibe code slop and ship it. That is what the people signing your paychecks actually want you to do.

I’ve never worked anywhere where there isn’t at least 3 times more work to do than there is time and developers to do it.

But when you do that extra 200% of work, would that give you a better output from a business point of view?

IMO I’m getting a lot of small stuff done that I wouldn’t have touched previously. It’s a little bit nicer for users but I would say the difference is marginal

Of course not - and, in fact, ruthless prioritisation almost always makes for a better product.

AI can also do the work of 500 Grindr CEOs.

No way Grindr needs 200 engineers.

Especially considering the quality of the app and how long bugs last.

Article is light on details but the premise is something I’ve seen playing out for series A and B companies. Head-counts that were growing as some pretty stable function of revenue growth having a sharp trend change starting about 6-9 months ago.

When AI start to do the activity of 200 Grindr users I'll get more concerned.

This article itself is AI slop, of course this is not surprising coming from a website called "ai-updates.net" which I get the impression that might be entirely vibe coded too.

I feel that maybe in the future HN will have to implement a "low quality AI" flag or something(if it has aleady I'm not aware).

You can already flag threads

I bloody hate the linkedin speak that is used in this article. I am sort of glad that a lot of AI articles use such language, since I was repulsed by it before AI was a proper thing, I don't have to update my filters :))

And what do Grindr engineers think of that?

Only takes 300 data centres worth of compute.

this article is just 2 sentences turned into multi page slop using ai lol

Does anyone actually believe a 2.5x engineering productivity gain is sustainable once the maintenance bill arrives?

Oh, another situation where a CEO makes an assertion that quantity is a more important metric than quality? I suppose the high level humor in this is considering the nature of the app itself. Not part of the target market but still rather side eye concerned this could end poorly for the users if the CEO isn’t very concerned with, em, protection.

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