Our team shrunk by 50% but we are serving 200% more customers. Every time a dev left, we thought we're screwed. We just leveraged AI more and more. We are also serving our customers better too with higher retention rates. When we onboard a customer with custom demands, we used to have meetings about the ROI. Now we just build the custom demands in the time we took to meet to discuss whether we should even do it.
Today, I maintain a few repos critical to the business without even knowing the programming language they are written in. The original developers left the company. All I know is what is suppose to go into the service and what is suppose to come out. When there is a bug, I ask the AI why. The AI almost always finds it. When I need to change something, I double and triple check the logic and I know how to test the changes.
No, a normal person without a background in software engineering can't do this. That's why I still have a job. But how I spend my time as a software engineer has changed drastically and so has my productivity.
When a software dev say AI doesn't increase their productivity, it truly does feel like they're using it wrong or don't know how to use it.
Of course they can - if you don't know any of the tech-stack details (i.e. a "normal" user), why can't someone else who also doesn't know the tech-stackc details replace you?
What magic sauce do you possess other than tech-stack chops?
When a non software engineer can build a production app as well as I can, I know I won’t be working as a software engineer anymore. In that world, having great ideas, data, compute, and energy will be king.
I don’t think we will get there within the next 3-4 years. Beyond that, who knows.
How big is your team? How many customers? What’s your product? Can we see the code? How do you track defects? Etc.
Part of the reason I’m struggling with this is because we’d be seeing OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. plastering these case studies everywhere if they existed. Instead, I’m stuck using CC and all its poorly implemented warts.
Companies are charged per token, which means heavy AI users deliver more and stress budgets. They recently announced significant payroll costs over the past ~3 years.
Those savings I think will partially be reclaimed by AI companies, enabling the high performers more ai model usage.
During the promo review, people will look how many projects were done and the impact of those projects.
I'm not saying it is the case, just making it apparent how unreliable it is to measure productivity by comparing what's happening at the lowest level in a company to its financials.
Imagine if Microsoft didn't invest in AI? Maybe they'd be down 50% now.
When Engineering Budget Managers see their AI bills rising, they will fire the bottom 5-10% every 6-12 months and increase the AI assistant budget for the high performers, giving them even more leverage.