IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

Interestingly I am part of the effort to understand AI costs and outputs for the company's AOP this year.

Finance is very very aware that we are on sweetheart deals with all of the AI companies right now but they are looking to project real $$ material gains from using AI vs its costs right now. While I think AI is extremely useful in various spots the increases in productivity certainly exist but many of them are not as exponential as you would think. We have a few production AI agents used across the company to do various tasks that have been identified as eating up significant time in the company. The agents have done well at just doing this for us as you go into ChatGPT and access the agent and it will retrieve things like specific invoicing, customer product usage, and other things and quickly summarize them.

While useful this ultimately ended up saving 50 man hours a month approximately. This isn't nothing, but it isn't replacing an entire person's salary either. When it comes to AI for coding it is 100% true that AI makes the coding part faster than it used to be. However if you look beyond that the majority of a senior engineer's time is not really spent heads down coding. It's researching and understanding before you actually execute it by writing the code to do whatever. AI's biggest and most advantageous gain according to our metrics is rapid POCing of unfamiliar technologies. Reducing the research time spent to narrow down the right avenue of development. As well as faster code completions in commits.

But not reducing overall feature development time by 50% or anything.

Noodleface said:

How are they cooling? If it's water cooling there could be infrastructure implications

Click to expand...

This. Once they buy off all the local pols, they will essentially be at the front of the line for water and power. Expect both of those bills to triple within a years time. They won't do anything for the local economy, since what few physical humans they have that work there will be mostly Poos and some security guard types. And when they decide to ramp up (after they get their hooks in all the right local pockets) the entire situation will get exponentially worse, but now with construction. Source: Close friends in Utah.

Got to Interview Round 2 with a Fintech company. Hybrid role but the office is only like 20 minutes from my house and it will be an absolutely massive raise if I get the job. I have certifications in every piece of their tech stack and have been using all of that day in and day out for the past 7 years now.

The hiring manager is not a streetshitter so I think I have at least some chance here. Staff level position. If anyone in the hiring chain is a poo I write the opportunity off as a loss and will never happen.

After round 1 the guy said they'd get back to me in a few days. Ended up scheduling me for round 2 within an hour of it which I take as a good sign considering.

On actual IT work I am currently tasked with designing a FEDRAMP solution for our data stuff. While its academically interesting boy is it gay. It has to be completely parallel and in our case a number of our backend services were not certified for FEDRAMP so we have to redesign them with enough features to get by. Only American citizens are allowed to work on it so I have to do this with the assistance of one of my team members (the other US citizen being useless and the rest in India) and one guy from the data science team.

The MVP for this will be better than nothing and that is about all I can say that is good about it. It will take years to catch up with our commercial parity in terms of features.

Live footage of an actual COBOL development team...