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

Phelps McManus · 2026-04-11T17:35:32-0400

Noodleface said:
Think about a place like nvidia where jensen said if your senior devs aren't using 250k tokens they shouldn't be employed. 250k tokens is more than we have allocated for our entire couple hundred developers. We get between 100-700 tokens a month.

Something is off on your scale or maybe you are taking about context sizes? I burn through a million tokens ($3 of Claude sonnet) in around 1-2 hours, and I am fairly diligent about clearing my context between prompts. If Claude says it is compacting, that means you hit the 50k context limit, which is eating up over 50k tokens on that one prompt (50k in plus whatever compacted version comes out). They have 1mil context models and I cannot imagine the burn rate for people who use them.

Kithani · 2026-04-11T18:13:28-0400

I burned so many Chuk E tokens on TMNT back in the day

Noodleface · 2026-04-11T18:19:24-0400

Phelps McManus said:
Something is off on your scale or maybe you are taking about context sizes? I burn through a million tokens ($3 of Claude sonnet) in around 1-2 hours, and I am fairly diligent about clearing my context between prompts. If Claude says it is compacting, that means you hit the 50k context limit, which is eating up over 50k tokens on that one prompt (50k in plus whatever compacted version comes out). They have 1mil context models and I cannot imagine the burn rate for people who use them.

Maybe there's a layer of abstraction at my site I'm not privy too. Makes a lot more sense now lol

Khane · 2026-04-11T18:57:18-0400

Kithani said:
I burned so many Chuk E tokens on TMNT back in the day

This is not far off from what the future of AI is going to be. Once everyone is completely dependent on it, and most companies have replaced people who actually know how to do the job without it with outsourced, low-cost, low-IQ workers.

ShakyJake · 2026-04-11T19:41:32-0400

Khane said:
This is not far off from what the future of AI is going to be. Once everyone is completely dependent on it, and most companies have replaced people who actually know how to do the job without it with outsourced, low-cost, low-IQ workers.

I'm not so sure. Unless AI becomes good at mind-reading, it takes real skill to craft effective prompts and steer the AI correctly to get the result you want. We have some Indian contractors that appear to be using AI for their code and it's a weird mess.

Khane · 2026-04-11T19:58:42-0400

ShakyJake said:
I'm not so sure. Unless AI becomes good at mind-reading, it takes real skill to craft effective prompts and steer the AI correctly to get the result you want. We have some Indian contractors that appear to be using AI for their code and it's a weird mess.

That won't stop executives that dont understand it from outsourcing, which is already happening en masse.

TJT · 2026-04-11T20:59:52-0400

Absolutely.

Leadership has not and may not ever realize that AI is an amazing productivity booster when you already know your desired output. You are just using AI to write it 50x faster than you could ever dream of doing. In addition to writing up docs and tests because that shit sucks and devs have always been loathe to do it. With AI commenting, docs, unit tests, are all automatic now.

I think its going to take a few years to understand the negative impact of having retards with very little experience in the actual thing using AI to bridge the gap. A decade from now its likely a lot of teams out there wont even have some old dev who knows the ins and outs of C from writing it for 20 straight years. It will be the blind leading the blind.

A good analog to this is the touchscreen generation. The young bucks today who grew up on the iPhone and such have famously terrible comprehension of basic computer technology. To the extent of not even knowing what a file directory is as they simply expect some app to handle all of that for them. Something like installing a printer driver is so alien to them they do not even know where to start. While printer drivers are kinda archaic today you still have to deal with drivers in general at times. You will have this same behavior, but for software engineering.

Noodleface · 2026-04-11T22:27:31-0400

TJT said:
Absolutely.

Leadership has not and may not ever realize that AI is an amazing productivity booster when you already know your desired output. You are just using AI to write it 50x faster than you could ever dream of doing. In addition to writing up docs and tests because that shit sucks and devs have always been loathe to do it. With AI commenting, docs, unit tests, are all automatic now.

I think its going to take a few years to understand the negative impact of having retards with very little experience in the actual thing using AI to bridge the gap. A decade from now its likely a lot of teams out there wont even have some old dev who knows the ins and outs of C from writing it for 20 straight years. It will be the blind leading the blind.

A good analog to this is the touchscreen generation. The young bucks today who grew up on the iPhone and such have famously terrible comprehension of basic computer technology. To the extent of not even knowing what a file directory is as they simply expect some app to handle all of that for them. Something like installing a printer driver is so alien to them they do not even know where to start. While printer drivers are kinda archaic today you still have to deal with drivers in general at times. You will have this same behavior, but for software engineering.

If I continue my example the reason I was able to get that code ported in 20 minutes and spend a few hours making it 100% solid is because I knew both what I was doing, but more importantly exactly what needed to be done. I'm sure some execs eyes are gonna light up when they hear what I did and they'll think dollar signs.

sliverstorm · 2026-04-11T22:49:47-0400

At my company, there are two pretty direct policy shifts (one good, one mixed in my view):

A. Offshoring as a model is dead in the water. Great.

B. Leaders have already determined that the multiplier you get from Claude is exponential to the base talent of the team member using it. E.g. a mediocre dev with Claude is 2x the mediocre output, but a good/great dev is 4x, and it's 4x an already great output. See Noodle's point above. This is having a few downstream impacts:

Net reduction in headcount.
Increased desire to aggressively "reskill" (fire/hire) for quality. Get rid of 3 okay people, hire 2 good ones for +25% wage = overall productivity increase, cheaper.
Overall impact in my estimation is that traditional junior/entry level jobs are probably going to evaporate even more quickly than they did due to offshoring--or at least, the expectation from an "entry level" position is going to dramatically change.

At least in my org, I don't think I will ever hire a fulltime human for "junior dev work" ever again.

Phelps McManus · 2026-04-11T23:29:26-0400

sliverstorm said:
[*]Overall impact in my estimation is that traditional junior/entry level jobs are probably going to evaporate even more quickly than they did due to offshoring--or at least, the expectation from an "entry level" position is going to dramatically change.

At least in my org, I don't think I will ever hire a fulltime human for "junior dev work" ever again.

It does not help that work ethic amongst younger employees is generally pathetic. Like how can you work on the same boring project for 3 straight months? Especially with AI to help you plow through tough debugging problems, I do not have much sympathy for people who can’t demonstrate productivity.

TJT · 2026-04-12T05:16:36-0400

sliverstorm said:
At my company, there are two pretty direct policy shifts (one good, one mixed in my view):

A. Offshoring as a model is dead in the water. Great.

B. Leaders have already determined that the multiplier you get from Claude is exponential to the base talent of the team member using it. E.g. a mediocre dev with Claude is 2x the mediocre output, but a good/great dev is 4x, and it's 4x an already great output. See Noodle's point above. This is having a few downstream impacts:

Net reduction in headcount.

Increased desire to aggressively "reskill" (fire/hire) for quality. Get rid of 3 okay people, hire 2 good ones for +25% wage = overall productivity increase, cheaper.

Overall impact in my estimation is that traditional junior/entry level jobs are probably going to evaporate even more quickly than they did due to offshoring--or at least, the expectation from an "entry level" position is going to dramatically change.

At least in my org, I don't think I will ever hire a fulltime human for "junior dev work" ever again.

This creates a problem though. If you don't hire junior devs to learn how do you get the superstar devs you want? Everyone has to start somewhere.

M Power · 2026-04-12T07:13:40-0400

TJT said:
This creates a problem though. If you don't hire junior devs to learn how do you get the superstar devs you want? Everyone has to start somewhere.

Is AI progressing faster than the next generation is aging? I'd say yes. I guess it's only a matter of time before AI is the superstar dev you want. It will be very interesting when we see what the new Mythos AI can actually do.

Haus · 2026-04-12T07:24:09-0400

Cad said:
Granted this was late 90's but I worked in R&D for a software company back then and we had tickets for features and bugs. The R&D manager got the bright idea to track who resolved the most tickets, and in a 12 person group I was resolving like half the tickets. Like half the department came to me and told me to chill because they like not working too hard and I'm fucking it up for them.

Can't imagine that has gotten better.

Ah yes.. The Pareto Principal applies almost everywhere. Especially in "percentage of workers versus percentage of work they get done". I work in sales and see this play out time and time again, but companies never accept it. They always think "We'll just pare down the less useful 80% and do just as well"...

Morgan Freeman narrator cuts in : "It never goes just as well"

Haus · 2026-04-12T07:25:27-0400

TJT said:
This creates a problem though. If you don't hire junior devs to learn how do you get the superstar devs you want? Everyone has to start somewhere.

AI is the new Junior Dev. We have to hope it's the new senior dev before the ones we have retire.

Haus · 2026-04-12T07:32:12-0400

sliverstorm said:
Net reduction in headcount.

Increased desire to aggressively "reskill" (fire/hire) for quality. Get rid of 3 okay people, hire 2 good ones for +25% wage = overall productivity increase, cheaper.

Overall impact in my estimation is that traditional junior/entry level jobs are probably going to evaporate even more quickly than they did due to offshoring--or at least, the expectation from an "entry level" position is going to dramatically change.

This is the exact willful ignorance of the Pareto Principal which every executive pats themselves on the back for... until the collapse.

TJT · 2026-04-12T07:36:30-0400

I don't see AI doing that.

As I have said before most companies have byzantine mazes of tech debt within their infrastructure. Systems of systems that are poorly understood by everyone working at the company. Many live services that are barely documented, if they are at all. Again following the theme in this thread, AI is amazing but it only performs at the level you are at. An experienced senior dev can torque out 5x the amount of high quality senior dev work. A junior dev can use AI to create junior quality work at a faster pace.

My perspective is biased somewhat as I work on the backend only. This is in the sense that I have many things dependent on each other but they often are disjointed and do not communicate natively and just by their nature it is unlikely that will change.

In short, trusting AI to navigate a sea of tech debt and create a solution for you means you are going to have a bad time.

Khane · 2026-04-12T07:39:22-0400

Haus said:
AI is the new Junior Dev. We have to hope it's the new senior dev before the ones we have retire.

Why would we hope that?

There seems to be this major disconnect where people believe AI can be a software developer but for some reason those same people believe AI can't do whatever it is that they do in their job.

"AI will replace software devs but not me!"

AI can get trained on anything it has access to information about. And once robotics catches up, if AI actually can mimic human ingenuity and creativity, every job on the planet is in peril.

Haus · 2026-04-12T08:54:39-0400

Khane said:
Why would we hope that?

There seems to be this major disconnect where people believe AI can be a software developer but for some reason those same people believe AI can't do whatever it is that they do in their job.

"AI will replace software devs but not me!"

AI can get trained on anything it has access to information about. And once robotics catches up, if AI actually can mimic human ingenuity and creativity, every job on the planet is in peril.

I'm in sales, a supposed job that combines both technical capabilities and "soft skills" , the latter is supposedly "immune to AI" if I listen to others in my career.

But even I realize I might be LUCKY being old in that I only have around 5 years tops left in an active working career because I see that what I do can and will probably be replaced by a well trained AI within the next decade.

M Power · 2026-04-12T08:59:08-0400

Haus said:
I'm in sales, a supposed job that combines both technical capabilities and "soft skills" , the latter is supposedly "immune to AI" if I listen to others in my career.

But even I realize I might be LUCKY being old in that I only have around 5 years tops left in an active working career because I see that what I do can and will probably be replaced by a well trained AI within the next decade.

My cousin does some sort of tech sales for a web company. I think he basically sells webpage design to small/middle sized companies or something. He makes pretty good money for a job I'd think could easily be done by an automated ordering service. I looked at his competition because I was helping him with something and they all seem to just use the same templates with different colors for most of their customers. I would not be surprised if his role is automated out within 3-5 years by agentic AI.

Noodleface · 2026-04-12T09:04:41-0400

I do see a problem in hiring junior devs. I think as developers ourselves we know the benefit obviously as the hope is they grow with the teams and become senior devs themselves. But from a business standpoint where they're thinking quarterly financials at a time it makes much more sense to have a senior using AI to do the work of the junior dev.

I gave a junior dev a task that was very complicated and it's taken him quite awhile to not only figure out the solution but to learn how our code actually works at a holistic level. You know .. exactly what we'd expect for a junior dev.

I absolutely could've fixed that bug in 5 minutes if I told AI what to fix but what's our net benefit there?

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