Restated, I’m not saying we’re hiring more or less because of LLM AI productivity changes. I’m rejecting the idea we need less people for all the previous reasons stated and my own two cents that we’re yet to see the reduced work hours Keynesian economics predicted as output per hour increased. We humans just keep working the same hours even if that hour is massively more productive.

This last point is well studied and not my own original thought. I’m just poorly regurgitating college level Macro Economics.

My own point I’ll add here is we’re not seeing companies bragging about their two day work weeks.

My personal experience with layoffs is that it’s all been financial engineering and the lack of nearly free financing that we had in the 2010s, again in the Pandemic, CapEx tax changes last year, and/or over hiring similar to but not nearly as massive as Google and Facebook. I worked for a European company that hired a dozen Americans to become more “US Tech Company” like and eventually let us all go two years ago once the fun money ran out when rates increased. They did a little bit of the AI babbling but realistically they couldn’t get the financing to keep it all rolling.

The companies reducing to one developer for a product are likely not doing this because of LLM AI work but likely will survive better because of it.

To your point, I’m actually living it and it’s nothing to do with AI. One of my teams was cut to 25% of its size a year ago and the whole QA team let go. Roughly this was an EBITA play. Basically the only way we get anything done is by doing what I mentioned in my earlier post where the front end dev uses LLMs to build a prototype backend they can use to support their front end expertise and the back end dev does the same for the front end. Eventually they meet in the middle and I can juggle some of the KTLO myself. Is this fun? Absolutely not. If we had the headcount back we’d be able to meet the ‘25-26 roadmap but instead we’re doing 40% of it.

I don’t see Keynes’ theory we would all be working drastically fewer hours per week suddenly materializing due to AI. As always we’re just going to try to output more in the same time. The fact I, a manager, can “vibe code” some bugs away between meetings does not mean I will benefit from having one less dedicated engineer.

When my brother was at the end of his run fighting cancer he felt a bit under the weather and managed to catch covid so everyone figured he was feeling bad due to that. The PET scan showed he had thousands of small masses converging into the large mass that eventually killed him by cutting off blood flow to his kidneys. His cancer was an aggressive blood cancer that had stood up to conventional and Trial Chemo drugs. There was no way to treat this but other cancers that are less aggressive can be treated at this point and would be treated differently than a single mass.

In a nutshell it’s that level of visibility that makes PET scans worth it.

I’ve consulted at some places that should have been licensing Dicker Desktop and I just skipped the workflow headaches and used Rancher from the start with the compatibility aliases installed. A lot of places are simply unaware.

At one place there wasn’t and at the other it wasn’t well managed. I agree from a compliance point of view and have advocated for this but I was not on the IT/Ops side of the business so I could only use soft power.

The CTO at the first company had a “zero hindrances for the developers” mindset and the latter was reeling from being the merger of five different companies. The latter did a better job of trying to say the least but wasn’t great about it. Outcome was the same none the less.

At two places I worked their reps reached out to essentially ensnare the company in a sort of “gotcha” scheme where if we were running the version of Docker Desktop after the commercial licensing requirement change, they sent a 30 day notice to license the product or they’d sue. Due to the usual “mid size software company not micromanaging the developers” standard, we had a few people on a new enough version that it would trigger the new license terms and we were in violation. They didn’t seem to do much outreach other than threatening us.

So in each case we switched to Rancher Desktop.

The licensing cost wasn’t that high, but it was hard to take them in good faith after their approach.

https://www.osnews.com/story/140868/macos-15-0-now-unix-03-c...

I can’t say this affects me in any way I’m aware of, but the perception presented here is interesting.

However, depending on how you procure this hasn’t been the experience for over 20 years. By the time you’re done with CDW or whomever is your VAR, you’re not comparing a $600 basic PC laptop to a $1200 basic Mac Laptop. They know you’re like the GP and going to pay $1500 minimum and are probably game for $2000. They sell the “Business” line with whatever terms added.

When I did this in K12 in the late 00s the price for a truly terrible Dell or IBM/Lenovo was the same as an iMac.

For the corporate world there have been times you couldn’t get Virtualization support, hardware dock ports, and various other bits of support until you moved to buying the “Business” line and after a certain number of units the direct to retail options send you down the VAR path. There’s simply too much money involved for them to make it easier for you.

I have not had to deal with this as a buyer since 2019 but the song seems to be the same as I work for a company that sells through CDW. Per the reps, the same stupid games are being played.

The only times I haven’t had to deal with this is when the companies I’ve worked for just hand you a credit card to walk down to the Apple Store or are using Apple’s program which is basically the same thing but comes with a shared App Store account and some better support for swap outs.

Note for the uninitiated: That figure is not even impressive or competitive with competition lifters. This is just “guy who put in the time and work” numbers.

In general YouTube is a good resource. There are a lot of respected coaches that also produce content.