alt Hacker NewsIf average is all we need, then anyone can do it. What value do I add? How does an employee differentiate themselves?
Why didn’t the boss ask the AI for the charts to begin with?
Everyone’s income is going to be below average, because they got fired.
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For that matter, how does a business differentiate themselves, if people can write their own software? While we're busy trying to replace our employees with AI, our customers are trying to replace our products with AI.
At any tech company with leveling guidelines that I have seen, promotions above mid level have never been based on “I codez real gud”. It’s always been based on scope, impact and dealing with ambiguity. It’s stated differently in different companies.
No one has ever differentiated themselves based on how good of a ticket taker they are. Coding especially on the enterprise dev side where most developers work has been being commoditized since 2016 at least and compensation has stagnated since then and hasn’t come near keeping up with inflation.
In 2016, a good solid full stack, mobile or web developer working in the enterprise could make $135K working in a second tier city. That’s $185K inflation adjusted today. Those same companies aren’t paying $185K for the same position.
My one anecdote is that the same company I worked for back then making $125K and some of my coworkers were making $135K just posted a position on LinkedIn with the same requirements (SQL Server + C#) offering $145K fully remote.
The power saw makes average cuts, it didn't disemploy carpenters, we just made better homes.
That isn't a sane starting point; if a corporation's strategy is to only hire above average employees they're going to fail. Enron springs to mind. Corporations generally take average people and give them a reasonably well defined scopes of simple work to complete that adds value. The bigger the corporation the more difficulty they have handling even the standard deviation above average differently to the one below; almost everyone just becomes a human resource to be swapped around based on social factors.
The people who need to be above average and exceptionally are senior management and maybe a few bright sparks in middle management. Most of the value-add happens there that builds social machines that then do the work.
> If average is all we need, then anyone can do it.
Pretty much, yes. That is why the range of salaries on offer is pretty compressed compared to the range of returns capitalists get.
The average of quality isn't always available in all people.
Reducing the amount of time I spend on the average code has meant I'm spending more time adding my above-average contributions to the code base. Amdahl's law, basically. Reducing the amount of time spent on one task means the percentage of time spent on the others increases.
How stable that is on the long term, I don't know any more than the next guy, but it is where I'm contributing now.
Not everyone can be average. Half of people will be below average.
I might not agree with the point, but I can see that idea that many things just need to be "good enough" (which we might define as "average") and we save our real expertise for the things that really matter.