Empirically, we likewise don’t seem to be living in the world where the whole software industry is suddenly 5-10 times more productive. It’ll have been the case for 1-2 years now, and I, at least, have felt approximately zero impact. I don’t see 5-10x more useful features in the software I use, or 5-10x more software that’s useful to me, or that the software I’m using is suddenly working 5-10x better, etc.
Diminishing returns! Scaling laws! One concrete version of “5x productivity” is “as much productivity as 5 copies of me in parallel”, and we know that usually 5x-ing most inputs, like training compute and data, # of employees, etc, more often scales logarithmically instead of linearly
that’s not how productivity ought to be measured—it should measure some output per (say) a workday
1 vs 5 FTE is a difference in input, not output, so you can say “adding 5 people to this project will decrease productivity by 70% next month and we hope it will increase productivity by 2x in the long term” … not a synonym of “5x productivity” at all
it’s the measure by which you can quantify diminishig results, not obfuscate them!
...but the usage of “5-10x productivity” seems to point to a diffent concept than a ratio of useful output per input 🤷 AFAICT it’s a synonym with “I feel 5-10x better when I write code which I wouldn’t enjoy writing otherwise”
Diminishing returns! Scaling laws! One concrete version of “5x productivity” is “as much productivity as 5 copies of me in parallel”, and we know that usually 5x-ing most inputs, like training compute and data, # of employees, etc, more often scales logarithmically instead of linearly
that’s not how productivity ought to be measured—it should measure some output per (say) a workday
1 vs 5 FTE is a difference in input, not output, so you can say “adding 5 people to this project will decrease productivity by 70% next month and we hope it will increase productivity by 2x in the long term” … not a synonym of “5x productivity” at all
it’s the measure by which you can quantify diminishig results, not obfuscate them!
...but the usage of “5-10x productivity” seems to point to a diffent concept than a ratio of useful output per input 🤷 AFAICT it’s a synonym with “I feel 5-10x better when I write code which I wouldn’t enjoy writing otherwise”