No. I'm a salaried employee. Marginal time/effort savings do not directly translate into more money for me. But the $20 charge hits my bank account today. Perhaps if I use it consistently enough and in smart enough ways I will be perceived to be a more valuable/productive employee, which might translate to a raise. But that's a lot of maybes. I'm sure it will get to that point eventually, but by then the value will be undeniable and my employer will pay for the subscription. Until then, I will continue to use the free version, or pay-per-use with the API, or just use google.
A cool trick is to go to system preferences and reduce cursor speed to the lowest possible. This way you make sure you're not working faster than what you're paid for.
Or as you used a non sanctioned tool in a corporate environment with murkiness around IP and copyright and quite likely exposed confidential information to a 3rd party you get disciplined or fired.
And not for nothing you probably will have better luck scoring a promotion by spending $20 a month on doughnuts for the team than on ChatGPT.
There's a lot of people who have cheated in life an not been punished for it. Many people just get promoted.
If you're contracting agency, it could be in your explicitly laid out in the contract that you might use information from 3rd party sources such as Google, Stack Overflow, and yes ChatGPT.
Yep sorry I wasn’t thinking of chatgpt specifically when I wrote that so much as AI assistants in general. Def everything you said need to be considered.
The odds that this will be the difference all other variables held the same strike me as unlikely. I've used it a lot for programming in my personal time and get where he's coming from. It's fun and cool but didn't spike my effectiveness at programming enough vs. just googling things that I'd expect it to be noticable when reviews come around
No. I'm a salaried employee. Marginal time/effort savings do not directly translate into more money for me.
I am also a salaried employee and if I can save a minute of work time that’s one less minute I have to work.
I have a body of work I need to complete and sometimes that takes me 40 hours and sometimes much more.
The only way I can think of that $20 per month for increased productivity doesn’t help is if your company’s metric of success is being present/working 8 hours per day.
Most jobs require you to be available for 8 hours. So you can't work hyper productively and then quit for the day at 2PM. You need to show up for the 4PM meeting as well as the continuous storm of incoming chats.
This is why productivity improvements feel so meh. For people that are hyper competitive and ambitious, it's a way to tackle more and bigger challenges. Fine.
For others though, the benefits do not really materialize in meaningful ways. Maybe you can win some slack/recovery time, but it's not really truly free time. You're still working and on call.
In fact, in quite a lot of teams being productive is actively punished. Say that in agile you do a great sprint, and execute 10 story points instead of the normal 5.
Nice. Oh...so you can do 10? 10 it is then for all the future sprints. Without a pay increase, obviously.
For people that are hyper competitive and ambitious, it's a way to tackle more and bigger challenges. Fine.
I agree that hyper competitive and ambitious people might do this. I would add though that curious and passionate people will also do this.
I'll be honest... if I weren't getting paid to be a software engineer I'd do it for free. Like I did when I was 13 years old with my 300 bps modem creating a BBS program.
This leads me to do all kinds of crazy things like work 6 hours on a Saturday because I am quite simply fascinated about the level of engineering I can do to turn an 18 hour batch process into 4.
It's been extremely lucrative for my career. I'm fortunate to work somewhere that is truly pay for performance. But not in a million years is that why I do it.
> The only way I can think of that $20 per month for increased productivity doesn’t help is if your company’s metric of success is being present/working 8 hours per day.
You don't need to complete the work. Your employer needs you to complete the work. If your employer gives you tools that make you work less optimally, they get less optimal work in return.
Exactly. It's entirely employer's responsibility to provide tools and equipment for the work, except perhaps stuff that you can keep, like tables, chairs and screens for home office. Only freelancers/entrepreneurs should pay for something like ChatGPT with their own money.
Maybe! They already expense Copilot, so I don't think it would be too out of bounds. I haven't asked yet, considering this just came out today. I'm guessing they will allow it, the marginal ROI calculation actually makes sense from an employer perspective.
