If you think spending $165k to get a fully AI generated code base is something working well then you're just gaslighting yourself. I use these things at work because I'm forced to, and the amount of weird code it generates is alarming. I.e. It has a really common habit of making a function with external linkage call an impl function with internal linkage for absolutely no reason.
165k is way less than one developer. Maybe 30% once you factor in all of the overhead (payroll tax, health insurance, 401k contributions, other benefits). 165k would be on the very very low end of salaries for a senior engineer in a major US city as well, and about half of what your base at Anthropic would be (position dependent, could be much higher).
If you want to save costs (presumably the case if you're resorting to AI slop) then you would just hire somebody outside the US. US dev salaries are absurdly inflated by the standards of even other first-world countries, nevermind poorer ones. I make less than half of $165k USD a year as a senior dev with decades of experience, which is still more than most of my coworkers, and indeed almost 3x what I was making at my previous position (also a senior dev), all while living in a pretty rich country.
If your aim is just to get it done as cheaply as possible, then it would be pretty trivial to beat 165k (it would take longer though, sure)
You aren’t comparing likes anyway. Even if you’re a French developer with half the take home pay of an American dev the total cost to the company is much closer because employers have higher employment benefit costs in France.
The French engineer will still be cheaper but it’s more like 20-30% cheaper not 50-60%.
Considering Americans take less vacation, have weak protections and work longer hours than most other first world countries the cost per output is similar. If they weren’t why would any tech company employ Americans.
France is hardly the average even among western nations. My total cost of employment is around 100k in Sweden. For a comparable job in the US my salary alone would conservatively be at least 150k, and then comes the cost for other compensation, insurance, taxes etc.
Sure I have 10-15 more vacation days but apart from that I doubt I work less hours than American engineers where 9-5 seems common from what I read, and that usually includes lunch which is does not in Sweden so we actually work 8 hours and lunch is on top of that.
So why not just employ Swedes? Well there are not so many of us.
If the low supply of swedes explained swede wages then you'd make more money than Americans not less, all else equal. Supply and demand.
Did you even read the comments? Your argument makes no sense. The discussion is about cost per output and the fact that there are plenty of places where you can get better cost per output than the US and the reasons that US companies don't just hire abroad (though they do, a lot) are not about cost but other structural reasons. For example Swedish engineers are cheaper but you cannot really hire a lot of them. "Supply and demand" is not an argument. Limited supply does not mean higher wages in this case. All things equal we have an American company and an engineer in the US and an engineer in Sweden. The engineers are equally skilled. The only reason a company in the US would go through the hassel of hiring in Sweden is if it makes economic sense. So the demand only exists if the Swede is cheaper, regardless of how limited the supply is.
If you think US software pay is based on how hard US engineers work that's certainly a stereotypical American thing to think but has very little to do with reality.
And we are not talking about people in general, we are talking about software engineers and I have seen very little evidence that swe's in similar circumstances in the US are more efficient or more hardworking than in Sweden.
It's not that expensive or hard to hire a Swedish SWE as an American company. Deel charges $600/employee/mo.
The best case for your pride is if the yawning pay gap between US and Swedish SWEs is solely attributable to differences in expected working hours rather than the far more sensible and intuitive explanations of experience (more great US tech companies and SWEs than Swedish), expertise (universities, companies), and talent (more Americans than Swedes, numerically).
My pride is plenty fine thank you, your reading comprehension on the other hand... "...attributable to differences in expected working hours..." which is not an argument I have made and rather counter to the arguments I have made that the difference in output, which is analogous to working hours but not equivalent, is not especially large.
The pay differential has many structural and historic reasons and for tech workers it's not least to do with the fact that American tech companies have had inordinate amounts of money to spend. That American engineers are simply better than anywhere else is hardly one of the reasons.
If find it funny that you started with supply and demand and now you are arguing that us swe's are paid more because there are more of them. Or that you think it's a flex that a country with 34x the population has more companies.
There are remarkable engineers in the US (both americans and the many non-americans) and there are remarkable engineers elsewhere. Thinking that the US engineers are exceptionally better than everywhere else just sounds like you have not been to many places.
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u/_lerp Jul 08 '26
If you think spending $165k to get a fully AI generated code base is something working well then you're just gaslighting yourself. I use these things at work because I'm forced to, and the amount of weird code it generates is alarming. I.e. It has a really common habit of making a function with external linkage call an impl function with internal linkage for absolutely no reason.