You own your life - why not spend your own money for the things that make you and your life better?
Who cares?
I worked at a job where I had a small, crappy monitor. I made decent cash. I just bought a large decent monitor and brought it into work. I ended up using it for many years. My life was significantly better. I've done that at several jobs since then, and NEVER regretted it, in fact it was one of the soundest decisions I've ever made. Also keyboard and mouse.
There are so many people using the default keyboard, the default monitor, the default tools.
If you push work to do it for you, you need to challenge the "everone gets a dell 19" monitor" b.s. If you push your boss, he might have to do justification paperwork.
I think there's also an argument to be made that $20 per month is a bigger deal than some people realise. The issue isn't just _that one_ specific subscription you're paying for. The issue is how they all accumulate over time.. and eventually you find that your metaphorical bucket of money has turned into a leaky sieve. Not to mention all the services you forget to unsubscribe from even though they've ceased to provide enough value to you to make them worth while.
A one-off purchase is very different from making a hole in the bucket.
Obviously this all depends on how financially comfortable you are. But still.. time is money. Money you're spending today is time you're committing to work to earn back tomorrow.
Sure, but with some things, the increase in productivity pays off the price easily - you end up earning more, or working way less.
$20/mo for a subscription of NYT, or Netflix is not one of those things. But ChatGPT in many cases can save whole days of work over each month, so - especially when you're a freelancer, it will pay itself off.
I think that's the big qualifier here. The productivity paying off the price is only meaningful if your time and money are arbitrarily fungible for each other, and for most people they are not. There's a good chance they won't be able to find a way to convert that saved time into the corresponding $20+ needed to pay the bill. And if finances are tight, $20/month might be a deal breaker.
Even if you're a freelancer, if your projects have billing caps related to the number of hours you expect to work then you don't necessarily have adequate time/money fungibility. $20 a month also might not be worth the cost of going out and acquiring a new project.
But for anyone in IT or related fields? $20/month feels like a nobrainer if you're in the West.
It's like paying for Jetbrains IDEs. I'm a bumbling idiot writing Symfony and Wordpress code and PHPStorm is 150 Euros a year. It probably increases my productivity by that much per day.
If ChatGPT saves you more than 60 seconds a day, or makes you work more comfortable, it's easily worth $20.
> $20/month feels like a nobrainer if you're in the West.
I earn 2000€ per month as a C# dev in France, (assuming $1 == 1€) I just need a hundred subscriptions like that to have no money left at the end of the month. While I'll admit a 100 subs is a bit much, it's very easy to have 10 or 15.
> If ChatGPT saves you more than 60 seconds a day
Even if it saved me 4 hours a day I wouldn't be paid more.
You're not part of the target market, then.
Think of it like any other recurring service, e.g., pickup/drop off laundry. It costs way more than doing laundry at the neighborhood laundromat and doesn't save very much time, maybe a couple hours a week. But, if you don't enjoy doing laundry, and you don't have an in-unit washer dryer, it may be worth it.
If you really don't like using your brain to write, then why not spend a bit of money to offload some thinking to this service?
My point was that I'm not a rarity, not everybody makes 100k+ a year even in the "West", there are a lot of people like me that have to watch carefully what they spend.
I have 14 years experience, same job. But as I said in another comment I have aging parents that I have to take care of and I live in a small town without opportunities.
I had found a high paying job in Switzerland that was close enough but it was canceled due to Covid.
I live in Belfort in eastern France near the Swiss and German border. It's a small town, there's not many opportunities here but I have aging parents I have to take care of so I can't move.
Everything is relative. I'm in IT - in fact in a decently high paying and relevant part of it, being a devops specialist - in the West (in Italy) and I make ~1700 euros a month, and this is with 10 years of experience in the sector. I'm not getting ripped off, this is by far the highest salary I've had and I make about as much as my parents do after working for 45 years.
I still cannot afford, after house, car and living expenses, to spend 20 euros a month for an AI chat app, or 150 a year for an IDE.
For reference, I do most of my work in standard vscode with almost no plugins and/or emacs, depending on what I'm doing, on the company provided dell/windows laptop. The only subscriptions, personal or work, that I pay for are netflix, spotify, xbox game pass, nintendo online and amazon prime - and we're thinking of dropping netflix and spotify lately since they're increasing prices and lowering in value.
So you making only 1700 euros a month? Sorry I think you are getting ripped off, as a programmer in Poland/Warsaw you would make around 5k+ euros per month. Change you work you are worth much more.
edit:
This is funny just after i wrote this I've seen so many references to Poland in this thread. But yeah it's interesting as working in UK as developer in small company I was earning 2500 pounds after taxes (Liverpool). And I thought that it's a dream job back then. But it was 10 years ago. And I think I am rather average developer just on level III on 6 level scale. So right now living in Poland my wage expectation is around 6k euro as Backend Java developer.
> I'm not getting ripped off, this is by far the highest salary I've had and I make about as much as my parents do after working for 45 years.
You're absolutely getting ripped off if this a real devops specialist role (some companies use that word for manual server admins) and your employment history is not an indicator of anything. Only the market is and where are you in the salary range for a given role.
I'm an average dev from Poland (basically 1/4 GDP of Italy), working for a Polish, not international company (clients are international), having less than 10 years of documented commercial experience and I'm making about 5k EUR after taxes (converted from PLN) and I'm not even close to the cap.
At my first company I made about 500 EUR a month, and whilst the second paid me twice as much, it was still absolutely ripping me off.
You’re making 2.5x the UK average salary. That’s not what happens to an average dev in an average role here; are you a consultant or doing 100 hour weeks or have expertise in some specialist field?
The general average salary is low everywhere as most jobs don't require any kind of "higher" education, so of course devs earn more. I'm earning 4-5x of Poland's average but that's meaningless. I sure as heck don't earn more than an average UK dev, because I've worked with some of them and I know their rates.
I'm just a full-stack .NET + React developer working in a mid-sized city as a contractor (but that's complicated, because in Poland most companies basically evade taxes by hiring via contracts with the same benefits and responsibilities as regular employees).
I work up to 40hrs a week just like a normal employee.
Just take a look at one of the many job boards and search for "devops" or my role which is ".net full-stack":
https://nofluffjobs.com/pl
Most oscillate around 20k PLN gross, which is definitely a lot more than 1700 EUR.
Some rates given by devs in this thread are shocking and something isn't right.
1700 EUR net (i hope net) would be 8k PLN which is about what my car mechanic friend without a degree earns in my city... and what I earned 1 year after my degree.
It's perfectly fine to begin with, but we're talking about 10+ years of experience and that's baffling.
> But for anyone in IT or related fields? $20/month feels like a nobrainer if you're in the West.
Yes, I definitely hear you. If you're living well within your means then sure.
But on the other hand, a shocking number of Americans don't live within their means and are strapped with credit card debt. In those situations even a small number of instances of this kind of "oh, it's just $20 / month" reasoning start to add up.
> It probably increases my productivity by that much per day.
Again, this doesn't matter if you're on the edge of cash flow positivity and can't actually turn that productivity into dollars. Your employer isn't going to pay you $20 / month more because they can't measure your productivity with that much granularity.
I see what you mean, but I wouldn't compare $20 for work to e.g. $20 for Netflix Pro Gold Premium; it's business vs entertainment.
You're probably right that it's a medium-term game for employees (if their employer isn't ready to pay the $20, which I assume they would be), but you will certainly be more productive and get things done quicker than others (and probably measurably so), which should give you a good spot for a promotion or negotiations. But of course, that only really works if you derive value from ChatGPT. If it's more of a "my work is easier but not faster or better", then it won't make sense.
For me, ChatGPT also has a psychological benefit. It makes me feel like there’s someone that I can fall back on when I‘m stuck. It might be wrong (often the bot is not super helpful), but this is not about rationality.
I'm finding ChatGPT may be wrong, but it's answers are often enough to point me in the right direction - particularly when I'm working in a new domain where I'm not yet experienced enough to be able to ask google the right questions.
Previously I'd fall back to asking in a forum and getting a (tbf) much better answer a few hours or days later, but ChatGPT may be enough to point me in the right direction in a few minutes
Oh I‘m not antropomorphising. It feels more like a GPS - a tool I wouldn’t like to be without when driving unknown places.
I work mostly alone on projects, at least currently. While I have friends I can bounce back general ideas on, it‘s hard to get good feedback on a small problem that I‘d be stuck with for, let’s say, 5 minutes.
So far, the choice has been between disrupting others‘ flow (who might not even work with the tech I‘m using), or exploring the issue myself. Problem solving is certainly not a skill I want to atrophy, but figuring out framework specific intricacies is more a chore than an interesting problem. A chore I can get stuck on. And that’s where the bot often points me in the right direction.
An example: I‘m dabbling in the PETAL stack with a side project, and Ecto‘s DSL still feels foreign to me. ChatGPT is actually really good at fixing my Ecto queries and recently made the suggestion to use the „dynamic“ function. It applied the function in a slightly wrong way, but that made me read up dynamic query building, which is already bearing fruit.
I could have read all of Ecto‘s documentation and wouldn’t need the bot, but that’s out of scope right now. I‘m currently working with native iOS, Android, JS/TS (Next), Flutter, and Elixir - if I read all the documentation, I wouldn’t write any code.
Indeed. People in developing countries might learn what the public school system should have taught them, with a free private tutor that is ChatGPT or similar.
That, and the thousands of numbskulls who waste their time trying to get ChatGPT to do math problems that a $1 calculator (or worst case, free Google Sheets) could do, is the most pointless waste of computing power, and I say this as someone who remembers Flash ads.
If you really are staring at strings and wanting those letters counted, you can easily ask it to write you a Python, JS, Ruby program that will do so, and in my experience for a task like that it will NAIL that task perfectly 100% of the time, and can even explain how it works to boot!
When I tested it on subjects I knew, it gave better answers than teachers in my high school (Poland, but I guess it might be similar elsewhere in the West)
Also, a friend physicist tested ChatGPT on the basics of quantum physics and he was surprised at how much it knew.
IMHO the chat is at a level of 1st year university student - of any subject available. The only issue being that it always sounds super confident, even if it's wrong.
Let's say you make $10 / hr. To break even, a $20 tool needs to save you 2h a month. Divided over 20 workdays and it must save you 6m per day. If a tool can't save you 10-15m per day, it doesn't deserve a "throughout the day" slot IMHO.
Which isn't to say that ChatGPT fits that bill for me - I think it requires too much supervision to save time. But people are too cheap about genuinely useful tools.
For me problem with many tools is subscription model, not that I have to pay. You build your workflow around a few subscription tools, then something bad happens. You need to cut expenses. Apart from shitty situation in general, your workflow falls apart and you're unhappy about lowered standard of living, making it more probable to further worsen your life. It simply feels bad.
The monetary aspect doesn't apply for many (most?) freelancers either. I work and bill the same amount of time every day regardless of how much I achieved. Brain fog day is worth the same as an uninterrupted flow day.
It does make me more efficient which is something I do care about.
If you're paid by the hour like that, doesn't saving 2 hours per week mean you are getting paid $20 less per week?
It's the opposite. A salaried developer on an agile team commits to a certain amount of work per sprint. If they can get it done in 2 hours less time, that's a net gain for the developer.
If anyone on this site working as a Dev is making 10/hr I question whether they can even navigate to the ChatGPT website by themselves in the first place. At a real number like 50/hr you only need to save 1.2 minutes per working day for it to break even. Which is trivially easy. You could save that by having ChatGPT write your emails for you alone.
On a website where the majority of people are SWEs living in HCOL areas where their daily lunch and coffee is probably $20+ the argument against a $1/day productivity tool seems lacking.
Everything we spend money on has a price that is set by what we are willing to pay collectively. Just because you don't want to pay the price doesn't mean it's not the right price.
It's a bit amusing that we find any price objectionable considering this ChatGPT experience didn't even exist a few months ago!
With tillerhq.com, you can set up a pretty nice workflow to review your spending daily, weekly, or whatever cadence makes sense to you across all of your accounts, and it's only $79/year! :)
Why not just put all the subscriptions on one credit card and I dunno, spend 5 minutes at the end of the month reviewing the credit card statement to cancel subscriptions?
You are using a service, that must pay for infrastructure and personnel. How do you think a on-off purchase would cover it. Your salary you want every month on your account, but for the others, nah, not so important
except this is $20 a month with the expectation that it’s saving you time. it’s fundamentally different from say, netflix, where you pay for it and have to give it your time
I think the monitor example is different from the ChatGPT example.
A monitor is relatively cheap, I would own it, and it will primarily improve my life and secondarily improve my productivity.
In contrast, with ChatGPT, if I'm working on a difficult programming job, I spend X time thinking deeply and Y time actually typing the solution. A system that can type for me is convenient but it may not speed things since I can only think so fast, so many hours a day. And the situation of renting a thing for $20 isn't just a constant expense but a bit of a feeling of being beholden - the price could be and probably will be raised, there is a pressure to get value out of the thing by using it more, etc.
And there's no guarantee that a code generator will make my life more pleasant - the time saved typing may be absorbed by meetings or whatever.
It's a bit like home automation or car dongles - some people might like never throwing a switch as they walk into a room but I think fewer people would see a benefit they'd pay for since they still have to walk into the room.
This is how I'm thinking about it. If I save an hour a week, will I really clock out at 4PM on Friday and say "in the counterfactual world without ChatGPT, I would still be working, so I'm free to clock out now". No, probably not. Will I work on another task for extra hour to productivity-maxx? Also, probably not. Probably the rest of my tasks will magically expand to fill that time. Or I will spend it fiddling around with something else of dubious value. There's a whole psychological element to it. If I was a perfect min/max-er and allocated my time perfectly based on ROI, I would probably already be a millionaire by some other means.
And it's good to keep in mind, the comparison is not $20 for ChatGPT versus nothing. It's $20 for ChatGPT Plus, versus my API-hacky-solution for $2, versus ChatGPT free, for $0.
No, and it's a bit frustrating when several people explain in great detail the components of a programming day and how they combine and what the combination tendency is and then someone comes back with the same "but mah productivity". It's also typical for a certain mindset, of course.
Anyway, a counter-example is that the arguments above would not be against some broad framework that reduces both the thinking and the writing needed to construct programs - say a combination of a good programming, a good software engineering framework and a management that forced client requirements into a structured format. That sort of thing can reduce the needed programmer activity in a project on both the low and the high level and none of the arguments above object to this.
> there's no guarantee that a code generator will make my life more pleasant - the time saved typing may be absorbed by meetings
It'll be absorbed by reviewing the generated code, which you are ultimately responsible for. Is typing speed actually a bottleneck to many programmers, beyond certain point of expertise?
Seems to me like ChatGPT could assist you in the "thinking deeply" part just as much (or more) as it could help you do rote typing tasks. Or do you think your creativity is beyond its abilities?
The issue is once you buy a monitor for your work, they're then getting to rent it for free. If you need something to do your job better than they need to pay for it. You hurt yourself (financially) and you are contributing to a workplace culture where employees buy what they need. It's not just a monitor you're paying for!
To be clear, I am not judging you. You did what was good for you and took the path of least resistance, as we all do many times a day. I am just trying to answer your question of "who cares?" We should all care a lot about this!
I'm an in-house producer at a tech company. I own a lot of film and audio equipment. I made it very clear in my initial negotiation that my gear was to be used solely at my discretion that and within 12mo we will fully transition off of it. I also used it to negotiate a slightly higher salary. It would've been easier to just give it away, but then why would they ever stop? I could've easily slipped into a position where they just use all my film equipment rent free and then I am on the hook to replace it as it breaks at a faster rate. That's not right without proper compensation.
I don't care what they're getting as much as I care about what I'm getting.
If I have a nice dual-monitor setup, in a business where everyone gets a 19" Dell, I will be more productive. That will lead to more promotions, lower odds of being fired, etc. I will come out ahead. Plus, I'll be happier.
If my employer benefits too, how does that hurt me?
I haven't worked in an office in years, but in my case it's travel. The company has travel policies that are what they are. If I'm going to spend my own money and points to upgrade to travel that is outside of policy, well I'll do that. I might object if company policy were to travel baggage-class but it's really not. So I'll pay out-of-pocket here and there.
I wouldn't mind getting fired if I worked for a corporation that can't even provide proper screens for employees. Not getting equipment from employer is only acceptable for startups low on cash.
Especially when you can get half decent 120hz ones for like $400-$600 now. If they can't pony up for that then there's a lot more to the story or they are going to be a pain in the rear to deal with whenever you need resoures.
I didn't say there can't more to the story, but I'm not going to just assume they always have a good reason either. It's not a simplistic judgment, it's simply working with the information I have on hand. If they have a good reason for not giving me the resources I need to do my job better than I'm all ears. I sincerely mean that. Maybe they can't get me the $3000 thing I want, but a $1500 one instead that is a suitable compromise. That being said I'm not just going to hear "no" and then buy what I think I need for the company.
I've done a lot of work in nonprofits, education, and government domains, and this can be a bit cumbersome. My experience is that in most cases, this comes down to administrative or bureaucratic issues which make sense on an organizational level, but very little sense on an individual contributor level.
At an organizational level, it's often not so much about money as about fairness, controls to avoid corruption, IT/supplier overhead costs, or similar sorts of reasons. I've been in C-suite, individual contributor, and everything in between. To flip things around, it's often cheaper to by a standard $3000 thing than a non-standard $1500 thing. Equipment costs are much lower than labor costs.
From my perspective, given three choices:
1. Spend $2000 of my time and $2000 of my boss' time to make an exception for a $500 monitor purchase
2. Be less productive
3. Drop $500
Often, I pick #3. I like my manager, and I don't want to complicate his life over a monitor. That lets me complicate his life over more important things, by the way.
When I was a director, I'd occasionally even spend personal dollars to buy things employees needed too. Dropping $20 is often easier than making a case to expense $20.
I was a freelancer/production company owner for a decade. I worked with plenty of non-profits and such. I actually am very sympathetic to the many reasons their hands can be tied. I assure you this is not a lack of imagination or understanding.
That being said, this is not that situation. I am a salaried employee at a small tech startup. It's always either "we have the money/don't have the money" or "I don't see the point." Luckily the latter is rare because they trust my judgment. But in the case of the former, while i get it's about resources, I'm not going to make it my problem. I am not going to fund their startup with my hardware. Which is why they are reasonable with me and just change their expectations when the resources aren't there. Of course I always try to find a solution that accomplishes the goal because I want us all to succeed, but I am not going to do it the way they want if they can't pay for it and it will only happen on my own dime.
I think you're failing to make a distinction between equipment that is critical to your job and equipment that simply helps you by making it more enjoyable and comfortable. Yes, the company should buy the equipment that is critical. Could I actually do my job on a 19" monitor? Yes, absolutely. Could I do it at a desk with no personal effects or decorations? Yes, absolutely. Both the monitor upgrade and pictures of my kids are things that are worth the expense to me to make the job more enjoyable. Would it be nice if the company sprang for enormous monitors for everyone? Yes indeed, that would be something to applaud. Is it necessary? No.
My Red wasn't critical and they had a crappy camera on-hand so it's not like I couldn't have done the job, just so we are clear. I don't need my lights, or my primes, or any of my stuff. They had the very bare minimum. But it was garbage so I negotiated accordingly. And we all won in the end!
Negotiating an increased salary for the use of your capitalized equipment is a terrible use of resources. The fact that they agreed to that tells me that they detected it was a touchy subject for you and went the appeasement rout. If they cared about the equipment they would have preferred to purchase/finance it or lease it.
>The fact that they agreed to that tells me that they detected it was a touchy subject for you and went the appeasement rout.
It wasn't touchy, it was reasonable. I guarantee you not one engineer at our company uses their personal computer. It's no different than saying "I want a work computer." They were going to buy me film equipment but hadn't determined exactly what we needed yet and hadn't set aside enough resources (cash) for it yet. So this was a useful stopgap that worked for everyone. Plus it's not like I got 10k more or something absurd. It was a modest amount that made me happy and got them what they needed.
>If they cared about the equipment they would have preferred to purchase/finance it or lease it.
Wasn't for sale and neither of us wanted to get into a lease. Plus they absolutely made out like bandits if we put dollar costs on this. I was just happy to have some cash for using my gear that made my life easier while also establishing a precedent that my gear isn't there for them to joyride.
I also think a big factor is what kind of equipment we're talking about. If you expect the equipment's value to be impacted by the use, as your "my gear isn't there for them to joyride" comment touches on, this is a bigger issue. I would never use my personal computer (or expensive camera equipment) for work without some sort of compensation because that usage implies a certain amount of deterioration (physical wear/damage) and/or compromise (corporate software/policies imposed on my machine). This seems pretty negligible for a monitor.
I'm confused what you were disagreeing with me about then tbh. Sure you can argue a monitor doesn't rise to that level but clearly we agree that there is some line here, even if we don't agree on where it is.
Was I disagreeing with you? I don't think so. I was just making a distinction between the use cases since you objected to the monitor purchase by comparing it to the use of your camera.
Depends. With stuff like mice and keyboards it's really not worth bothering anyone, in my opinion. Those are personal preferences.
About monitors and larger stuff, you may argue. Employers can find and buy good ones in bulk, instead of making everyone individually spend hours being annoyed, searching and comparing and buying better equipment. Either way, for monitors the financial hit will be way less than 1% of a typical salary (okay, may depend on location, but a monitor lasts 5+ years).
I agree it has to stop somewhere. For me that would be stuff like Unity3D subscriptions, or tables, or FPGA tools and oscilloscopes. But monitors... shrug
I’ve stuck to my guns a little more lately with WFH. When they want something done on a certain time table, if there’s some resource I know that they failed to get me and need, I remind them that it’s going to take longer because I don’t have ______ when they ask “why?”
Frankly, I’ve been surprised at the results. Generally, they just say “OK” and the matter is settled and I don’t have unrealistic expectations saddled on me. It’s what I like about my company, they don’t dance around things. There’s a lot of trust and open communication. Plus every now and then they give me what I need. Because they know I’m being honest and not just trying to buy myself new toys.
> why not spend your own money for the things that make you and your life better?
Objectively, a few reasons:
- You can't afford it.
- Paying for it doesn't let you "own" anything
- It's not reliable
- It's legal compatibility is not fully decided yet
- It can preclude opportunities for learning and even teach you entirely false things under the guise they are true
The list probably goes on, but I don't think we should buy everything that stands to make our lives better. If we applied that logic to everything in our lives, we'd all use computers from Skymall and eat food we see on QVC.
> If we applied that logic to everything in our lives, we'd all use computers from Skymall and eat food we see on QVC
Pretty sure GP didn't say "completely give in to all impulse purchases and cease to use your brain about the worth of things."
I agree with GP. I bought my own monitor. It's great. It significantly improves my workday, and I get to take it with me if I quit. It generally gets two reactions: first, "how did you manage to get a better monitor than everyone else" and second, "why would you spend your money to help the company?" Not sure how something that contributes directly to my comfort while performing my job is helping the company more than it's helping me, but whatever. Seems very much like cutting off your nose to spite your face to just stick with the standard monitor to avoid "giving" the company something. Same as the folks who spend time every month filing expense reports and having corporate mobile device management profiles on their phones so they can get reimbursed $20/month for their mobile data.
I pay more than that for electricity and fuel. It's not strictly renting and there are no ad pop-ups, but it's a recurring expenditure and prices can (and did) increase. Once I use it, it's gone - I can't resell or rent it either.
It still makes sense for me to pay because I get more value compared to if I didn't.
He/She owns the monitor. But the resale is instantly 10-20% of the purchase price once opened. So we're sinking money very fast either way - through owning or "renting".
When I worked at Amazon I brought my own monitor and chair. When I was leaving I put monitor on the chair and rolled it through security and loaded it into my car. Nobody asked a question, I’m still surprised many years later that security seeing somebody removing furniture and equipment from the building just shrugged at it :)
At another FAANG people would regularly tote around Mac Pros, monitors, or full desktop towers, including packing them in their car to work from home for a day or two. Security sees so many things, that just not looking suspicious (even without a badge) is often enough.
> Nobody asked a question, I’m still surprised many years later that security seeing somebody removing furniture and equipment from the building just shrugged at it :)
Not wanting to spoil it, I’ll just say that if you haven’t seen this show then you’re in for good laugh:
I’ve always brought my chair, monitor and keyboard to office. But I found ChatGPT to be inconsistent for programming tasks, sometimes it’s just wasting my time.
The question isn't really if $20 is worth it, the question is can you get 90% of the way there for much less? It sounds like he found a way, and of course he's going to do that.
There's a big difference between a monitor that you pay and own for many years, and a $20 monthly subscription though. It's going to be really quickly much more expensive than a monitor …
I have no issues paying for thing I can use for a long time or re-sell if it turns out not being that useful, but spending money and investing time using cloud-based tools that can be discontinued by next month, thanks but no thanks.
Greek vs Roman work environment. The Greeks expected the craftsman to show up with his compliment of tools, sharpened and maintained. The Romans provided the bench, tools, and ensured they were sharp each morning before arrival of the worker. Both cultures produced marvels of design and construction.
I want a 5K 27 inch monitor but they aren’t affordable sans getting an iMac. I did buy my own 28” 4K (and we got my wife a nice 24” 4K) for work, but these are fairly affordable.
I wish I could do the same with my laptop, WFH would be better, but it is against security.
The screen is fine, but connecting doing work with something other than the company issued laptop isn't allowed. It isn't really that bad in the winter, but in the summer the fan will go off a lot, a desktop would be quiter, and I would have room for a second large monitor (right now I'm at one large monitory + 16" laptop screen).
I buy my own laptop for work. Work will give me a good one, but I want a GREAT one. It’s the one tool I need to do my job, and I’ll be using it over 40 hours a week.
It’s a few thousand dollars, but I make a comfortable six figure salary, and I think it’s worth it.
Screw that. The employer wants me to dig trenches? They provide me with a shovel. The employer wants me to do computer work? They provide me with a computer. Quality of my work will be directly proportional to quality of the tool.
Quite often there's simply no profile for certain hardware/software configurations. And yes, good luck resuscitating it once it was bricked one Friday with a surprise lay-off.
I've been lucky to be working remotely, but if I ever go back into the office, I'll be bringing
my own gear just like you.
Recently, I've been gasp paying for software. Open source and free tools have come a very long way, but paid tools can be better. Especially when those tools are used daily as part of the job.
The paid tools often have free usage, albeit with some limits, so they are still useful to the defaults.
For example, TablePlus vs SQL Server Studio. I'm not a DBA and most often just need to run a quick query or two to check things. In this regards, TablePlus is light years ahead. No need to load a dinosaur for that.
He IS spending his own money on something he finds useful-- the OpenAI API. NOT ChatGPT. He gets greater use out of the service, as the API isn't limited in its output the way ChatGPT is (no content filters), AND it's cheaper. Did you even read his comment>?
I'm the opposite. I was using my laptop's build-in screen for months. My manager had to remind at every 1:1 for months to buy a monitor until I finally did.
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.
I use my toothbrush every day but I wouldn't pay $20 per month for it.
I use my keyboard everyday but I wouldn't pay $20 per month for it. In fact, I paid around $4 total for it, as paying more would bring significantly more diminishing returns.
I use my phone every day and have used it for the past 5 years with no issue, it has brought me so much value and yet, if I draw the line, it didn't even reach $20 per month (price divided by time used), not even mentioning that I expect it to last another 2-3 years, bringing the cost down even further.
What kind of crazy value would you expect something to have in order to be worth $20/mo?
I even thought $20/month is such a cheap option. You articulated very well that $20 is indeed a lot despite something being useful everyday. It's time to revisit all my monthly $10 subscriptions and see how much they are actually delivering reasonable value.
It could be cheap, or you could be too willing to part with your money.
if it makes you more than $20 or saves you more than $20 then it’s worth it. Simple as that. That’s it. That’s the test. For some, the time they save and spend with family is “worth” $20, for others, productivity increases don’t lead to free time, while others still don’t have $20 to spend.
Fwiw I get my teeth professionally cleaned once a month and spend more than $20 on it. Because it’s worth it to me and because dental care is expensive. Toothbrushes are cheap not because they’re worthless but because they’re undifferentiated. All toothbrushes are the same. ChatGPT… isn’t.
Which toothbrush is so much better than a regular one that it would be the difference between tooth decay or not? It's mostly up to how often you brush and floss, not how many LED's your toothbrush has.
You have misread his comment. Look at the last bit:
> What kind of crazy value would you expect something to have in order to be worth $20/mo?
The implication of that is that of tootnhcare cost more than $20 a month he wouldn't do it. Which is crazy, the expected return from brushing your teeth is well above $20 a month.
I think you have misread my comment. A regular toothbrush + toothpaste costs pennies a day, add floss and mouthwash and it would still not reach $20/month. If I can take care of my teeth by using all of those costing so little, what on Earth would I gain by paying more?
Brushing your teeth takes time. If you could pay $20 p/m to get the same results from say a stick of gum (i.e., no time)...is that then worth it?
The KB "as is" makes sense. But that's a fairly generic item. Adding value / differentiation is minimal.
Phone? Maybe. Put what's your service p/m? Is one worth considering without the other?
What crazy value? At $1 per work day?? It doesn't have to be crazy. Just 5 minutes per day is breakeven (and that's generous). In many cases, ChatGPT is more helpful than the ever polluted Google SERPs. One buck a day to avoid that? With the weekends free? Perhaps not crazy value but worthy of reasonable consideration.
> Brushing your teeth takes time. If you could pay $20 p/m to get the same results from say a stick of gum (i.e., no time)...is that then worth it?
No, because I start the kettle (or coffeemaker, depending on what I want) before I start brushing. I brush my teeth while waiting for the kettle to boil.
I don't get that time back if I don't brush my teeth; I still have to wait for the coffee anyway.
> I use my keyboard everyday but I wouldn't pay $20 per month for it. In fact, I paid around $4 total for it, as paying more would bring significantly more diminishing returns.
I wouldn't pay $20 per month for a keyboard either, but I doubt that a $4 keyboard is even close to diminishing returns unless you got a really good deal. Even $100 for a decent mechanical keyboard is not much if you use it for many years.
If you really think you won't get anything out of it then no it does not make sense. I can only speak for myself, but I prefer the feel of my current keyboard over any I had previously. If you happen to be fine with the rubber dome response then sure, but mechanical has a much wider range of options. I also find it easier to clean (by taking off the keycaps) and more resistant to liquid splashes (collects under the keycaps and doesn't tend to get into the actual switches unlike my previous rubber dome keyboard where any water getting into the caps meant having to take it apart and drying the rubber layers before you could use it). But those points aren't something a cheaper keyboard couldn't inherently manage as well.
Yes, why would it be any higher? My phone plan is around a tenner a month and over the lifetime of my phone, the cost per month is definitely less than that.
People are so cheap it's ridiculous. If we ever get past people being unwilling to pay for software beyond rates of 1 cent per hour tech will blow up to 10x as big as it is right now.
Alternatively, people are tired of paying subscriptions for everything. And many SaaS actively mislead on price and employ dark patterns to make canceling difficult. It's often not worth the hassle.
Think of all the different software and tools you use daily and consider how much you would pay if they were all $20/month subscriptions. Using something daily also says nothing about the value it provides - maybe there is only marginal utility over the next best option but being free makes it worth it. SAAS vendors are so greedy it's ridiculous.
> Should almost be a matter of pride to get it for less than $20.
When you're a high schooler, yes, even Steve Jobs did it. But when your monthly salary is easily in the thousands, it's not a matter of pride to get it for <$20, it's a matter of stupidity.
> I agree, it's stupid to pay $20 for something you can get for 2 cents
> $20/mo, for the people in this situation, is not an amount of money worth thinking about.
I don't follow this logic. In this case everything that is currently sold for 2 cents can also be sold for $20, because "it is not an amount of money worth thinking about" (at least for some people).
For most use cases, normal GPT-3 provides just as good results as Chat-GPT (though Chat-GPT is a better interface). So I guess if you don't use it much, or you can use one of the less powerful versions, the pay-as-you-go model of GPT-3 is much cheaper. On the other hand, it's certainly possible to spend more than $20/month on GPT-3.
GPT3 also doesn't have the same restrictions. It might be preferable if you're tired of getting "I can't do X I'm a large language model" even if it wasn't cheaper.
Is it surprisingly? Value is not determined by frequency of use, but by the qualitative difference: if gp doesn't use it at all, would anything of value be lost?
He's a thought experiment: imagine a device that changes the scent of the air I breathe to something I find pleasant. I could use this device all day everyday for free (or on the cheap), but I will not pay $20/mo for it. Losing access to the features really isn't worth that much. On the flip side, many people pay thousands of dollars to rent machines that helps them breathe, even if that adds up to total of less than an hour of their lives - which is nor much.
I pay $80 a year for IntelliJ and that works out to waaay less than something like CoPilot or ChatGPT and is waaay more consistently useful.
$20 a month for ML tool that is only sometimes useful is a tough sell, especially in a world where a lot of people feel like $80 a year for IntelliJ is too much.
Coders are thrifty bastards, except when it comes to their personal vices in which case financial responsibility goes out the window...
I would think the big issue here is that they still make a ton of money off of you by selling your data.
Any Software as Service is deeply flawed because it is pretty much guaranteed to extract as much data from the consumer as possible. In this case, it is quite a bit worse, because it's likely close to your entire content or body of work that they will take.
So unless it becomes something that runs locally and has no networking component to it whatsoever, it's not going to be worth spending money on for many people or companies.
