What a $100K Employee Costs Me Now

I Finally Have a Team

I'm bringing a project back to life that went dark last year. Funding dried up, we never reached a real launch, and it's been parked ever since. Now it looks like it may be coming back. And the wild part isn't the project itself. It's that I was able to clone all the repos, have my AI team analyze them, and get back up to speed almost immediately.

It's so weird that suddenly, without any real extra money, I'm the lead of a team. My team. It's like I've got employees that I don't have to pay for. Not really. Everything costs money, but the cost of having a team of junior engineers that do whatever you tell them to do, and think and work faster than senior engineers, and learn faster than senior engineers? It's wild.

I always imagined the cost of a human was just too high. You'd have to increase your income enough to pay for a junior developer, and you'd have to get somebody really junior. You're not going to be able to afford anyone who already knows anything. And then once you teach them stuff, you better hurry up and make use of them because they're going to be able to get more money from somebody else once they can say they've got any experience at all.

Why Is It So Hard to Hire?

Most people will just show up and expect that you've got a simple job that you can tell them to do, and that's exactly what they're going to be doing every day. When it turns out the job is learning things, their brain just shuts down. They don't know what to make of it. Or when you try to hire them like contractors and say, look, this is what productivity looks like, and until you can learn how to do that, you're not going to get paid. That doesn't work either, because most people will say no, I need to be on a clock for every minute of my time.

The truth is, they're getting more value out of me than I'm getting out of them. I'm getting no value out of them for like a year. Maybe in 6 months I can train them enough that they're actually making me money or saving me money, but I'm going to be investing in them, and really, they're going to be learning more from working under me than if they were paying for school. This is really an apprenticeship is what it is. And they want me to pay competitively? Like, compete with what Taco Bell pays?

But what is Taco Bell giving you that's of any real value? The only thing you're going to learn at a fast food restaurant is how to work at a fast food restaurant, and any of them can teach you how to do it in a day. It's repetitive, it's redundant, it's stressful, and it doesn't pay a lot. You're not going to learn anything on any day, no matter how long you work any of these minimum wage jobs, that you couldn't learn on day one.

We've all got bills to pay. If you want to make this work, you're going to have to juggle multiple things. You may have to keep that part-time job and work both. You may have to stay up late while you're tired and your favorite show is on. The most heartbreaking thing is when your kids want to spend time with you, and you're going to have to make a choice: okay, I'm only going to spend 30 minutes with my kids today, we're going to have dinner, and apart from that, I've got to get to work. That's the only way to break through.

The Tidal Forces of the Singularity

No one has any idea how things are changing right now. I talk about tidal forces of the singularity. That metaphor we use, the AI singularity, the deeper you dig into it, the more it actually works. First of all, there's no turning back. Once we've crossed the event horizon, it is physically not possible to go back. You have to go through. And the danger is not so much what's on the other side. We have no idea what's on the other side. The danger is in the tidal forces.

The analogy that's often made is horses when cars were invented, or lamplighters when electricity came along. The horse manure companies were booming in the cities right before cars were invented. They had a lot of job security, they were in high demand, they could command high pay. Then suddenly there's no horse manure anywhere because everybody's driving cars. The usual solution is to slow adoption down so people have time to transition.

What's happening now is different. I don't think slowing things down is the right move. There's nothing you can do to slow it down enough to not be disruptive. By its very nature, it's just not possible. The possibility of a fast takeoff is so inevitable that our best efforts to slow it down are still going to leave it transforming society so fast that it's going to be disruptive regardless.

So it may be the case that we just need to speed it up. Get it all out there. Because we're not going to be able to salvage the same economy. Whatever comes next looks like something different.

It's Not Capitalism vs. Socialism

You're going to have a lot of people, when it becomes a jump ball for who's got the best solution for the future, all the capitalists will come out and say capitalism has always been better, it's the worst solution in the world except for all the others. And then the socialists will come out saying it's time for the revolution, we're finally going to make Marx's vision come true.

The truth is, it's not either of those. Whatever it is, it's a new thing. Something different with elements from both. And we don't really know what that looks like. That's the biggest unknown. That's the biggest question mark. It's hidden in the shadow of the singularity. We can talk about it and we should talk about it, and that's probably the most important point: we need to talk and we need to be open-minded.

What Does Spaghettification Feel Like?

I can tell you from personal experience that there's a lot of truth in all the hype surrounding disruption of jobs. It's maybe mostly true. No one felt it faster and sooner than software developers, people who code for a living.

It was about 2 years that I really seriously struggled to get established into web development. The level of sacrifice during those 2 years was intense, and it was still a roller coaster. But I learned to adapt when new technologies came out. I'd find ways to set aside savings, build credit, have multiple clients so that anytime I lost one, I had time to replace it. By the 3rd, 4th year of freelancing, I had learned how to protect myself from the ups and downs.

Usually what happened was a technology change. Sometimes it was market driven, but it's all interconnected. You just had to stay aware of what people were working on so that when disruptive moments happened, you could set aside time and go all in. You padded yourself with emergency funds and lines of credit you could dip into. And for several years, maybe even close to 10, I was a machine. New tech would come out and I'd be right there at the cutting edge, sometimes involved in creating it. Before I depleted my reserves, I'd have a whole new class of clients. Usually my rate would go up.

AI has changed things so fast. The writing was on the wall when ChatGPT came out. That should have been an eye-opening moment for everyone that this was all real, that it was only a matter of time. We didn't take it that seriously. Then it came in waves.

The waves of disruption that we experienced as developers during the AI revolution, those are the tidal forces I'm talking about. One minute you think, oh, this is just a new technology I need to learn, so I'll go learn it and I'll be fine. Then suddenly it's like, okay, that was just a bunch of hype. So you go back to business as usual. Then the next wave is bigger and more disruptive, and there's this jerk back and forth between the waves. That's the tidal forces of the singularity tearing you apart. That's the spaghettification of a human job.

Riding the Wave

Right now I'm riding a wave with automations where I think I've found a sweet spot. I've learned to plug into where the disruption is going to happen and equip myself with the tools and skills and the knowledge of what these people are going to need and who they are. A lot of that comes from collaborating with people who have experience in automation, digital marketing, people who know the clients, who know the market that's going to need this tech the most. And following the influencers who have good content in this space.

I'm sharing my technical engineering knowledge with these people, and they're sharing their knowledge of the market, of the clients. Automations used to be all about no-code. Turns out now because of AI, you need to learn code. And because of AI, it's not that hard to learn, and you don't need to learn as much to do what you're trying to do.

I'm telling you, it was really scary. I didn't know what I was going to do. I ran out of credit, ran out of money. The hourly rate of a traditional developer was in free fall, and there was no reason to think it was ever going to rebound. The constant jerking back and forth between "it's here now, it's real" and "it was all hype, get back to work" tears you apart. Financially, emotionally. You get a form of psychosis over it. I feel shell shocked from it.

All signs are there that I've found my groove, that I'm well equipped, that I know what I'm doing. But there's still that voice in my head: that's what you thought the last time. I keep telling myself, I think it's really real this time. I'm seeing increase in traffic on all of my sites, increase in income, the clients I've got all seem to be long-term relationships with big things we want to do. Money is actually starting to come in for them, which means money is coming in for me. Small consulting jobs are starting to pile up. I'm starting to build up savings, starting to pay off debts so my lines of credit are available again. I'm starting to finally heal.

But then that voice: that's what you thought the last time.

$100,000 Down to $1,000

I never successfully hired anyone. I worked with people on teams being paid by other people with a lot more capital than me, much wealthier investors paying the tab, and a lot of those hires turned out to be failures. I never had the capital to inject into a person to bring them up to speed. I was never a trust fund kid. I was never able to pitch startup ideas to a VC. I just never had a huge amount of capital to inject into my company, and people are so expensive and so many of them let you down.

Claude Code and the whole concept of an AI assistant gave me the ability to have employees. A team of my own that does stuff for me, that I can assign tasks to, that I can teach how to do things. It's democratized our ability to hire. On the one hand, that has seriously disrupted my ability to charge money for traditional developer skills. But it has opened up a whole new world now that I've found the market, now that I've gotten into a groove.

I've got more work now than I know what to do with. Once you find your flow, AI doesn't make it so there's less to do. AI makes it so that we're all startup founders. We're all entrepreneurs. Our time is so much more valuable. When you look at a company with a billion dollar valuation and ask yourself, how much does an hour of that founder's time cost? How much does the company lose if they don't show up for an hour? Millions of dollars. That's kind of what we all experience now. The more we automate, the more we realize: when I go to sleep, how much opportunity is my company losing? And then you go back in and build an automation for that. It just keeps compounding.

What would have cost me $100,000 a year is now costing me less than $1,000. Those savings are real. That disruption is real. And maybe we just need to hurry up and do this as fast as possible. Maybe we need it to be one big event so we can capitalize on all that abundance. Because if we try a slow takeoff, all these waves of disruption are going to cause a level of psychosis that people can't adapt to.