Microsoft is running an ambitious project

How does 1000 times productivity sound to you?

Microsoft is running an ambitious project: to rewrite all of the company’s C and C++ codebases in Rust before 2030. They are currently recruiting experimentally, and a level-5 engineer (IC5 – Individual Contributor) would need to produce around 1 million lines of code per month to meet this goal.

To help you visualise what 1 million lines of code per month means: an employee at a large software company, running critical software with a massive codebase, would historically have (relatively) the following productivity at the golden age:

Writing raw code, using editors like vi or Emacs: ~10 “proper” lines of code per day, equivalent to ~200–300 lines per month. Most time is spent on logic, syntax, debugging, 2-hour lunches, drinking wine, bringing dogs and cats to work, going to conferences, and debating code & the meaning of life.
Writing with tooling support: using IDEs, frameworks, etc.: ~1,000–3,000 lines of quality code per month.
Microsoft is now hiring people who can command an army of AI to write 1 million lines of code per month.

Labour productivity is being pushed up by a factor of 1,000 — not 20% or 30%, but 1,000×.

This is pre-AI vs post-AI.

Author

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