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Canaries in the Coal Mine? Recent Employment Effects of AI [pdf]

digitaleconomy.stanford.edu

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Re: Canaries in the Coal Mine? Recent Employment Effects of AI [pdf]

#21

Post by trhway »

eru wrote: post #3
majormajor wrote: post #2

LLMs are very useful tools for software development, but focusing on employment does not appear to really dig into if it will automate or augment labor (to use their words). Behaviors are changing not just because of outcomes but because of hype and expectations and b2b sales. You'd expect the initial corporate behaviors to look much the same whether or not LLMs turn into fully-fire-and-forget employee-replacement to…

Yes, even if the underlying AI stops advancing today, it will take a while for the economy to digest and adjust to the new systems. Eg a lot of the improvements in usefulness in the last few quarters came from better tooling, not necessarily better models. But with progress continuing in the models, too, it's an even more complicated affair.

Offshoring was similar - i.e. companies discovered that expensive labor here can be performed inexpensively there while senior laborers/PMs here would perform the overseeing role - and we can look at it how long it took to digest it and adjust to it. While 15-20 years ago it was all the rage, today it is just an established well understood and efficiently utilized, where applicable, practice.

Re: Canaries in the Coal Mine? Recent Employment Effects of AI [pdf]

#22

Post by moi2388 »

hochstenbach wrote: post #8
majormajor wrote: post #2

LLMs are very useful tools for software development, but focusing on employment does not appear to really dig into if it will automate or augment labor (to use their words). Behaviors are changing not just because of outcomes but because of hype and expectations and b2b sales. You'd expect the initial corporate behaviors to look much the same whether or not LLMs turn into fully-fire-and-forget employee-replacement to…

One would expect that if such studies indeed indicate that AI has an effect on early-career workers in AI-exposed occupations, that this would be a global effect. I wonder if there are good comparable non-US studies available.

As a non-US citizen, in my EU country we’re still starving for new programmers.

Re: Canaries in the Coal Mine? Recent Employment Effects of AI [pdf]

#23

Post by black_knight »

yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #13
ath3nd wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLMs are very useful tools for software development That's an opinion many disagree with. As a matter of fact, the only limited study up to date showed that LLMs usage decrease productivity for experienced developers by roughly 19%. Let's reserve opinions and link studies. https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o... My anecdotal experience, for example, is that LLMs are such a negative drain on…

I’m 15 years into my career and I write Haskell every day. I’m getting a massive productivity boost from using an LLM.

How do you find the quality of the Haskell code produced by LLM? Also, how do you use the LLM when coding Haskell? Generating single functions or more?

Re: Canaries in the Coal Mine? Recent Employment Effects of AI [pdf]

#24

Post by trhway »

moi2388 wrote: post #22
hochstenbach wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One would expect that if such studies indeed indicate that AI has an effect on early-career workers in AI-exposed occupations, that this would be a global effect. I wonder if there are good comparable non-US studies available.

As a non-US citizen, in my EU country we’re still starving for new programmers.

Poland? Sometimes ago i looked up salaries in Warsaw - it were like $10-$20K/month which as i understand is pretty high by EU standards.

Re: Canaries in the Coal Mine? Recent Employment Effects of AI [pdf]

#25

Post by yurishimo »

trhway wrote: post #24
moi2388 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a non-US citizen, in my EU country we’re still starving for new programmers.

Poland? Sometimes ago i looked up salaries in Warsaw - it were like $10-$20K/month which as i understand is pretty high by EU standards.

Really? That's crazy. I'm earning a bit over 5k in the Netherlands. Granted, not Amsterdam, but still.

Re: Canaries in the Coal Mine? Recent Employment Effects of AI [pdf]

#26

Post by yakshaving_jgt »

black_knight wrote: post #23
yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m 15 years into my career and I write Haskell every day. I’m getting a massive productivity boost from using an LLM.

How do you find the quality of the Haskell code produced by LLM? Also, how do you use the LLM when coding Haskell? Generating single functions or more?

I'm stuck in my ways with vim/tmux/ghci etc, so I'm not using some AI IDE. I write stuff into ChatGPT and use the output, copying manually, or writing it myself with inspiration from what I get. I feed it a fair bit of context (like, say, a production module with a load of database queries, and the associated spec module) so that it copies the structure and patterns that I've established.

The quality of the Haskell code is about as good as I would have written myself, though I think it falls for primitive obsession more than I would. Still, I can add those abstractions myself after the fact.

Maybe one of the reasons I'm getting good results is because the LLM effectively has to argue with GHC, and GHC always wins here.

I've found that it's a superpower also for finding logic bugs that I've missed, and for writing SQL queries (which I was never that good at).

Re: Canaries in the Coal Mine? Recent Employment Effects of AI [pdf]

#27

Post by 9rx »

ath3nd wrote: post #7
majormajor wrote: post #2

LLMs are very useful tools for software development, but focusing on employment does not appear to really dig into if it will automate or augment labor (to use their words). Behaviors are changing not just because of outcomes but because of hype and expectations and b2b sales. You'd expect the initial corporate behaviors to look much the same whether or not LLMs turn into fully-fire-and-forget employee-replacement to…

> LLMs are very useful tools for software development That's an opinion many disagree with. As a matter of fact, the only limited study up to date showed that LLMs usage decrease productivity for experienced developers by roughly 19%. Let's reserve opinions and link studies. https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o... My anecdotal experience, for example, is that LLMs are such a negative drain on…

> decrease productivity for experienced developers by roughly 19%.

Seems about right when trying to tell an LLM what to code. But flipping the script, letting the LLM tell you what to code, productivity gains seem much greater. Like most programmers will tell you: Writing code isn't the part of software development that is the bottleneck.

Re: Canaries in the Coal Mine? Recent Employment Effects of AI [pdf]

#28

Post by joshdavham »

ggm wrote: post #15

Any Board which supports management hollowing out future profits by either firing, or not hiring junior staff deserves to have their bonus rescinded. Think like a forestry investor, not a cash crop next season.

It's going to be extremely interesting to see what the field of software dev will look like in a few years given how few juniors are getting hired recently.

Re: Canaries in the Coal Mine? Recent Employment Effects of AI [pdf]

#29

Post by chii »

manmademagic wrote: post #10
whatever1 wrote: post #4

To me it seems that LLMs are a tool that only increase productivity for given headcount in dimensions that were neglected in the past. For example, everyone now writes emails with perfect grammar in a fraction of a time. So now the expectation for emails is that they will have perfect grammar. Or one can build an interactive dashboard to visualize their spreadsheet and make it pleasing. Again the expectation just cha…

It's an interesting dilemma, since if I know that an email was written mostly with AI, it feels to me like the author didn't put effort in, and thus I won't put much effort into reading the email. I had a conversation with my manager about the implications of everyone using AI to write/summarise everything. The end result will most likely be staff getting Copilot to generate a report, then their manager uses Copilot…

> Eventually all context is lost, busywork is amplified

why not fire everyone in between the top-most manager and the actual "worker" doing the work, as the report could be generated with the correct level of summary?

Re: Canaries in the Coal Mine? Recent Employment Effects of AI [pdf]

#30

Post by CuriouslyC »

ath3nd wrote: post #7
majormajor wrote: post #2

LLMs are very useful tools for software development, but focusing on employment does not appear to really dig into if it will automate or augment labor (to use their words). Behaviors are changing not just because of outcomes but because of hype and expectations and b2b sales. You'd expect the initial corporate behaviors to look much the same whether or not LLMs turn into fully-fire-and-forget employee-replacement to…

> LLMs are very useful tools for software development That's an opinion many disagree with. As a matter of fact, the only limited study up to date showed that LLMs usage decrease productivity for experienced developers by roughly 19%. Let's reserve opinions and link studies. https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o... My anecdotal experience, for example, is that LLMs are such a negative drain on…

People who suck at typing are better off writing by hand as well. I don't need to argue, I'll let history pick a winner.
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