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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]

#31

Post by trhway »

yurishimo wrote: post #25
trhway wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Our guys in St.Petersburg 20 years ago were pulling $3-6K. Granted the life there comes with some risks and inconveniences :)

You're probably working in a domestic company which usually pays less than offshored jobs by a large transnational (and domestics say in Russia were paying significantly less than the offshored). I don't think many companies do significant offshoring into Western Europe though.

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

#32

Post by jopsen »

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…

There are many ways to use an LLM.

Writing code is a bit crazy, maybe writing tedious test case variations.

But asking an LLM questions about a well established domain you're not expert in is a fantastic use case. And very relevant for making software. In practice, most software requires you to understand the domain your aiming to serve.

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

#33

Post by wiz21c »

yurishimo wrote: post #25
trhway wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

before or after taxes ?

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

#34

Post by wiz21c »

chii wrote: post #29
manmademagic wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

as google seems to do (seen that other HN post today)

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/27/google-executive-says-compan...

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

#35

Post by softwaredoug »

I think mRNA vaccines and green energy are equally transformative economic opportunities. In the US though we are becoming a one trick pony. Instead of investing in all 3, we will prioritize AI because Silicon Valley sucked up to Trump in the recent election.

All to say we could have quite a bit more resilience as an economy, but we decided to sacrifice our leadership in these areas.

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

#36

Post by borzi »

The 10% reduction in hiring for young workers is entirely because industry (software, manufacturing) at least in the united states (and probably the world) is contracting and in recession, while the services and government sector has been the main sector growing since a long time now - completely due to economic and geopolitical reasons, nothing to do with AI.

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

#37

Post by ludicrousdispla »

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…

It's funny the lengths to which companies will go in order to avoid work.

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

#38

Post by ikari_pl »

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.

Mostly from US or at least large companies, though. I live in Kraków, some companies offer 10+k USD monthly (Rippling, Atlassian, maybe Google?), for staff level especially. More common range would be 7~10k, i think.

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

#39

Post by baxtr »

borzi wrote: post #36

The 10% reduction in hiring for young workers is entirely because industry (software, manufacturing) at least in the united states (and probably the world) is contracting and in recession, while the services and government sector has been the main sector growing since a long time now - completely due to economic and geopolitical reasons, nothing to do with AI.

Yes. And unfortunately (or luckily for some) the end of the low interest and geopolitical changes aligned with the advent of LLMs.

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

#40

Post by camillomiller »

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.

Corporate incentives are usually not pushing in this direction.
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