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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]

#61

Post by sokoloff »

ath3nd wrote: post #46
wahnfrieden wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a skill issue. That lone study was observing untrained participants. It's no surprise to me that devs who are accustomed to working on one thing at a time due to fast feedback loops have not learned to adapt to paralellizing their work (something that has been demonized at agile style organizations) and sit and wait on agents and start watching YouTube instead, as the study found (productivity hits were due to…

Interesting take. I suggest an alternative take: it's a skill issue if LLMs help a developer. If the study showed that experienced developers suffered a negative performance impact while using an LLM, maybe where LLMs shine are with junior developers? Until a new study that shows otherwise comes out, it seems the scientific conclusion is that junior developers, the ones with the skill issues, benefit from using LLMs,…

Imagine if you’d worked for a decade as a dev using Notepad as your code editor (in a world where that was the best editor somehow). You’d developed your whole career in Notepad and knew very well how to work with it

Then, someone did a two week study on the productivity difference between Notepad, vim, emacs, and VSCode. And it turns out that there was lower observed productivity for all of the latter 3, with the smallest reduction seen in VSCode.

Would you conclude that Notepad was the best editor, followed by VSCode and then vim and emacs being the worst editors for programming?

That’s the flaw I see in the methodology of that study. I’m glad they did it, but the amount of “Haha, I knew it all along and if you claim AI helps you at all, it’s just because you sucked all along…” citing of that study is astonishing.

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

#62

Post by manmademagic »

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?

Mostly because there are different depths of reporting required depending who you’re creating said reports for. Often it’s unnecessary bureaucracy, but also often the ones doing the “actual work” don’t have a full understanding of how what they’re working on interacts with other parts of a system. (I mean this broadly, and not just related to software development)

Middle management can sometimes be good at this, because they may actually have the time to step back and take a holistic look at things. It’s not always easy to do that when you’re deep in the weeds with clients, managers, colleagues, or direct reports bugging you about misc things.

Overall I think (or hope) the more useless reporting will die a slow death, but I also think there’ll be a loooooong period of AI slop before we reach the point where everyone says “why are we actually doing this?”

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

#63

Post by ath3nd »

sokoloff wrote: post #61
ath3nd wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting take. I suggest an alternative take: it's a skill issue if LLMs help a developer. If the study showed that experienced developers suffered a negative performance impact while using an LLM, maybe where LLMs shine are with junior developers? Until a new study that shows otherwise comes out, it seems the scientific conclusion is that junior developers, the ones with the skill issues, benefit from using LLMs,…

Imagine if you’d worked for a decade as a dev using Notepad as your code editor (in a world where that was the best editor somehow). You’d developed your whole career in Notepad and knew very well how to work with it Then, someone did a two week study on the productivity difference between Notepad, vim, emacs, and VSCode. And it turns out that there was lower observed productivity for all of the latter 3, with the sm…

> citing of that study is astonishing and somewhat comical

I would like to see your study, one that's not sponsored by OpenAI or github, that shows LLMs actually improved anything for experienced developers. Crickets.

So, to summarize:

1. An actual study shows that experienced developer's productivity declines 19% when using an LLM.

https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...

2.The recent actual MIT study showing 95% GenAI projects fail to have any tangible results in enterprises:

https://fortune.com/2025/08/18/mit-report-95-percent-generat...

And your source is: 'Trust me bro'. I swear the new LLM fanbase is the same as good ol' scrum: a bunch of fanatic gaslighters.

It's always a "skill issue" , "not doing it right" , "not the proper llm/scrum flavor", or a "flawed study".

When I see the studies, then I might actually listen to the LLM booster crowd, but for now I got studies, what you got? Vibes? Figures.

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

#64

Post by digitcatphd »

I had a team of developers and essentially told them all 'either learn to code with Claude' or you're out. What I found is the more junior developers started 'vibe coding' resulting in a net decrease in performance, where the more senior ones used it to accelerate their speed cautiously and selectively.

My conclusion was senior engineers were better because they were used to managing developers and taking on more managerial tasks building 'LLM Soft Skills' and also frankly fixing mistakes, the junior developers were pressured for speed and had their managers to correct them.

Within 12 months, despite extensive attempts, only the mid level team members remained.

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

#65

Post by wazoox »

ludicrousdispla wrote: post #37
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.

Well...

> The contest between the capitalist and the wage-labourer dates back to the very origin of capital. It raged on throughout the whole manufacturing period. [112] But only since the introduction of machinery has the workman fought against the instrument of labour itself, the material embodiment of capital. He revolts against this particular form of the means of production, as being the material basis of the capitalist mode of production.

> [...]

> The instrument of labour, when it takes the form of a machine, immediately becomes a competitor of the workman himself. [116] The self-expansion of capital by means of machinery is thenceforward directly proportional to the number of the workpeople, whose means of livelihood have been destroyed by that machinery. The whole system of capitalist production is based on the fact that the workman sells his labour-power as a commodity. Division of labour specialises this labour-power, by reducing it to skill in handling a particular tool. So soon as the handling of this tool becomes the work of a machine, then, with the use-value, the exchange-value too, of the workman’s labour-power vanishes; the workman becomes unsaleable, like paper money thrown out of currency by legal enactment.

Karl Marx, The Capital, Book I Chapter 15.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm

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

#66

Post by sokoloff »

ath3nd wrote: post #63
sokoloff wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine if you’d worked for a decade as a dev using Notepad as your code editor (in a world where that was the best editor somehow). You’d developed your whole career in Notepad and knew very well how to work with it Then, someone did a two week study on the productivity difference between Notepad, vim, emacs, and VSCode. And it turns out that there was lower observed productivity for all of the latter 3, with the sm…

> citing of that study is astonishing and somewhat comical I would like to see your study, one that's not sponsored by OpenAI or github, that shows LLMs actually improved anything for experienced developers. Crickets . So, to summarize: 1. An actual study shows that experienced developer's productivity declines 19% when using an LLM. https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o... 2.The recent actual…

My argument is limited to “we don’t know and one study with significant limitations with regards to participant adaptation doesn’t settle anything definitively for the long-term”.

Your argument seems to project significantly more certainty and spittle.

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

#67

Post by user94wjwuid »

Is 2 years or so big enough sample size for any conclusions? You’re also seeing massive money movements; last quarter larger than consumer spending (!!!) This money isn’t going to junior head counts(labor), it’s going to compute(capital) Also what’s everyone’s balance sheet really saying? Will this money movement to capital rather than labor ACTUALLY pay off ? I think that would take a 10year hind sight to prove no?

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

#68

Post by eru »

trhway wrote: post #21
eru wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes.

However it wasn't just noticing the difference in wages. That had been known since forever and didn't wake a genius. Figuring out how to produce efficiently in the cheaper places and get the goods to rich markets took more smarts and experimentation.

Container shipping played a big role in that, and so did modern communication and cheaper flights.

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

#69

Post by elric »

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.

Some anecdata: I have a buddy who runs a smallish consulting firm, and another buddy who's a software recruiter. Both are telling me that they've stopped hiring developers except for senior developers. From this limited sample size, the market seems to be convinced that it no longer needs or wants junior developers because their tasks can be outsourced to LLMs.

Outside of tech, my eulogy writer friend got fired and replaced by ChatGPT. So when gramma dies, someone will now read a page of slop at her funeral instead of something that a person with empathy wrote.

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

#70

Post by ftmootnomoat »

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…

This kind of blanket statement smells of the same dogmatism as the AI hype train in reverse.

LLMs are a just a simple tool, if people misuse it it's on them.

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