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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]

#71

Post by sokoloff »

elric wrote: post #69
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 r…

I’m sorry for your friend’s job loss, but reading a page of fairly generic eulogy written by someone who knew nothing of grandma beyond what the family said and basic obituary facts doesn’t seem massively different from a page of fairly generic eulogy written by an AI based on the same inputs.

If you can find a workable way to put the family in the improvements loop, the AI eulogy could be far better at expressing the family’s sentiment about grandma. (I’m not going to want to go 3 rounds of edits over 2-3 days with a human to get it just right, but going 8 rounds of tweaking/perfecting with an AI in a 20-30 minute sitting is appealing and would give a better result in a lot of cases.)

Under those conditions, how much more am I willing to pay for a human-written eulogy? $0 at most, and probably a negative amount.

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

#72

Post by bgwalter »

digitcatphd wrote: post #64

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 man…

The senior developers pretended to use Claude Steal to comply with your rude and ignorant request. They are better at programming and the soft skills required to appease an incompetent manager.

You just used "AI" to get rid of people you didn't want anyway, but since it was your order it had to be a "success story".

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

#73

Post by Etheryte »

digitcatphd wrote: post #64

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 man…

This is literally the difference between a junior or senior though? You could've just as well said to go faster or you're out and you would've gotten the same result. LLMs are irrelevant to what you've done here.

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

#74

Post by TomMasz »

>early-career workers (ages 22-25) in the most AI-exposed occupations have experienced a 13 percent relative decline in employment even after controlling for firm-level shocks.

As a professor of software engineering, I'm feeling an existential crisis coming on. Are we preparing students in vain? Last term was the first time I had senior project students who didn't have a job lined up in the Fall of their final year. Maybe it's time to retire.

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

#75

Post by bgwalter »

TomMasz wrote: post #74

>early-career workers (ages 22-25) in the most AI-exposed occupations have experienced a 13 percent relative decline in employment even after controlling for firm-level shocks. As a professor of software engineering, I'm feeling an existential crisis coming on. Are we preparing students in vain? Last term was the first time I had senior project students who didn't have a job lined up in the Fall of their final year.…

I would say it's time to fight back. Politicians need to be educated that "AI" is plagiarism and is used as an excuse to scale back the workforce. It also ruins the thriving intellectual landscape.

Since you are a professor, they might listen to you.

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

#76

Post by svaha1728 »

softwaredoug wrote: post #35

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.

Working in microgrids and I completely agree. I use Claude Code every day. There’s so much we don’t know and so much that an LLM is not going to help you with.

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

#77

Post by bsenftner »

I'm curious what percentage of the "tech industry" is in fact the classic dumb money, and what they have their developers doing is basically fantasy nonsense for the owner(s). I know of several very good sized tech companies, purchased by Saudi Princes, for nothing other than their bragging rights and their staff are an odd mix of their friends, the original tech team, and then an odd series of fantasy vanity projects. Remember 15 years ago when mounting cameras on a person's face for "face captures" during gameplay was a thing? Several of those companies are now Saudi playpens, with over worked developers making demos on deadlines that are just for bragging rights and not products at all.

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

#78

Post by fauigerzigerk »

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…

I don't think the study is flawed. It just seems rather narrow:

"We conduct a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to understand how AI tools at the February-June 2025 frontier affect the productivity of experienced open-source developers. 16 developers with moderate AI experience complete 246 tasks in mature projects on which they have an average of 5 years of prior experience."

So the question is what other kinds of software development tasks this result applies to. Moderate AI experience is fine. This applies to many other situations. But 5 years of experience with a single code base is an outlier.

That said, they used relatively large repositories (1.1 million LOC) and the tasks were randomly assigned. So developers couldn't pick and choose tasks in areas of the codebase they already knew extremely well.

I think the study does generalise to some degree, but I've seen conclusions drawn from this study that the methodology doesn't support. In my view, it doesn't generalise over all or even most software development taks.

Personally, I'm a bit sceptical (but not hostile) about LLMs for coding (and some other thinking tasks), because the difference in quality between requests for which there are many examples and tasks for which there are only few examples is so extreme.

Reasoning capabilities of LLMs still seem minimal.

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

#79

Post by adroniser »

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…

This suggests people should pre-register benchmarks. Because currently it feels like there is little incentive to publish benchmarks that models saturate.

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

#80

Post by rsanek »

The first figure alone is insane, for me it helps explain why some friends feel like the market has fallen out from under them (early career) while others aren't having such a tough time. It seems like so far, for folks 30+ AI hasn't really changed things radically (yet).

The series in figure 6, though, I think suggests that we may just be seeing a time-delayed effect and eventually everyone's going to be impacted.

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