251–260 of 662 posts
High interest rates + tariff terror -> less investment -> less jobs But let's blame AI
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I'll re-explain. A human CEO might do morally questionable things. All do not, of course, but some may. Yet even so, they need a planet with air, water, and some way to survive. They also may what their kids to survive. An AI may not care. It could be taking "bad CEO" behaviour to a whole new level. And even if the AI had human ethics, humans play "us vs them" games all the time. You don't get much more "them" than a…
The AI most certainly does not care, because it is a computer program. It also doesn't want to buy a boat.
Brutal that software engineering went from one of the least automatable jobs to a job that is universally agreed to be "most exposed to automation". Was good while it lasted though.
Brutal that software engineering went from one of the least automatable jobs to a job that is universally agreed to be "most exposed to automation". Was good while it lasted though.
Too bad engineers were “too important” to unionize because their/our labor is “too special .” I think you could find 10,000 quotes from HN alone why SDEs were immune to labor market struggles that would need a union Oh well, good luck everyone.
There are two possibilities:
a) This is a large scale administrative coordination problem
b) We don't need as many software engineers.
Under (a) unionizing just adds more administrators and exacerbates the problem, under (b) unions are ineffective and just shaft new grads or if they manage to be effective, kills your employer (and then no one has a job.)
You can't just administrate away reality. The reason SWEs don't have unions is because most of us (unlike blue collar labor) are intelligent enough to understand this. I think additionally there was something to be said about factory work where the workers really were fungible and it was capital intensive, software development is almost the polar opposite where there's no capital and the value is the theory the programmers have in their head making them a lot less fungible.
Finally we do have legal tools like the GPL which do actually give us a lot of negotiating power. If you work on GPL software you can actually just tell your employer "behave or we'll take our ball and leave" if they do something stupid.
High interest rates + tariff terror -> less investment -> less jobs But let's blame AI
You really do have to account for why this is mainly happening in industries that are adopting AI, why it's almost exclusively impacting entry-level positions (with senior positions steady or growing), and why controlling for broad economic conditions failed to correct this. I doubt very much that these three Stanford professors would be blindsided by the concept of rates and tarriffs.
Reducing in call centers has been going on for a while as more people use automated solutions (not necessarily AI) and many of the growing companies make it hard to reach a real person anyways (Amazon, Facebook, etc). I feel like AI is throwing fuel on the existing fire, but isn't as much of a driver as the headlines suggest.
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> I'm not sure it's that our job is the most automatable I don't know. It seems pretty friendly to automation to me. When was the last time you wrote assembly? When was the last time you had map memory? Think about blitting memory to a screen buffer to draw a square on a screen? Schedule processes and threads? These are things that I routinely did as a junior engineer writing software a long time ago. Most people at…
RAD programming held the same promise, as did UML, flow/low/no code platforms. Inevitably, people remember that the hard part of programming isn't so much the code as it is putting requirements into maintainable code that can respond to future requirements. LLMs basically only automate the easiest part of the job today. Time will tell if they get better, but my money is on me fixing people's broken LLM generated busi…
I don't think LLMs alone are going to get there. They might be a key component in a more powerful system, but they might also be a very impressive dead end.
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>Buy a trailer, live somewhere cheap, do odd jobs Unrelated to the discussion, but I love these kinds of backup plans. I've found that most guys I talk to have one. Just a few days ago a guy was telling me that, if his beloved wife ever divorces him, then he'd move to a tropical island and become a coconut seller. (My personal plan: find a small town in the Sonoran Desert that has a good library, dig a hole under a n…
Is it hard to date living under a cactus?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You really do have to account for why this is mainly happening in industries that are adopting AI, why it's almost exclusively impacting entry-level positions (with senior positions steady or growing), and why controlling for broad economic conditions failed to correct this. I doubt very much that these three Stanford professors would be blindsided by the concept of rates and tarriffs.
The jobs are going to India