Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

cnbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 662 posts

Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

#421

Post by anal_reactor »

jedberg wrote: post #360
raincole wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's amusing to see programmers in the US promoting remote work. Do those people really believe they're the most intellectually superior to the rest of the world? If a job can be done purely remotely, what stops the employer from hiring someone who lives in a cheaper place?

> what stops the employer from hiring someone who lives in a cheaper place? I've worked with remote workers from around the world. Let me preface by saying there are of course exceptions but: What I've found is that most often Americans exhibit self-starting and creativity. What I mean by that is non-us workers are great if you give them a specific task, even a really hard task. But if you give them a nebulous proble…

I work for an American company. 90% of my job is covering my ass because if I push for a novel idea and it fails, it's going to be a huge problem.

Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

#422

Post by nicce »

vvpan wrote: post #340

Lots of people are sceptical but I cannot imagine a use for entry level positions anymore. At my work everybody got to calling AI "the intern", which is not confusing because we do not have and have no use for interns.

So what are the long term risks when senior staff leaves and those need to be replaced with new seniors that have never seen the existing work vs. promoting younger people who knows the projects and practises?

Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

#423

Post by elevation »

raincole wrote: post #297
fibers wrote: post #8

The accounting note is not true in the traditional sense. The field in the US is just getting offshored to India/PH/Eastern Europe for better or for worse. There is even a big push to lower the educational requirements to attain licensure in the US (Big 4 partners want more bodies and are destroying the pipeline for US students). Audit quality will continue to suffer and public filers will issue bunk financials if th…

It's amusing to see programmers in the US promoting remote work. Do those people really believe they're the most intellectually superior to the rest of the world? If a job can be done purely remotely, what stops the employer from hiring someone who lives in a cheaper place?

As a US-based developer I do not feel threatened by the "cheap" offshore developers I encounter. I've repeatedly been hired to clean up after offshore developers who:

* lied about their capabilities/experience to get the job,

* failed to grok requirements through the language barrier,

* were unable to fix critical bugs in their own code base,

* committed buggy chatgpt output verbatim,

* and could not be held liable because their firm is effectively beyond the reach of the US legal system.

In a couple of projects I've seen a single US based developer replace an entire offshore team, deliver a superior result, and provide management with a much more responsive communication loop, in 1% of the billable hours. The difference in value is so stark that one client even fired the VP who'd lead the offshoring boondoggle.

Software talent is simply not as fungible as some MBAs would like to believe.

Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

#424

Post by bpye »

ArtTimeInvestor wrote: post #38

Every day when I am out in the city, I am amazed by how many jobs we have NOT managed to replace with AI yet. For example, cashiers. There are still many people spending their lives dragging items over a scanner, reading a number from a screen, holding out their hand for the customer to put money in, and then sorting the coins into boxes. How hard can it be to automate that?

Not AI - but businesses have tried offshoring them - https://www.npr.org/2022/09/30/1126167551/would-you-like-a-s...

Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

#425

Post by matusp »

jedberg wrote: post #403
bruce511 wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> What I've found is that only Americans exhibit self-starting and creativity. I'm going to counterpoint somewhat. I think those attributes are evenly spread into all countries, but equally I think they are uncommon in all countries. I don't live in the US. I have traveled there and elsewhere. I would agree that there are lots of cultural differences between places, even places as nominally similar as say the UK, Au…

> I think those attributes are evenly spread into all countries, but equally I think they are uncommon in all countries. The data does not support your statement. From a startup report just four days ago: The United States alone generates 46.6% of all startup activity worldwide, nearly half of the global total. Together with China (9.2%), the United Kingdom (5.6%), and India (5%), these four countries account for 66.…

There is startup activity in the US because there is enough capital to fund it. Getting funding for a startup even in pretty rich countries in EU is more difficult by an order of magnitude.

Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

#426

Post by tokioyoyo »

mostlysimilar wrote: post #167
jameslk wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many of these jobs are getting offshored because of AI? Language barriers, culture, and knowledge are some of the biggest challenges to overcome for offshoring. AI potentially solves many of those challenges

> AI potentially solves many of those challenges Isn't it exactly the opposite? Language barriers: LLMs are language models and all of the major ones are built in English, speaking that language fluently is surely a prerequisite to interacting with them efficiently? Knowledge: famously LLMs "know" nothing and are making things up all of the time and sometimes approximate "knowledge"

It’s basically a solved problem for Japanese English. There are some hiccups, but my coworkers who aren’t fluent in English do pretty good job. We have most of our Slack set up with LLM-auto translations, and it’s been a couple of years of smooth sailing at this point.

Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

#427

Post by globular-toast »

nicce wrote: post #422
vvpan wrote: post #340

Lots of people are sceptical but I cannot imagine a use for entry level positions anymore. At my work everybody got to calling AI "the intern", which is not confusing because we do not have and have no use for interns.

So what are the long term risks when senior staff leaves and those need to be replaced with new seniors that have never seen the existing work vs. promoting younger people who knows the projects and practises?

Long... term... risk? What is this archaic concept? I just want to get into a position where I can extract rent from children when they grow up. Why do I need to worry about this so called long term risk?

Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

#428

Post by KronisLV »

jedberg wrote: post #360
raincole wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's amusing to see programmers in the US promoting remote work. Do those people really believe they're the most intellectually superior to the rest of the world? If a job can be done purely remotely, what stops the employer from hiring someone who lives in a cheaper place?

> what stops the employer from hiring someone who lives in a cheaper place? I've worked with remote workers from around the world. Let me preface by saying there are of course exceptions but: What I've found is that most often Americans exhibit self-starting and creativity. What I mean by that is non-us workers are great if you give them a specific task, even a really hard task. But if you give them a nebulous proble…

> Failing is considered a good thing in the USA. And the USA is much more entrepreneurial than the rest of the world.

I wonder how many devs have been sacked for going out of their way and making stuff nobody in business asked for, or perhaps that broke something along the way and ended up being a net negative: in the EU vs US and other parts of the world.

Might be loosely related to how much money the company has to burn and the nature of their work (e.g. probably not looked well upon in consulting where you have to convince clients to pay for whatever you've made), as well as how popular each type of work is in each part of the world.

Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

#429

Post by throwaway48476 »

elevation wrote: post #423
raincole wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's amusing to see programmers in the US promoting remote work. Do those people really believe they're the most intellectually superior to the rest of the world? If a job can be done purely remotely, what stops the employer from hiring someone who lives in a cheaper place?

As a US-based developer I do not feel threatened by the "cheap" offshore developers I encounter. I've repeatedly been hired to clean up after offshore developers who: * lied about their capabilities/experience to get the job, * failed to grok requirements through the language barrier, * were unable to fix critical bugs in their own code base, * committed buggy chatgpt output verbatim, * and could not be held liable b…

That's not the talent not being fungible but the trust and accountability not being fungible. Which is a structural issue and unlikely to be resolved. I suspect it's more profitable for a lot of VPs for offshore labor to be as inefficient as possible.

Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

#430

Post by tokioyoyo »

root_axis wrote: post #356

Are people really replacing customer service agents with LLMs? It doesn't seem practical. Customer service handles all the things that customers aren't trusted to manage on their own with a self-service portal - that's the whole point of having a trusted human involved at all. Giving those tasks to LLMs won't work because the customer can just prompt inject their way to whatever toolcalls correspond to their desired…

I mentioned it before as well — I know first hand companies that have replaced most low level CS with elevenlabs + GPT ticket systems, while tracking the main metrics. Overall, it’s been better and cheaper than operating all the human agents.
Post reply on HN