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

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571–580 of 662 posts

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

#571
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?

I mean, while this might be true, Europe is full to the brim of developers who speak fluent English, and yet cost maybe a third of their US counterparts. Programming is really quite far from being a global market.

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

#572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Its a passive aggressive, I think it's read as passive aggressive when people realise they've been holding a silly opinion don't want to admit it. > thought terminating cliche The irony. > that might as well be saying "I know better than you". Sometimes people do know better than you. I think I should reflect on that.

You've made my case for me, if by "I think I should reflect on that", you do in fact mean "[you've] been holding a silly opinion don't want to admit it". The former is a passive-aggressive way to say the latter. I aim to, and encourage others to say what they mean.

All jokes aside, the commenter I initially replied to really should reflect on why their concept of creativity and risk tolerance is so linked with financial outcomes, because that is a very particular association and it maybe informs their worldwide more than they may realise.

> The former is a passive-aggressive way to say the latter. I aim to, and encourage others to say what they mean.

I suppose you don't see the irony?

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

#573

AI is the popular cover excuse for layoffs. I can’t think of a single job that modern AI could easily replace.

I agree its a popular excuse, however unlike the blockchain craze there’s legitimate use cases of productivity improvements with AI. And if you can (in some cases) substantially increase productivity, then logically you can reduce team size and be as productive with less. With the right prompting, you can cut a copywriting team in half easily. My business has one copywriter/strategist, who I’ve automated the writing…

The problem is people (not sure if it's coping) present an argument that either it can perfectly replace someone 100% or it's an useless fad.

Even increasing the average productivity by 10-20% is huge and in some areas (like copywriting as you've mentioned) the gains are much bigger than that. Of course there's also the argument of the infinite demand (i.e. demand will always overshadow any gains in supply caused by AI) but evidence is never provided.

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

#574
post #422
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?

The beauty is that, as mere workers, it's not our problem. Let the ruling class figure it out.

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

#575
post #538

Not sure what these guys are studying but can tell you in the real world - essentially zero AI rollout in accounting world for anything serious. We've got access to some fancy enterprise copilot version, deep research, MS office integration and all that jazz. I use it diligently every day...to make me a summary of today's global news. When I try to apply it to actual accounting work. It hallucinates left, right & cen…

I keep trying to get it to review my personal credit card statements. I have my own budget tracking app that I made, and sometimes there's discrepancies. Resolving this by hand is annoying, and an LM should be able to do it: scrape the PDF, compare the records to mine, find the delta.

I've tried multiple models over the course of 6 months. Yesterday it told me I made a brilliant observation, but it hasn't managed to successfully pin down a single real anomaly. Once it told me the charges were Starbucks, when I had not been to a Starbucks—it's just that Starbucks is a probable output when analyzing credit card statements.

And I'm only dealing with a list of 40 records that I can check by hand, with zero consequences if I get it wrong beyond my personal budgeting being off by 1%.

I can't imagine trusting any business that leans on this for inappropriate jobs.

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

#576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it can't replace graphical designers except in low stakes projects. Companies won't risk their projects on cheap AI with other larger costs on the line.

>Companies won't risk their projects on cheap AI with other larger costs on the line. Coca Cola's christmas ad had AI slop in it last year. That doesn't seem very cheap or low stakes.

[deleted]

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

#577

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…

People expect that they can pay 0.05x in the Philippines or India, or 0.1x in Poland or Estonia, when that's just not going to happen. I've heard a few people say the multiplier starts at something like 0.4x or more for equivalent talent.

Since that comes with all the disadvantages and risks you'd expect from splitting your team across two countries and operating in a market you don't understand, at that price point a US company should probably start thinking about spinning up a cheaper team in, I dunno, Dallas rather than offshoring.

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

#578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For a counterpoint, I’ve worked with many great engineers in Latin America who are smart, capable, and in the same time zones as the US

We find it incredibly hard to hire these people. It turns out a lot of US companies are also interested in smart, capable, cheap engineers in Central Time Zone.

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

#579
post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's read the paper instead: https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/... It presents a difference-in-differences ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Difference_in_differences ) design that exploits staggered adoption of generative AI to estimate the causal effect on productivity. It compares headcount over time by age group across several occupations, showing significant differentials across age grou…

Were entry level jobs the first to go in earlier developer downturns? Is AI being used to attempt to mitigate that effect? I don't think their methods or any statistical method could decouple a perfectly correlated signal. Without AI, would junior jobs have grown as quickly as other?

I'm not trying to be clever here. I'm trying to be publicly stupid in an effort to understand.

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

#580
post #538

Not sure what these guys are studying but can tell you in the real world - essentially zero AI rollout in accounting world for anything serious. We've got access to some fancy enterprise copilot version, deep research, MS office integration and all that jazz. I use it diligently every day...to make me a summary of today's global news. When I try to apply it to actual accounting work. It hallucinates left, right & cen…

LLMs basically can't do arithmetic directly, trying to get them to do so is a skill issue. Most models can and will happily write and execute code to do that work instead.
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