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

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

#591

Post by AndrewKemendo »

msgodel wrote: post #255
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We're not "too important." All a union would do is create extra problems for us. 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 n…

You said: All a union would do is create extra problems for us.

Then you said:

a) This is a large scale administrative coordination problem

Pray tell: what is it a union does other than the latter?

Or is your position that “union” is some narrowly defined, undifferentiated structural artifact of a specific legal system?

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

#592

Post by kypro »

nicce wrote: post #560
kypro wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not talking about "replacing" workers. I'm talking about hiring the most qualified which in a global talent pool will almost always be someone from abroad. There's no reason for a company to hire a relatively unskilled graduate domestically when they could hire someone with more experience from abroad. If you look at the workforce makeup of many large tech companies today there's a reason Indian and East-Asian ta…

> I'm not talking about "replacing" workers. I'm talking about hiring the most qualified which in a global talent pool will almost always be someone from abroad. There's no reason for a company to hire a relatively unskilled graduate domestically when they could hire someone with more experience from abroad. What I meant with replacing was that when someone retires, you hire a new worker and hope that they immediatel…

> I haven't heard yet a company that actually has produced valuable product because of it. Usually the flow has been, that some Western country has created a succesful product, and then later the workforce has been changed. And almost always the quality has decreased. But it does not matter because the product got already decent market share, and it takes years for revenue to drop because of that.

Are you talking about out-sourcing or hiring the best talent from abroad with work-visas? I guess I don't understand why you would think domestic labour is inherently better? I understand this perspective with outsourcing because it can be difficult to maintain quality when outsourcing to a team in another country, but there's plenty of examples of successful tech companies hiring the best talent from abroad, no? I'd argue this is almost the norm for large tech companies in the US.

And for what it's worth, I'm not saying I agree with this. I'm just saying that if you're a company genuinely interested in hiring the best of the best it makes no sense to limit your Labour pool to the domestic market, and it rarely makes sense to consider graduates unless they are truly exceptional given their relative lack of experience.

In the past companies were simply forced to hire and train domestically because countries like India and China didn't have the education or technological access to compete with the average graduate in the US. Today most of the world is online and education is decent enough that the best talent is far less concentrated to a few geographical areas.

In a pure meritocracy (which the US is close to) in a globalised world it's quite rare that someone graphically local will be the best person available for any given role.

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

#594

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

Havoc wrote: 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…

"...can tell you in the real world - essentially zero AI rollout in accounitng world for anything serious."

The jobs the reseearchers concluded were affected were "unregulated" ones where there are no college education or professional certification requirements, e.g.,

   receptionists
   translators
   software "engineers"
"Not sure what these guys are studying..."

Apparently, they studied payroll data from ADP on age, job title and headcount together with, who would have guessed, data from an AI company (Anthropic)

https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/publications/canaries-in...

This study has not been peer-reviewed

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

#595

Post by Balgair »

Havoc wrote: 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…

Aisde: Hey, whats the prompt you're using for a summary of the news events?

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

#596

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

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?

It's not intellectual superiority. They've already offshored all the other jobs they can. If they could offshore my job, they would. But it's very hard to find reliable talent anywhere, much less offshore. It is easier to find the talent here, and there's more of it. Then there's the complexity of hiring, the timezones, language barrier, and all the other small complications that add up.

Once you have world-class experts all over the developing world, my job might disappear. But you need experience to get there, which they aren't getting, because they aren't here. It's privilege 101: if you have it, you get more of it; if you don't have it, you don't get any of it. We're very privileged to be high-value domestic workers.

And by the way, remote work has been a thing here for decades, yet the calculation hasn't changed. Our remote jobs are still safe.

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

#597

Post by red-iron-pine »

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…

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

this is a big one. last F500 I was at dropped Tata for several internal support teams due to belief that they were messing with proprietary code and/or had screwed things up so badly they warranted a lawsuit -- but had no legal levers to chase them for damages.

ditto for the one-off programmer who sexually harasses people while remote -- how does a remote worker sue, or get sued, and under what law?

or finance / tax -- who pays the payroll tax?

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

#598

Post by red-iron-pine »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #443
elevation wrote: post #423

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…

I've worked alongside (but never with) offshore developers, often from the big consultancy companies. One thing they tend to do is place one competent developer and a dozen less-so, so that the work gets done by the one but they get paid for a dozen people. But I also believe the managers hiring offshore employees are fully aware of this. If they aren't then they're not very good managers and/or have no idea what the…

we couldn't find good SAP security folks to save our life at a previous job. 900/hr for consultants.

regular "line" SAP admins had to be found in Mexico and brought up on TN visas -- still well paid but generally pretty good, doubly so because we had a Mexico City office and could retain the staff even after they rotated back to MX.

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

#599

Post by zemvpferreira »

palmotea wrote: post #400
AtlasBarfed wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's optimistic. Ancient egypt (elite in pyramids, slaves otherwise) is more likely.

>> Feudalism. > That's optimistic. > Ancient egypt (elite in pyramids, slaves otherwise) is more likely. No you're both being optimistic. The feudal lords had a vital need for serfs, and the pharaohs slaves. It'll be more like elite in pyramids, everyone else (who survives) lives like a rat in the sewers, living off garbage and trying to stay out of sight. Once the elite no longer need workers like us, they'll withdr…

I would say that’s still being optimistic. The end will come when Baidu, Facebook and Microsoft’s AI engage in total war against each other for survival while we watch in horror and incomprehension. The elites are just as fucked as anyone else.

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

#600

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

cinntaile wrote: post #359
jameslk wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So what comes next? When you don’t need as many people because of automation, you also don’t need them to fight your wars. You use drones and other automated weapons. You don’t need things like democracy because that was to prevent people from turning to revolution, and that problem has been solved with automated weapons. So then you don’t really need as many people anymore, so you stop providing the expensive heal…

The current wave of automation (LLMs) aren't capable of "fighting your wars".

Ukraine and russia are already employing low-cost recon and hunter-killer drones

israel is already using sniper drones in Palestine that use AI to fly around and headshot whatever moves, as well as AI to select their bombing targets.

the future is now, isn't it exciting?

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