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

601–610 of 662 posts

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

#601

Post by red-iron-pine »

CalRobert wrote: post #441
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…

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

As posted above, we had great success with Mexican hires out of Mexico City.

General perception was the universities there produced qualified graduates who were not paper tigers (or didn't lie about creds).

Rates for them were pretty good, and we had better alignment with timezones and holidays.

Reasonably good alignment in terms of legal and HR issues -- easier to enforce than, like, Bangladesh

The NAFTA / USMCA / whatever its called now Visa made it easy for them to come across the border for a few years as well. Pay bump for a while plus a chance to work in HQ or the IT office directly, make fat stacks, and then rotate back to MX and buy a nice house. The Mexico City PMs were also instrumental for bridging the language gap when running projects in other LATAM countries.

Trump's ICE might be the end of that approach tho

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

#602

Post by 0xdde »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #594
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 ti…

It should also be noted that there are some pretty big flaws in the analysis. They mention "the distribution of firms using ADP services does not exactly match the distribution of firms across the broader US economy," but make no attempt to adjust their analysis for it. They also drop 30% of the data for which there is no job title recorded. With such a skewed sample, it's hard to tell how the analysis is supposed to generalize.

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

#603

Post by phkahler »

coffeefirst wrote: post #575
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…

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…

>> 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.

This is a perfect example of what people don't understand (or on HN keep forgetting). LLMs do NOT follow instructions, they predict the next word in text and spit it out. The process is somewhat random, and certainly does not include an interpreter (executive function?) to execute instructions - even natural language instructions.

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

#604

Post by tonymet »

aksss wrote: post #201
tonymet wrote: post #195

I see a worrisome trend. On one hand, many of my proto-boomer friends are suffering from age-ism , and memes claim that over-50-year-olds are unemployable. Not 100% fidelity, but there's some truth. Then I hear about a lot of youngsters struggling to find work, and see articles like this. Well, who's left? Is there a sweet spot at like 31 that are just cleaning up?

beside the point, but over 50 = proto-boomer? You mean para-boomer, maybe? Gen X is <=60, I believe, so you referring to the cusp boomer/genx I think..

boomer-adjacent seemed like a mouthful

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

#605

Post by yupyupyups »

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…

Is that what you think of yourself?

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

#606

Post by coffeefirst »

phkahler wrote: post #603
coffeefirst wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>> 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. This is a perfect example of what people don't understand (or on HN keep forgetting). LLMs do NOT follow instructions, they predict…

Agreed. I keep trying stuff because I feel like I’m missing whatever magic people are talking about.

So far, I’ve found nothing of value besides natural language search.

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

#607

Post by bwfan123 »

svara wrote: post #177
romeros1 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it" ~ Upton Sinclair Your stance was the widely held stance not just on hacker news but also by the leading proponents of ai when chatgpt was first launched. A lot of people thought the hallucination aspect is something that simply can't be overcome. That LLMs were nothing but glorified stochastic parrots. Well, t…

How will this work exactly? I think I have a pretty good idea of what AI can do for software engineering, because I use it for that nearly every day and I experiment with different models and IDEs. The way that has worked for me is to make prompts very specific, to the point where the prompt itself would not be comprehensible to someone who's not in the field. If you sat a rando with no CS background in front of Curs…

I just completed a prototype of a non-trivial product that was vibe-coded just to test the ability and limits of LLMs.

My experience aligns largely with your excellent comment.

>But the level of integrative intelligence, combined with specialized world >knowledge required for that task is really very far away from what current >models can do.

Where LLMs excel are to put out large templates of what is needed, but they are frayed at the edges. Imagine programming as a jigsaw puzzle where the pieces have to fit together. LLMs can align the broader pieces, but fail to fit them precisely.

>But they are quite bad at abstracting textual information into a more >fundamental model of program and world state and reasoning at that level.

The more fundamental model of program is a "theory" or "mental-model" which unfortunately is not codified in the training data. LLMs can put together broad outlines based on their training data, but lack the precision in modeling at a more abstract level. For example, how concurrency could impact memory access is not precisely understood by the LLM - since it lacks a theory of it.

> the technical challenge is how do you pose a training problem to force a model > to learn beyond that.

This is the main challenge - how can an LLM learn more abstract patterns. For example, in the towers of hanoi problem, can the LLM learn the recursion and what recursion means. This requires LLM to learn abstraction precisely. I suspect LLMs learn abstraction "fuzzily" but what is required is to learn abstraction "precisely". The precision or determinism is largely where there is still a huge gap.

LLM-boosters would point to the bitter lesson and say it is a matter of time before this happens, but I am a skeptic. I think the process of symbolism or abstraction is not yet understood enough to be formalized.

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

#608

Post by nicce »

kypro wrote: post #592
nicce wrote: post #560

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. 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 abo…

But you can domestically hire that junior too - I am just arguing about that pure replacement model. You can pick the top talent from juniors too. Otherwise, if nobody ever hire juniors, at some point you run out of any workers because there is a portion for their life when they simply cannot get the job in their field. Young people won't invest the field if the first job requires that you are magician or have 10+ years of work experience that you either can't have or need to use your free-time.

Anyway, big tech doesn't work as an generic example because they have much more resources and therefore it cannot be generalized.

US also is an exception because the only expectation is English language. In other countries you may need two languages.

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

#609

Post by AndrewKemendo »

renewiltord wrote: post #143
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.

I mean, I still don't want to unionize with the guys who find `git` too complicated to use (which is apparently the majority of HN). Also, you guys all hate immigrants which is not my vibe, sorry.

Then don’t complain when some other group treats you the same

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

#610

Post by visarga »

yourusername wrote: post #434
visarga wrote: post #417

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.

Did the cost reduction have more value than the change in ad outcomes?
Post reply on HN