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

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

#611

Post by tracker1 » Fri, Aug 29, 2025, 5:57 PM UTC

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…

This seems to assign a cause without merit other than AI is the buzzword of the day.

Receptionist jobs down.. this has been the case for a while, and does include some AI, but AVR and general speech recognition and matching has gotten pretty good for a while, I'd say AI is half a step back.

Translators, maybe AI, but again, speech recognition in general is pretty good and not strictly an AI thing... but I'll give that one credit.

Software Engineers, maybe it's more about the (I don't even know the right current FAANG acronym anymore) companies that have laid off tens of thousands in the past few years and largely replaced (if at all) them with either contract or h1b workers? Only to grow short term margins on already profitable companies.

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

#612

Post by sensanaty » Fri, Aug 29, 2025, 5:59 PM UTC

weatherlite wrote: post #539

sensanaty wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm one of those offshore people that live in a cheaper place and works remotely for a US co. The majority of people in the company are still in the US, and even for the East coast, the timezones are just annoying to work around sometimes. Either I need to do late days, or they have to do uber early mornings/SUPER late days, don't even get me started on West coast where the hours basically never match. And I'm in the…

> but it's really not that much lower, plus life is just cheaper, even here in the Netherlands. Lived in the NL for 4 years, it was many things - cheap wasn't one of them. With the enormous taxes , high rents and mediocre salaries I don't think you can make the case it's somehow cheaper than the U.S unless you specifically mean Manhattan and Silicon Valley.

There's a reason I included that "even", because indeed NL is not cheap. However if you're not in SV or NYC, you're also not making the ludicrous half-a-million figures that people often talk about as well. Myself having lived in NYC, I can tell you right now QoL is dramatically higher in NL even if I'm earning a lot less cash. Also, it definitely is cheaper than those cities, even if you're in Amsterdam (and cities like Utrecht or Den Haag are a lot cheaper than Amsterdam too).

Around the 50-60k Euro mark is a VERY decent and comfortable living in the Netherlands and you'll be hard pressed to find companies not paying that much for medior roles, yet alone senior ones. Plus you have the bigger companies like Adyen, Booking, ASML etc. plus remote US companies that pay ~100-125k for Medior+ talent (I know this as I literally today, a mere 4 hours ago got an offer letter from one of the mentioned companies as a SWE II). The taxes only really start hurting in the 70k-90k region, but since it's progressively taxed it's still not the end of the world. Also if you work for one of the aforementioned big boys then you're probably going to be in the party bracket (literally what it's called :p) where the sting is lessened, stupidly enough.

Remember, average salary in NL is around 40k-45k EUR. If anyone above a medior level manages to work at a tech-adjacent company as is getting paid less than that, it's time to move jobs because the market has shifted up massively as of late in terms of wages, at least anecdotally from what I can see.

And most importantly, money isn't everything which is so often missed in these discussions talking about EU vs US comp. Most importantly of all is that I never have to worry about healthcare costs should anything happen to me or my loved ones that don't have the privilege of being sponsored by a megacorp, and very importantly I have job security and a permanent contract that makes it damned hard to get rid of me.

Now things aren't perfect here obviously, train costs are astronomical, the tax brackets are absurd (the aforementioned party bracket being an absolute farce), the healthcare system while great can be very annoying to navigate alone, and indeed rent in the private sector and housing costs in general is completely detached from reality... But compared to anywhere in the US I've ever lived, especially if we zoom out a bit and look at it from a lens of someone not in tech and not making FAANG-level money? I'll take Utrecht 100 times out of 10, thank you very much.

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

#613

Post by rwmj » Fri, Aug 29, 2025, 6:04 PM UTC

Havoc wrote: post #558

ecshafer wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There seems to be this dream of Tax AI Software that will just do all of the taxes. But other than using AI as a fancy text search, I don't see it happening for a long long time. LLMs can't do arithmetic or count.

Yeah - classifying an invoice into building rent or say printer ink it'll have some success. So we'll see some of it at the very bottom end. >LLMs can't do arithmetic or count. Yes. The fancy copilot stuff does use pandas/python to look at excel files so stuff like add up a table does work sometimes, but the parameters going into the pandas code need to make sense too in the garbage in garbage out sense. The base LLM…

We use Concur (SAP? expenses software), and it can scan your paper receipts and fill in the fields for you. I'd say it's about 30% accurate. Occasionally it'll be incredible. But mostly you end up having to manually adjust fields. It even gets categories completely wrong, like classifying a train ticket as a phone bill. All this means you spend a lot of time checking everything. It'd be hard for me to say honestly that it saves any time, and probably it takes a bit more time.

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

#614

Post by sensanaty » Fri, Aug 29, 2025, 6:09 PM UTC

mosburger wrote: post #555

deanmoriarty wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’ll get downvoted but in my experience, which may not be representative of the entire population, this is true. A mid-size US tech company I know well went fully remote after a lot of insistence from the workforce, prior to the pandemic they were fully in office. Soon enough they started hiring remotely from EU, and now the vast majority of their technical folks are from there. The only US workers remaining are mo…

My previous employer stopped hiring in the EU (except for the UK, where they were based, and South Africa, where the CTO was from) because the labor laws there made it too difficult for them to fire people, which was a particularly troublesome for them as they had almost quarterly layoffs. They switched back to hiring in the UK and US where there are fewer worker protections.

Does the UK really not have labor laws as strong as most countries in the EU? It's not like you can't fire people in EU, you just have to have an actual legitimate reason to do so, exactly because doing quarterly layoffs is absurd and shouldn't be tolerated by anyone.

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

#615

Post by endemic » Fri, Aug 29, 2025, 6:28 PM UTC

antonymoose wrote: post #513

zoeey wrote: post #456

This past year, I’ve seen a lot of entry-level jobs quietly disappear. It’s not that people are getting laid off, it’s that no one’s hiring beginners anymore. What’s really missing isn’t just the jobs, it’s the chance to grow. If there’s nowhere to start, how are new people supposed to get in and learn?

Were there ever that many low-level Junior jobs though? In my experience, almost everyone in college would get an internship Junior / Senior year and convert into an FTE after graduation. Those that were not so talented or not so lucky usually struggled to find work, taking many months to finally land a job. Most typically at a Booz Allen Hamilton type of place that was just throwing bodies into seats. At all of my e…

It took me ~2 years after graduation to find a development job, which was from a "can you code HTML by hand?" classified on craigslist.

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

#616

Post by ecshafer » Fri, Aug 29, 2025, 6:30 PM UTC

rwmj wrote: post #613

Havoc wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah - classifying an invoice into building rent or say printer ink it'll have some success. So we'll see some of it at the very bottom end. >LLMs can't do arithmetic or count. Yes. The fancy copilot stuff does use pandas/python to look at excel files so stuff like add up a table does work sometimes, but the parameters going into the pandas code need to make sense too in the garbage in garbage out sense. The base LLM…

We use Concur (SAP? expenses software), and it can scan your paper receipts and fill in the fields for you. I'd say it's about 30% accurate. Occasionally it'll be incredible. But mostly you end up having to manually adjust fields. It even gets categories completely wrong, like classifying a train ticket as a phone bill. All this means you spend a lot of time checking everything. It'd be hard for me to say honestly th…

Concur might be the worst software I have ever used.

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

#617

Post by endemic » Fri, Aug 29, 2025, 6:37 PM UTC

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.

Yeah and it tanked pretty hard, IIRC

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

#618

Post by nevertoolate » Fri, Aug 29, 2025, 7:24 PM UTC

I talked with an AI friend to find patterns in this comment thread. I'd like to comment it back here:

Crisis response analysis of these comments reveals three patterns:

Denial (24%): "Study is BS" / "It's just offshoring" - dismisses AI impact without examining evidence

Fear/Catastrophizing (24%): "Feudalism incoming" / "End of democracy" - accepts premise, jumps to apocalyptic scenarios

Analytical (39%): Questions methodology, notes sample bias, considers alternative explanations, asks for clarification

Key finding: Nearly half the responses (48%) are emotional rather than evidence-based. The most upvoted and substantive comments come from the analytical category, which actually engages with the study's limitations rather than just reacting to the headline.

The Stanford study itself has significant methodological issues (ADP represents only ~15% of workforce, multiple sample restrictions, correlation≠causation), but you'd miss that if you only read the emotional responses.

edit: formatting

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

#619

Post by laughing_man » Fri, Aug 29, 2025, 7:41 PM UTC

legulere wrote: post #485

laughing_man wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't have to replace people on a one-for-one basis to cause job losses. Let's say LLMs make your developers 50% more efficient. Doesn't it stand to reason you can lay off the lowest performing 33% and get the same amount (or more) of work?

It also means that with lower costs your service becomes more attractive and maybe attracts more customers, so might even grow the number of workers. This is known as Jevons Paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Yes, and a lot of people have gone broke assuming unlimited demand for the services they provide.

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

#620

Post by laughing_man » Fri, Aug 29, 2025, 7:43 PM UTC

visarga wrote: post #418

laughing_man wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't have to replace people on a one-for-one basis to cause job losses. Let's say LLMs make your developers 50% more efficient. Doesn't it stand to reason you can lay off the lowest performing 33% and get the same amount (or more) of work?

No, it does not stand, because you think linearly. Companies can't simply drop 33% of employees because there is competition. If competition uses both humans and AI they will get more value from both. No AI has sufficient autonomy or capability to be held accountable for its mistakes. There is less upswing in reducing costs than in increasing profits. Companies want to increase profits actually, not just reduce costs…

You're assuming everyone can compete on service alone, and that's just not the case. If the quality of the product is good enough, price becomes the more important metric.