When anyone asks the question: "What is AGI", it is actually this. An "abundance" of nothing else but this.
It's just that the tech workers are the canaries in the coal mines for the other white collar knowledge workers.
This is "AGI".
The tech jobs bust is real. Don't blame AI (yet)
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Re: The tech jobs bust is real. Don't blame AI (yet)
#12Can anyone provide historical data for "job busts" or other types of declines in tech employment, massive layoffs or hire freezes? I seem to read about something like this every few years. Would like some data to see if this trend is stronger than the previous ones or not.
Re: The tech jobs bust is real. Don't blame AI (yet)
#13Feels early to blame AI for most of this. A lot of it still looks like a reset from 2021-era hiring assumptions rather than actual labor replacement
Over hiring is one thing.. but that wouldnt be a problem if there was an endless stream of projects to take that are value creating.
So the issue is not necessarily the over-hiring.. more that the large tech firms are running out of projects to take that are value-creating. Which is not surprising - the labour market in its currently state is absolutely not perfect in allocating labour.
It should be noted that fixing tech debt is not necessary value-creating from a financial standpoint. What engineers think is value creating has nothing to do with what a CFO determines to be a value creating project - whose job is to maximize firm value.
Re: The tech jobs bust is real. Don't blame AI (yet)
#14reciprocal tariffs had put the non-tech and tech economy in stasis (except for hardware for AI). they are also are better than tax breaks and will supercharge bottom lines for large corporations once reclaimed and if prices remain high.
also if you want to test/force ai adoption you have to put pressure by firing some
now wars will put us into further stasis or decline via increased inflation pressure.
Re: The tech jobs bust is real. Don't blame AI (yet)
#15When anyone asks the question: "What is AGI", it is actually this. An "abundance" of nothing else but this. It's just that the tech workers are the canaries in the coal mines for the other white collar knowledge workers. This is "AGI".
Meanwhile... I had to step in and hand code lots of css today because copilot couldn't do the thing. And I had to step in and manually fix tests yesterday because copilot couldn't do the thing.
Are you paid by OpenAI and/or Anthropic?
Re: The tech jobs bust is real. Don't blame AI (yet)
#16The only reason to blame AI is that it doesn't live up to promises, so corps are betting that scale will solve the problem. So datacenter after datacenter wants to be built in areas that can't supply them water/power. And that money sink is causing the layoffs. If AI really helped like it expected to, you would grab any dev you could so that you could have a army of 100x devs. Humans are still cheaper for the real co…
> If AI really helped like it expected to, you would grab any dev you could so that you could have an army of 100x devs.
This seems maybe a bit reductionist.
AI will have diminishing returns because at a certain point, coding is not the bottleneck and coordination is or some other thing that hasn’t been optimized yet. The exact bottleneck seems like it depends on the organization.
My theory is that in general, augmented devs are much more productive, but 100% of that gain doesn’t translate into 100% more software delivered to customers, and there is a point where coding isn’t the longest pole.
But I don’t think most orgs are at that break even yet, and I think we can still get more out of engineering before we plateau.
Re: The tech jobs bust is real. Don't blame AI (yet)
#17Feels early to blame AI for most of this. A lot of it still looks like a reset from 2021-era hiring assumptions rather than actual labor replacement
Yeah it feels like a lot of this could still be shakeout from FAANG and FAANG wannabes hiring 10x more engineers than needed. I realize Square is a more complicated business than OnlyFans. But OnlyFans isn't a trivial app and it runs on 42 employees. Block had more than 10k employees pre-layoff.
Re: The tech jobs bust is real. Don't blame AI (yet)
#18[flagged]
Re: The tech jobs bust is real. Don't blame AI (yet)
#19Feels early to blame AI for most of this. A lot of it still looks like a reset from 2021-era hiring assumptions rather than actual labor replacement
You'd think if the market were rational that Block would be punished for firing that many people, and obviously lying about why, but we haven't reached that point yet I guess.
Re: The tech jobs bust is real. Don't blame AI (yet)
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
I could be wrong but it seems like in the case of a crash no one will be buying new GPUs and thus the existing ones could hold their value longer. Of course that value will no longer be massively inflated by bubble FOMO.
It isn’t about holding value, the cards are going to burn up. If they don’t, in 5 years one could run a rack of 4 cards at home at an affordable rate. Either the cards become affordable again and the datacenter is useless, or they don’t, and nobody can fucking afford to rent them.
GPUs definitely have higher failure rates than CPUs but I'm not sure what the absolute rates will turn out to be. If 10% of GPUs die within 5 years that's very high but also probably economically fine. If 50% die that's a disaster.