How employment changes when firms adopt generative AI • Hacker News Board

Re: How employment changes when firms adopt generative AI

#31

Post by nairboon » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 7:14 AM UTC

So they studied change in "headcount" (full-time, part-time?), but what are these heads doing? A more interesting metric to study would be changes in wages for a normalized position (e.g. 40h/week, 4w PTO/y). Then you could disentangle the different effects of actually hiring a highly paid worker or replacing a highly paid worker with two new assistants + an AI subscription for less total compensation. AI is just the latest stage of a long trend in automation. If you check the first chart in the recent article of the NY FED [1] you'll see that the labor share has been on a decline for decades, and the trend hints at an accelerating decline. In light of this larger trend, I wouldn't expect that the wages of the "increased headcount" according to ramp's article is growing or holding ground.

[1]: https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2026/06/the-po...

Re: How employment changes when firms adopt generative AI

#32

Post by watwut » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 7:34 AM UTC

protocolture wrote: post #11

shevy-java wrote: post #4

So, more skynet leads to more real jobs? I am confused. Wasn't the initial claim that AI kills all jobs? I feel the claim right now is not really correct. One needs to do a thorough analysis of the whole job market across different countries, say, over 5 years. Or at the least 3 years but very complete and unbiased either way.

The claim is and always has been that automation increases net jobs. There's never been an automation revolution that worked otherwise. The counter claim that LLMs were special for some reason has never been supported. And a lot of its proponents have other axes to grind, like UBI, Socialism, Communism etc. It would suit their worldview for this time to be different, and so thats the message they push.

> The counter claim that LLMs were special for some reason has never been supported. And a lot of its proponents have other axes to grind, like UBI, Socialism, Communism etc.

No, they are mostly right wing capitalists. LLM is not a left wing project. UBI is something they talked about, but super hard to believe it is anything but a way to shut up critics.

> The claim is and always has been that automation increases net jobs.

That was definitely not the common claim last 4 years.

> There's never been an automation revolution that worked otherwise.

That is not what historical record shows. In the short term, larger unemployment are to be expected. Over long term, it evens out.

Re: How employment changes when firms adopt generative AI

#33

Post by Havoc » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 7:43 AM UTC

Seems like a questionable correlation. The companies with money to burn on AI are those those that are growing and doing well so ofc their growing headcount too

Re: How employment changes when firms adopt generative AI

#34

Post by whstl » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 7:43 AM UTC

whatever1 wrote: post #7

Because people are wasting time and tokens doing irrelevant to the bottom line things. Cool you spent 2 days and $200 building a react UI for your spreadsheet.

Bingo. Bullshit work grows to accommodate productivity gains.

Is it easier to implement a design now? Then let’s redesign every quarter.

Is it easier to refactor the whole codebase? Then let’s rewrite in whatever new hotness.

This is not different from web frameworks 10-20 years ago. Is it easier to make a website using Rails? If so, why did I see an explosion in devs-per-project after I started using Rails? Because of the BS.

Re: How employment changes when firms adopt generative AI

#35

Post by programmer4web » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 7:45 AM UTC

[flagged]

Re: How employment changes when firms adopt generative AI

#36

Post by bigfatkitten » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 7:54 AM UTC

nok22kon wrote: post #29

protocolture wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Current rates of employment are well below historic levels. Ignoring for a second that net jobs and employment rates aren't really the same thing. >In preindustrial societies nearly everyone was working to support themselves and their families, these days a huge percentage of the population is in education which may be investing in their future but isn’t directly producing anything. Retirement as a percentage of the…

> Likewise, Banks employ more people after introducing ATM's than before. that's a common trope, and its both true and false true: more bank employees after ATM's false: less bank employees after smartphone banking

The big 4 Australian banks (Commonwealth Bank, ANZ, National Australia Bank and Westpac) all employ pretty much the same number of people now as they did 25 years ago, but their workforce composition has changed. More software developers, fewer branch staff.

Re: How employment changes when firms adopt generative AI

#37

Post by arcticbull » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 7:55 AM UTC

Havoc wrote: post #33

Seems like a questionable correlation. The companies with money to burn on AI are those those that are growing and doing well so ofc their growing headcount too

One of the study authors, Ara, tweeted that they control for that by comparing early adopters against firms who haven't yet, and built like-for-like control groups with similar pre-adoption growth trajectories. (This is a rough quote).

Re: How employment changes when firms adopt generative AI

#38

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 7:59 AM UTC

nairboon wrote: post #31

So they studied change in "headcount" (full-time, part-time?), but what are these heads doing? A more interesting metric to study would be changes in wages for a normalized position (e.g. 40h/week, 4w PTO/y). Then you could disentangle the different effects of actually hiring a highly paid worker or replacing a highly paid worker with two new assistants + an AI subscription for less total compensation. AI is just the…

[deleted]

Re: How employment changes when firms adopt generative AI

#39

Post by Terr_ » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 8:41 AM UTC

consp wrote: post #16

camillomiller wrote: post #14

These studies miss a huge point, which is: working with automation outside of programming is tedious, frustrating, and soul crushing. I see it already with some non technical clients. I have notice a terrible trend of people just offloading everything to agents or prompting even the simplest interaction with other humans. Let me tell you, it’s fucking dire.

Inside can be as well. Please manually review these 5000 lines of slop I generated while watching YouTube and verify the unreadable readme due to all the bloat and icons is correct with the code. If that is not soul crushing I would not know what is.

> bloat

"Look at all the traditional signals of thought, quality, or attention that it inserted, which being totally counterfeit have actually become strictly counterproductive--at least to anybody who has to actually use it!"

Re: How employment changes when firms adopt generative AI

#40

Post by arcticbull » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 8:41 AM UTC

keyle wrote: post #10

That's interesting and goes directly against what everyone complains about in the employment sector. I'm sure there is a big caveat in there somewhere.

Companies over-hired in 2021 assuming that their COVID metrics explosion would persist, but they didn't. We saw low attrition for years, and a low-hire/low-fire employment environment. Then the time came to pay the piper.

The tech everything's-hypergrowth era is, for now, over. Most of the low-hanging fruit that we've collected for the last 20 years of bull market (putting tech into every business) is gone, and companies hired in advance of having the next business to overlay on their current ones. For many that didn't materialize.