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What is happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality

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Re: What is happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality

#201

Post by CuriouslyC »

bigfishrunning wrote: post #198
CuriouslyC wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's the rub. They produce low quality work according to your rubric. If that was the universal rubric, they would already have RL'd against it, and you'd like the work they produce.

So the average bar for software is very low, and most people writing it don't care about software quality and just want a paycheck to cash? I've been saying this for years.

I wouldn't say it like that exactly, though you're not wrong either. People just heavily discount the value of future efficiency gains due to nuanced architectural/stylistic choices. I think this is in part because people have a limited expectation that the code will survive long enough for it to matter, or that they'll be at the company long enough to reap the rewards of the up front work.

Re: What is happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality

#202

Post by chewbacha »

VladVladikoff wrote: post #199
chewbacha wrote: post #196

Big caveat to the productivity claim is that it’s concentrated in lesser experienced engineers and vanishes or goes negative with highly experienced engineers. This intuitively makes sense and generally agrees with my experience. LLMs move your baseline towards the mean. If you are below average it improves and if you are above it hinders. But also in my experience, my memory retention of the work done with an LLM is…

>My tinfoil hat says that this is what tech CEOs want. They want workers that are low skilled and can be paid less. My company is small, but my opinion at the moment is the opposite. Low skill workers don’t notice the flaws of what LLMs produce, I am no longer interested in hiring any juniors, as all they do is copy and paste LLM output without thinking, which anyone could do. It is the senior engineers who are most…

The issue would be that LLMs seem to not improve senior devs productivity. In which case what you are saying is “we shouldn’t use LLMs”

Which I happen to agree with.

Re: What is happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality

#204

Post by lelanthran »

bloaf wrote: post #7

Organizational inertia is a real thing. There are still fortune 500 companies with internal bans on AI. A lot of the answer to "how much impact has AI had" comes down to "how much have we even attempted?" In my workplace, we're going to decline to renew some software subscriptions because a non-programmer vibe-coded their replacement in a week. The impacts are here, they're just not evenly distributed yet.

> In my workplace, we're going to decline to renew some software subscriptions because a non-programmer vibe-coded their replacement in a week.

That's gonna turn out well :-)

Maybe they only need it to work for the next 6 months of enhancements...

Re: What is happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality

#206

Post by drTobiasFunke »

gentooflux wrote: post #200
VladVladikoff wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>My tinfoil hat says that this is what tech CEOs want. They want workers that are low skilled and can be paid less. My company is small, but my opinion at the moment is the opposite. Low skill workers don’t notice the flaws of what LLMs produce, I am no longer interested in hiring any juniors, as all they do is copy and paste LLM output without thinking, which anyone could do. It is the senior engineers who are most…

And as a senior engineer, I'm not interested in cleaning up vibe code. When I review a PR for a junior dev they learn from my suggestions (or I tell their boss they're not learning). Having to correct an AI is a waste of my time.

I hope you do know that your comments are straight up being pasted to an LLM that addresses or counters those, not the junior dev. They are likely learning nothing other than how to increase their PR counts for managers to see.

Re: What is happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality

#207

Post by iLoveOncall »

TeriyakiBomb wrote: post #105
cowanon77 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to be true this time though; I have observed it myself and heard it from several experienced developers I personally know and respect. It feels like some threshold was crossed with Opus 4.5 and Gpt 5.3, where the models are now able to reliably solve certain classes of problems that were previously unreliable. Time will tell of course, and it’s early, but inflection points do exist with progress.

Thing is. You can find an extremely similar paragraph written about Claude 4.x or some equivalent gpt. And simultaneously, many people expressing their frustration and the shortcomings of “But it’s different this time” - several people, several times over the last couple of years. This is not at all a dig at you, I’m very sorry if it reads that way. My point is these things only get truly better in anecdotes. The way…

> You can find an extremely similar paragraph written about Claude 4.x or some equivalent gpt

Even 3.7. I remember when it came out and people were claiming that that was now the model that was going to replace engineers. Cue Fable years later and people still claim that this one is the one.

Re: What is happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality

#208

Post by iLoveOncall »

simonw wrote: post #55
bluefirebrand wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how much of it is real and how much of it is people just being worn down by the hype to the point they can't fight it anymore Very smart people aren't immune to being worn down over time

I really don't think that's how it works. Smart, experienced developers who thought coding agents were junk for most of 2025 and think they're useful now in 2026 are not saying that because they got "worn down over time".

[flagged]

Re: What is happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality

#209

Post by giantg2 »

exabrial wrote: post #56

Prior to the weaving loom and sewing machines, a factory might be able to make like 20 t-shirts a day with 50 workers. After mass production, factories generally employ the same amount of workers, but people aren't hand-sewing things. Instead roughly 50 people are producing thousands of tshirts a day leveraging giant machines. Most of HN recognized the "We're firing people because AI makes people efficient" as one of…

"factories generally employ the same amount of workers"

Not really. The stats should show that factory workers as a percent of the workforce has been declining.

Thw leadership at my company has said they plan to do more with the same people rather than lay off. But they also seem to have reduced hiring and are removing certain types of roles.

Re: What is happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality

#210

Post by conqrr »

chewbacha wrote: post #196

Big caveat to the productivity claim is that it’s concentrated in lesser experienced engineers and vanishes or goes negative with highly experienced engineers. This intuitively makes sense and generally agrees with my experience. LLMs move your baseline towards the mean. If you are below average it improves and if you are above it hinders. But also in my experience, my memory retention of the work done with an LLM is…

> My tinfoil hat says that this is what tech CEOs want. They want workers that are low skilled and can be paid less. Guess it worked then. I'm happy to take a paycut to never deal with vibecode and toxic environment where every estimate is borked due to agentic coding.
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