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What is happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality

siepr.stanford.edu

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

#211

Post by iLoveOncall »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #171

One thing on the first graph that jumps out, is that ALL unemployment has gone up/down in same ratio's. Maybe the current job market is not about AI, but all the other variables in the economy that has always driven unemployment. Maybe the scary thing, the economy itself is suffering which is causing the unemployment, not AI.

> One thing on the first graph that jumps out, is that ALL unemployment has gone up/down in same ratio's

Actually the first graph shows that the most exposed to AI an industry is, the LEAST affected it has been by unemployment...

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

#212

Post by incrudible »

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.

That's not how you should use it and LLMs aren't that bad anymore. Either you just accept the quality level of LLM code wholesale, which means accept mediocrity in exchange for volume, or you at least leverage the LLM to improve the process surrounding the production code.

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

#213

Post by cjbgkagh »

I find that productivity follows a Pareto distribution (80:20 rule) and that AI is a sharper tool in that it enables the already productive to be proportionally more productive and this effect increases as the intelligence of AI increases. So 80:20 becomes a 90:10, 95:5, 99:1 etc. I also think that corporate bureaucratic change is laggy so change there will still be rather slow. I think where change will be rapid is when the most productive employees leave the company to create a new smaller company to compete with it, so there will be a displacement of medium to large companies by much smaller ones. On one hand this greater competition of more efficient companies will result in an increased in consumer surplus, on the other hand it will result in mass economic displacement and a collapse of the tax base. I think AI has only recently been good enough to do this and it takes time to spin up competing companies so I wouldn’t expect to see this effect in any lagging indicators just yet. From personal experience, I’m well down the path of commoditizing my niche industry where I can practically give away a better version of the top tier software and still personally make a lot of money. Additionally it would be counter productive to alert my competitors to this new reality. I know I’m not the only person doing this, so this multiplied by a bunch of industries would be absolutely world changing.

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

#214

Post by danshipt »

overgard wrote: post #38
simonw wrote: post #2

A challenge with this kind of study is that coding agents (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex) only started working really well in late November, which for most people meant early January due to the December break. General agents (OpenClaw, Anthropic Copilot, ChatGPT "Work") started working even later than that. This category of software may have a much more meaningful impact on work than the mostly-chat systems we were using…

Anecdotally, I (along with the rest of my team) got laid off from a big tech company at the end of January. The stated reason was "AI", although I think as we all know the real reason was "we overhired in 2022". I managed to get a job by April without putting in a lot of work, though (mostly just listened to recruiters until something hit my fancy). My work experience is good, but I don't know if it's so good that I…

Same experience. I’m based in Western Europe.

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

#217

Post by codechicago277 »

sethammons wrote: post #142
nicce wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Interesting to see the impact in the long term when battle tested software gets replaced with vibecoded variants by non-programmers. Does it increase data breaches or quality actually goes up?

The other day, i was fed up with my mac webcam software. I just needed to fix being washed out. Every piece of software I found cost money, several were a monthly subscription. Over lunch, Claude made a minimal toolbar app that lets me adjust down the brightness. Often, you don't need battle tested. And you don't need a bunch of features. The ai could have shipped my video feed somewhere I suppose, if I were unable t…

Becomes a problem when the next version of Mac OS changes the api, and you have to dig up the code, install dependencies, recompile and fix it. Meanwhile potentially breaking something else.

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

#218

Post by danshipt »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #166
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, the goalposts just keep shifting. In reality: they still don't work well, unless you're content with producing low quality work.

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.

From time to time check a couple of ads in YT. They are full of low quality unrealistic AI generated ads.

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

#219

Post by danshipt »

weatherlite wrote: post #154
simonw wrote: post #2

A challenge with this kind of study is that coding agents (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex) only started working really well in late November, which for most people meant early January due to the December break. General agents (OpenClaw, Anthropic Copilot, ChatGPT "Work") started working even later than that. This category of software may have a much more meaningful impact on work than the mostly-chat systems we were using…

> This category of software may have a much more meaningful impact on work than the mostly-chat systems we were using from 2022-2025. Mostly an impact on software development - I'm not seeing broad automation and layoffs in industries like law, finance etc. It will gradually happen but due to issues with memory, reliability and long term planning of LLMs there are real barriers. Even in software development - while i…

If by 50% you mean all juniors/mid-level engineers will not find work, then I agree.

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

#220

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

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.

I think it's useful to divide companies doing software development, as well as specific jobs within a company, into two groups:

1) Companies where software is the product - where what you are working on is directly what is making the company money, and differentiating what they sell from what other companies are selling. These are the jobs you want, and where you will be valued.

2) Companies where software is only a component of the product, regarded as non-critical, or not product related at all - just internal IT systems. These are NOT the jobs you want!

In a type 1) job the company (unless it is run by idiots) recognizes that better developers = better product = more profits. They will seek out experienced skilled developers and pay them what the market demands.

In a type 2) job you are not regarded as a profit-generating asset, but rather as overhead - an expense to be minimized. The company will be looking for the cheapest, least experienced people they think can do the job. Maybe they will outsource, and/or nowadays try to use LLMs as a way to avoid needing to hire better quality developers. The development work may still in fact be demanding and require skilled developers to be done well, but if the company mindset is that developers are an expense not an asset, then they will try to get the job done with the cheapest labor regardless.

So, yeah, if at all possible don't work on things like IT systems or on products where it is not blindingly obvious to management that software quality is directly related to profitability.

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