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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

#241

Post by jvanderbot »

zahlman wrote: post #232

I open this discussion thread and literally the first two top-level comments I see contradict each other: > 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. > Big caveat to the productivi…

It's not so contradictory if you peel back a couple layers

1. For junior engineers a 50% increase might be less than a 10% increase for senior engineers. So the % comments are consistent with the pareto argument. Diminishing returns _can produce_ a pareto tradeoff.

2. Saying gains are "concentrated" to junior engineers can also be a function of the work assigned to junior engineers. A senior engineer might get 1000% boost over jr doing the same jr work. The problem is the reverse - the hard things are concentrated around the oldest engineers, and now "hard" can also mean "not easily claude'd"

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

#242

Post by tcp_handshaker »

zahlman wrote: post #232

I open this discussion thread and literally the first two top-level comments I see contradict each other: > 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. > Big caveat to the productivi…

That is not the most absurd, the most absurd is people here thinking faster ( and yes I avoid the word better ) code generator engines will solve humanity problems.

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

#243

Post by FrustratedMonky »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #211
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...

Yeah, but they do all go up and down together. It isn't isolated to software jobs.

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

#244

Post by jvanderbot »

dahart wrote: post #230

Why does the unemployment chart show a slow rise in unemployment for a year or more before covid started? This does not agree with the data from the BLS, which showed unemployment spiked very suddenly in March 2020. https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-une... Also, what is “AI exposure” in 2015? LLMs hadn’t been invented yet. I did just read some of the cited paper. Essentially the quintiles boil…

They cut out the peaky-peak (16%), and then fit a time-lagged smoother, it looks like. The dots are more like bls.

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

#245

Post by hfthkgghnd »

simonw wrote: post #240
jcranmer wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since so many people are doubting you here, here is a post from ~a year ago that's pulling the same "LLMs 6 months ago were crap, now they're awesome" shtick: https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/ . There's more posts along this vein being put out from 2024 on or so.

I find this attitude baffling. Things are allowed to get better more than once! The idea that "yeah, you said technology had improved in the past, and now you're saying it has improved again" is a gotcha just seems incoherent to me.

[dead]

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

#246

Post by Kiro »

jcranmer wrote: post #233
ballsac wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A challenge with this kind of study is that coding agents (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex) only started working really well in 2026? 5? 4? 3? Heard this one way too many times.

Since so many people are doubting you here, here is a post from ~a year ago that's pulling the same "LLMs 6 months ago were crap, now they're awesome" shtick: https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/ . There's more posts along this vein being put out from 2024 on or so.

A year ago it was capable but required much more hand-holding. I thought it was as good as it would ever get and was still happy and productive, but only because I didn't know how much better it would get.

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

#247

Post by codinhood »

simonw wrote: post #240
jcranmer wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since so many people are doubting you here, here is a post from ~a year ago that's pulling the same "LLMs 6 months ago were crap, now they're awesome" shtick: https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/ . There's more posts along this vein being put out from 2024 on or so.

I find this attitude baffling. Things are allowed to get better more than once! The idea that "yeah, you said technology had improved in the past, and now you're saying it has improved again" is a gotcha just seems incoherent to me.

I keep running into this as well. Someone shared a link to a study from last year telling me that AI doesn't make programmers as productive as they think. The study was obviously done months prior to it's release. So evaluating the state AI even further back.

But this didn't seem to concern them. The study said X, therefore it applies to today.

I'm just not sure it's worth it to argue with others about it at this point. Not that I'm 100% all behind AI coding, but I'm just shocked people are still this resistant.

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

#248

Post by bicx »

jvanderbot wrote: post #241
zahlman wrote: post #232

I open this discussion thread and literally the first two top-level comments I see contradict each other: > 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. > Big caveat to the productivi…

It's not so contradictory if you peel back a couple layers 1. For junior engineers a 50% increase might be less than a 10% increase for senior engineers. So the % comments are consistent with the pareto argument. Diminishing returns _can produce_ a pareto tradeoff. 2. Saying gains are "concentrated" to junior engineers can also be a function of the work assigned to junior engineers. A senior engineer might get 1000%…

Yes, I’m a senior engineer at a 3-engineer startup, and there isn’t “junior-level” or “senior-level” work here. It’s all just work. Claude allows me to tear through the kind of gruntwork I’ve been doing ad nauseam for the last 15 years.

If my tasks were things like squeezing 3% more efficiency out of an algorithm, that might be different. Although, even then, my PM (!) used Claude to boost the efficiency of one of our more complex Postgres queries by up to 5x, in ways I honestly would not thought of doing. It was quite humbling. A former engineer here used pgMustard on the same query a couple years ago and claimed it was as fast as it could get.

I can’t speak for the kind of work done in the higher echelons of big tech, but for us, there isn’t much that Claude can’t help with.

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

#249

Post by cjbgkagh »

zahlman wrote: post #232

I open this discussion thread and literally the first two top-level comments I see contradict each other: > 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. > Big caveat to the productivi…

While I disagree with the counter position I do believe it to be an honest account of their experience. I think the counter intuitive aspect is that marginal cost of software is practically zero so in an efficient market the consumption of it will be dominated by the best software written by senior devs with AI, even if the production of software is dominated by junior devs with AI. I think we are in a transitory phase where still employed juniors can be very productive shortly before becoming unemployed at which point that productivity drops to zero. If junior devs are productively producing software that then goes unused then how productive were they really. But I understand that the latter effect may not have been picked up in the general stats. Anecdotally again, I fired 3 juniors and went solo and I know of many others who have done something similar.

Another aspect is that once the easier work is complete then the remaining residual is the difficult work, and this changes the relative productivity to the point where a junior developer may not be able to make any further progress at all.

Overly bureaucratic companies tend to generate easier work for themselves to the point that this work dominates their total workload. If we are to measure productivity by opening and closing Jira tickets then I would expect the junior developers to get a much bigger ‘productivity’ benefit from AI than senior developers.

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

#250

Post by Kiro »

johnyzee wrote: post #133
cmenge wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess it's important who one hears this from. I just spoke to a fried who is a headhunter and who's been trying to automate his processes for a while (he likes to fiddle and certainly has skills, but he's not an engineer). He kept trying, but it just wasn't good enough. Now he said with GPT Work and Sol, it worked, but the key point is: all of it suddenly worked. The problem was one of reliability, of handling edge…

You heard it from someone with no experience developing software. A lot of AI hype comes from that, even (or especially) from people in the actual business of developing software - a surprising amount of managers and adjacent or supporting roles in the field actually have very little clue about software development. It's cool that 'regular' people can now create solutions to many small problems, and automate stuff -…

Who are these "real" software engineers and what are they working on? Among software developers I know, the biggest users of LLMs are the seniors. I don't think any of them would agree that its usage is a tiny part of development.
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