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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

#311

Post by lobster45 »

suzzer99 wrote: post #300
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 enables the already productive to be proportionally more productive I finally got a real feature to develop and started using Codex a couple weeks ago. Before that, I was just using ChatGPT for small things. For the most part, I was doing a lot of monkey-patching and deep troubleshooting that I didn't think Codex would be good at. I was wrong. I had no idea how smart these tools are. I now realize, as the tech l…

Your comment resonates with me due to the cognitive dissonance of seeing the benefits and issues with AI as far as development work. I have been struggling to identify a process improvement that AI can improve not only the development aspect by the overall productivity of our company. We are a dev shop mostly C++ and python. At our company I see the development workflow and it is very inefficient. The biggest issue is communication. AI can certainty increase the coding output and velocity, but the rest of the process relies on humans.

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

#312

Post by jvanderbot »

bojan wrote: post #291
bicx wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ou…

> Although, even then, my PM (!) used Claude to boost the efficiency of one of our more complex Postgres queries by up to 5x Would you be kind to describe what test set-up do you have that a PM felt safe enough to deploy the changed query without the fear they'll break something?

read the diff and time the query?

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

#313

Post by ulnarkressty »

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 heavily depends on the task, language and experience. What I saw in my team was that low performers started being as productive as mediocre programmers, however they mostly produce slop which needs to be sent back for rework, so in the short term it's not that great. However since they can iterate faster, I have the feeling that they are learning faster so hopefully in the long run they can be somewhat productive.

The high-performers on the other hand are ripping through tasks at such a speed that they now have time to focus on quality and processes, so in the end you get a really well polished piece of software. However this is starting to change for the worse as the PMs are realizing what's happening and cramming more and more stuff in the sprints.

The amazing part is not the above though - it's that one needs not be an SME anymore. One of our customers asked us to make an Android application with some features of our product, which were not trivial to port. Even though we never did anything like that before, a small team was able to release it in a couple of months mostly bug-free. Without AI this would have taken at least half a year, or more. It is quite shocking to hear the status updates going from "we need this thing implemented and I have no idea what it even means" to "it's done and works" the next day.

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

#314

Post by torginus »

DanielHB wrote: post #302
cjbgkagh wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pha…

> If junior devs are productively producing software that then goes unused then how productive were they really Most ways of measuring productivity across an economy (in macro sense) takes into account only the transfer of capital. Meaning someone paying for something. So in this case it will be measurably zeo in most macro-economics studies.

Wonder if that means if I knock out an app using a Claude Code sub in an afternoon, that would've taken me a week previously, and the result is better than what I could've done, does that mean that gross productivity went down?

- I didn't make money, since I got paid for my time

- Anthropic didn't make money, since the amount I paid them for AI is tiny

This sounds wrong to me.

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

#315

Post by inigyou »

expedition32 wrote: post #309
indoorfish wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But software makes the most money? Look at the stock market. It must be the most important thing? right guys? right?

If AI starts putting tech folks out of a job we can end the teacher, nurse and daycare shortage.

There will still be no money available for those things. Money is only available for Larry Ellison's yacht.

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

#316

Post by iririririr »

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.

you should not be noticing what's behind the official veil!

it's all Ai. The economy is great. i mean if there was any sign the world was trading oil not in dollars, they would have moved into Venezuela and Iran by now.

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

#317

Post by AnimalMuppet »

ModernMech wrote: post #137
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.

If it's so evident, why can't someone prove it with something more than "it seems better and everyone agrees"?

Con: "Where's the evidence that this actually is improving productivity?"

Pro: "The evidence hasn't shown up in statistics yet; it's too new!"

Con: "And won't this destroy maintainability?"

Pro: "Show me the maintainability disasters caused by AI."

Con: "I can't yet; it's too new!"

Both sides are playing the "it's too new" card when asked for actual evidence to prove their claims. In fairness, it actually is too new for there to be much statistically-valid data, especially if the inflection point was November 2025. So both sides are trumpeting their position, neither with actual trustworthy data.

Everybody has their anecdote. Nobody has data yet.

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

#318

Post by agumonkey »

tossandthrow wrote: post #303
agumonkey wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was observed on first week for me. In the employee room, most people were all crazy about LLMs, looking at the prompt results in awe, "I can do my day in 1h easy..." . By the end of the week, group meetings were much more tame "yeah I can go a bit deeper than I would otherwise, surely saves me a few hours a week". And after the meeting was over these employees were already saying that they would never report the…

I don't think we should fear the big corps shrinking over night. What we should fear is the startups. Legal startup demonstrates they can do legal work at a fraction of the price. New generation of banks can underwrite at a fraction of the cost, or new insurance companies can insure much cheaper. This will force the incumbents to reduce head count and use Ai.

fair point, that said that's a first phase only, if llm/ai keeps growing steadily it's in theory able to do 90% of non manual labour jobs (and robots are also improving so.. even manual labour may evaporate)

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

#319

Post by torginus »

lobster45 wrote: post #311
suzzer99 wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it enables the already productive to be proportionally more productive I finally got a real feature to develop and started using Codex a couple weeks ago. Before that, I was just using ChatGPT for small things. For the most part, I was doing a lot of monkey-patching and deep troubleshooting that I didn't think Codex would be good at. I was wrong. I had no idea how smart these tools are. I now realize, as the tech l…

Your comment resonates with me due to the cognitive dissonance of seeing the benefits and issues with AI as far as development work. I have been struggling to identify a process improvement that AI can improve not only the development aspect by the overall productivity of our company. We are a dev shop mostly C++ and python. At our company I see the development workflow and it is very inefficient. The biggest issue i…

Well for one, since one person can do more, less communication is needed, so you can cut out the inefficient part.

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

#320

Post by asdff »

SoftTalker wrote: post #273
asdff wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there was 100x on the table for you, why weren't you already at 100x scale just with more headcount? That is the other side of this coin. Demand is a factor. Productivity goes up? Great, if there is demand to satiate that you can meet. I doubt that is the case otherwise you'd already have scaled to meet it if it were actually on the table for the taking if only you could output more volume.

At least in software, 100x headcount does not get you 100x productivity, due to communication complexity (see Brooks).

Maybe not a linear relationship, but there is a relationship, which begets the question: If the market had available space with which for you to scale from 10x-100x, why aren't you or competitors already taking advantage? The answer is that there is no free 100x scaling on the table in all likelihood. If everyone's business had 100x in front of them thanks to AI we'd need the demand of an earth of 800 billion people on it to generate that.
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