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IBM tripling entry-level jobs after finding the limits of AI adoption

fortune.com

101–110 of 309 posts

Re: IBM tripling entry-level jobs after finding the limits of AI adoption

#101

You know when someone is singing the praises about AI and they get asked "if you're so much more productive with AI, what have you built with it"? Well I think a bunch of companies are asking this same question to their employees and realising that the productivity gains they are betting on were overhyped. LLM's can be a very useful tool and will probably lead to measurable productivity increases in the future, at th…

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Nice, yeah I feel like there's a big opportunity for tech workers who are product-adjacent to use LLMs to get up to speed building SaaS etc.

Are you worried by any of those claims about SaaS being dead because of AI? lol

Re: IBM tripling entry-level jobs after finding the limits of AI adoption

#103
post #54

It must be refactored: IBM is hopping that juniors(less paid) with AI can be sold as seniors.

Tbh, getting good results from ai requires senior level intuition. You can be rusty as hell and not even middling in the language being used, but you have to understand data structures and architecture more than ever to get non-shit results. If you just vibe it, you’ll eventually end up with a mountain of crap that works sort of, and since you’re not doing the coding, you can’t really figure it out as you go along. Sometimes it can work to naively make a thing and then have it rewritten from scratch properly though, so that might be the path.

Re: IBM tripling entry-level jobs after finding the limits of AI adoption

#104
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least today, I expect this will fail horribly. The challenge today isn't AI literacy in my experience, its domain knowledge required to keep LLMs on the rails.

People literate in AI, but inexperienced in all other facts. What could go wrong!

ClawdBot Boardroom Edition

Re: IBM tripling entry-level jobs after finding the limits of AI adoption

#105
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It certainly feels that way. I was there. Fortunately had just waltzed into the tech side of things and scurried off back to my professional career for a couple of years. I watched a lot of stuff burn. It was horrifying. We are nearly there again.

Yeah similar story here. I had to spend a couple of years painting houses before the local market recovered enough that tech jobs were a thing again. Shit was surreal. There was one guy I knew that went from building multi-million dollar server and networking projects for IBM to literally working as unskilled labor on a fencing crew just to make rent.

Problem is there aren't jobs where you can go and hide until the economy recovers this time.

Re: IBM tripling entry-level jobs after finding the limits of AI adoption

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New metric: agent-hours spent on a task. Or so we measure in tokens. Clearly more tokens burned == more experience right?

There are actually books which recommend that organizations track employee tokens burned as a proxy for AI adoption. Surprised me a bit.

it's the only KPI available.

Re: IBM tripling entry-level jobs after finding the limits of AI adoption

#107
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. They're firing high paid seniors and replacing them with low pay juniors. This is IBM we're talking about. The "limits of AI" bit is just smokescreen. Firing seniors: > Just a week after his comments, however, IBM announced it would cut thousands of workers by the end of the year as it shifts focus to high-growth software and AI areas. A company spokesperson told Fortune at the time that the round of layoffs woul…

Where does it say those cuts were senior software developers? Obviously they want new workers to use AI but I don't really see anything to suggest they're so successful with AI that they're firing all their seniors and hiring juniors to be meatbags for LLMs.

probably aren't going to find a lot of articles discussing how water is wet, either.

Re: IBM tripling entry-level jobs after finding the limits of AI adoption

#108

You know when someone is singing the praises about AI and they get asked "if you're so much more productive with AI, what have you built with it"? Well I think a bunch of companies are asking this same question to their employees and realising that the productivity gains they are betting on were overhyped. LLM's can be a very useful tool and will probably lead to measurable productivity increases in the future, at th…

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Sounds nice, for how many years have you had that annual recurring revenue so far?

Re: IBM tripling entry-level jobs after finding the limits of AI adoption

#109
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still a wildly different thesis than the “juniors are fucked, ladder’s been raised”

just to be clear: from my standpoint it's the worst period ever being a junior in tech, you are not "fucked" if you are junior, but hard times are ahead of you.

OTOH, as a junior, you haven't learned all the wrong lessons that don't apply anymore, and you have fewer responsibilities than the seniors.

Re: IBM tripling entry-level jobs after finding the limits of AI adoption

#110

You know when someone is singing the praises about AI and they get asked "if you're so much more productive with AI, what have you built with it"? Well I think a bunch of companies are asking this same question to their employees and realising that the productivity gains they are betting on were overhyped. LLM's can be a very useful tool and will probably lead to measurable productivity increases in the future, at th…

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Details would help your argument. Since many did the same thing, before the AI wave...

Is the business 3 months old now?

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