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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

#111

Post by asdff »

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…

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.

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

#113

Post by danaris »

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.

> There are still fortune 500 companies with internal bans on AI.

And there probably always will be.

When the choices are "hand all of our highly sensitive internal data over to one of several other companies, all of which have questionable financials and very cozy relationships with adtech" or "invest in a whole bunch of expensive GPU servers plus internal talent to run our own models", vs "keep on doing what we've been doing, which is still working just fine", why would a non-tech Fortune 500 company choose either of the former options?

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

#114

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

GolfPopper wrote: post #89
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.

Perhaps the LLM companies need to start hiring true Scotsmen?

University of Edinburgh is a good school.

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

#115

Post by agumonkey »

altern8 wrote: post #104
aborsy wrote: post #103

The impact on job satisfaction for those with jobs will be negative too. People will be trapped in their positions, fearing to leave or move around.

I agree because it's already happening with me

may i join ?

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

#116

Post by ACCount37 »

b112 wrote: post #93
overgard wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's so early game, is the real problem. My experience so far, has been that it's barely a junior dev. I've met so many in my career that think reading stackoverflow, or watching a youtube video mysteriously makes them an expert. AI reminds me of this sort. Well anyone can use (prior to AI) a simple linter and learning to code isn't that big a deal. It's learning the pitfalls, the traps, that's the issue. And so far…

> Are these companies slowly gaining rot in those codebases?

Yes!

And that "yes" holds regardless of whether they use AI or not.

Let's not pretend tech debt accumulation is somehow an AI problem. Some of the world's biggest companies routinely ship code that reeks of years of rot and decay.

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

#117

Post by agumonkey »

newsomix9xl wrote: post #73

Employees have no incentive to meaningfully implement AI to increase productivity, and if they do so, they have no reason to share it. If AI means job cuts and not using AI means job cuts but no one really tracks AI impact that means performative adoption of AI is safest, and real gains are to be sandbagged as innate magic hand waving. At my work I'm one of the few who says "I made this with Claude" and the near impo…

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 real productivity boost, because that would be suicide.. more trash talk will fill the void instead.

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

#118

Post by nswango »

IshKebab wrote: post #102
01100011 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Also I'm finding out that, after being blown away by agent mode lately, non-agent mode still kind of sucks across frontier models. Using GPT and Gemini in non-agent mode is asking for inaccurate information confidently presented as the truth. Turning on agent mode fixed a lot of that for me.

I think it's because of the lack of feedback. Humans also can't do much without feedback. E.g. I doubt most people could write 100 lines of code that works first time without even compiling it once.

Disagree. When tool limitations meant that this was the way people had to work, many people could do this.

It was much more inefficient, because it's easier to find bugs after compiling or running the code. But it is perfectly possible.

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

#119

Post by codingdave »

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…

The sewing machine analogy is a good one. The problem I'm seeing is leadership who sees the t-shirt company succeed with sewing machines, so goes out, buys 100 sewing machines, then puts them in the kitchen because they are a bakery and gets confused why the bread production isn't improving.

Because AI can do some things. Not everything. Applying it to the wrong problem reduces productivity.

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

#120

Post by dannersy »

ValentineC wrote: post #20
usef- wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or the amount of software increases tremendously

I'm surprised the layoffs worldwide hasn't produced more entrepreneurs building their own software product.

It is almost as if the technology is not as good as everyone claims. If they were, the game would already be over.
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