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AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

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Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#121

Post by czl »

9rx wrote: post #116
acuozzo wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please dig into this more deeply or suggest somewhere in which I can read more?

Money is an IOU; debt. People trade things of value for money because you can, later, call the debt and get the exchanged value that was promised in return (food, shelter, yacht, whatever) I'm sure this is obvious. I am sure it is equally obvious that if I take your promise to give back in kind later when I give you my sandwich, but never collect on it, that I ultimately gave you my sandwich for free. If you keep col…

Money is less about personal consumption and more about a voting system for physical reality. When a company holds billions in IOUs, they are holding the power to decide what happens next. That capital allows them to command where the next million tons of aluminum go, which problems engineers solve, and where new infrastructure is built.

Even if they never spend that wealth on luxury, they use it to direct the flow of human effort and raw materials. Giving it away for free would mean surrendering their remote control over global resources. At this scale, it is not about wanting more stuff. It is about the ability to organize the world. Whether those most efficient at accumulating capital should hold such concentrated power remains the central tension between growth and equality.

Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#122

Post by pwarner »

warmedcookie wrote: post #118

Let's presume / speculate for a moment that companies will only need 1 developer to do the job of 10 developers because of AI. That would also mean 10 developers can do the job of 100 developers. A company that cuts developers to save money whose moat is not big enough may quickly find themselves out-competed by a company that sees this as an opportunity to overtake their competitor. They will have to hire more devel…

Yeah I think this is a good way to think about it. I mean Google, MSFT for example have effectively unlimited developers, and their products still suck in some areas (Teams is my number one worst) so maybe AI will allow them to upgrade their features and compete

Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#123

Post by direwolf20 »

michaelrpeskin wrote: post #115
direwolf20 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reasons for learning to drive a manual transmission aren't really about the transmission, they're about the learning and the effects on the learner. The more you get hands on with the car and in touch with the car the more deeply you understand it. Once you have the deepish understanding, you can automate it for convenience after that. It's the same reason we should always teach long division before we give stude…

I agree with all of those statements - I always told my wife that I'd get our kids a underpowered manual so that they're always busy rowing gears and can't text and drive. But in the bigger picture, where does it stop? You had to do manual spark advance while driving in the 30's You had to set the weights in the distributor to adjust spark advance in the 70's Now the computer has a programed set of tables for spark a…

EVs don't have variable gearboxes at all, so when EVs become popular, it doesn't make sense to learn stick. It would be a fake abstraction, like the project featured on HN, where kids had floppy disk shells with NFC tags in them that tell the TV which video file to load from a hard disk.

Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#124

Post by estimator7292 »

Lramseyer wrote: post #44
tracerbulletx wrote: post #6

I am very tired of seeing every random person's speculation (framed as real insight) on what's going to happen as they try to signify that they are super involved in AI and super on top of it and therefore still worthy of value and importance in the economy.

You have to understand the people in the article are execs from the chip EDA (Electronic Design Automation) industry. It's full of dinosaurs who have resisted innovation for the past 30 years. Of course they're going to be blowing hot air about how they're "embracing AI". It's a threat to their business model. I'm a little biased though since I work in chip design and I maintain an open source EDA project. I agree wi…

In my humble opinion, every corporate EDA exec can suck farts through a bendy straw. Altium has to be some of the worst software in existence.

Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#125

Post by SoftTalker »

XorNot wrote: post #52
SoftTalker wrote: post #33

"Most people who drive cars now couldn’t find the radiator cap if they were paid to, and that’s fine." That's not fine IMO. That is a basic bit of knowledge about a car and if you don't know where the radiator cap is you will eventually have to pay through the nose to someone who does know (and possibly be stranded somewhere). Knowing how to check and fill coolant isn't like knowing how to rebuild a transmission. It'…

This is a bizarre analogy. For one thing: if your car is overheating, don't open the radiator cap since the primary outcome will be serious burns. And I've owned my car for 20 years: the only time I had to refill coolant was when I DIY'd a water pump replacement, which saved some money but only like maybe $500 compared to a mechanic. You could perfectly well own a car and never have to worry about this.

Yes and no. For one thing the radiator/reservoir cap is clearly marked "Do not open when hot." But the general point really is that if you have no idea how something works, you will be helpless when it doesn't work. If (at some time in the future) the only thing you know how to do is ask an AI to do something for you, then you'll be not only helpless without it, but less and less able to judge whether what it is telling you is even correct. Like taking your car to a mechanic because it's overheating, and him saying you need a new water pump and radiator when maybe all you needed was a new pressure cap but you never even knew to try that first.

Of course you can't know everything. There a point at which you have to rely on other people's expertise. But to me it makes sense to have a basic understanding of how the things you depend on every day work.

Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#126

Post by blackguardx »

estimator7292 wrote: post #124
Lramseyer wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to understand the people in the article are execs from the chip EDA (Electronic Design Automation) industry. It's full of dinosaurs who have resisted innovation for the past 30 years. Of course they're going to be blowing hot air about how they're "embracing AI". It's a threat to their business model. I'm a little biased though since I work in chip design and I maintain an open source EDA project. I agree wi…

In my humble opinion, every corporate EDA exec can suck farts through a bendy straw. Altium has to be some of the worst software in existence.

Altium isn't great, but you must not have tried the others...

Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#127

Post by jacquesm »

daxfohl wrote: post #56
xXSLAYERXx wrote: post #10

Senior dev here 15 years experience just turned 50 have family blah blah. I've been contracting for the last two years. The org is just starting to use Claude. I've been delegating - well copy pasting - into chatgpt which has to be the laziest way to leverage AI. I've been so successful (meaning haven't had to do anything really except argue with chatgpt when it goes off on some tangent) with this approach that I can…

Same situation (50 last week, 2 kids) though have been unemployed for a year. Part of me thinks that, rather than taking jobs, AI is actually the only reason a lot of jobs still exist. The rest of tech is dead. Having worked in consulting a while ago, you can kind of feel it when you're approaching the point where you've implemented all the high value stuff for a client and, even though there's stuff you could do, th…

> The only investment money is flowing into AI

That's so not true. Of the 23 companies we reviewed last year maybe 3 had significant AI in their workflow, the rest were just solid businesses delivering stuff that people actually need. I have no doubt that that proportion will grow significantly, and that this growth will probably happen this year but to suggest that outside of AI there is no investment is just not compatible with real world observations.

Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#128

Post by jacquesm »

acuozzo wrote: post #106
9rx wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s funny that perfect capitalism (no payroll expenses) means nobody has money to actually buy any of the goods produced by AI. When you remember that profit is the measure of unrealized benefit, and look at how profitable capitalists have become, its not clear if, approximately speaking, anyone actually has the "money" to buy any goods now . In other words, I am not sure this matters. Big business is already effe…

Can you please dig into this more deeply or suggest somewhere in which I can read more?

It's really simple: if you crash the market and you are liquid you can buy up all of the assets for pennies. That's pretty much the playbook right now in one part of the world, just the same happened in the former Soviet Union in the 90's.

Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#129

Post by FloorEgg »

jrowen wrote: post #112
tracerbulletx wrote: post #6

I am very tired of seeing every random person's speculation (framed as real insight) on what's going to happen as they try to signify that they are super involved in AI and super on top of it and therefore still worthy of value and importance in the economy.

Also, can we just STFU about AI and jobs already? We've long since passed the point where there was a meaningful amount of work to be done for every adult. The number of "jobs" available is now merely a function of who controls the massive stockpiles of accumulated resources and how they choose to dole them out. Attack that, not the technology.

> Also, can we just STFU about AI and jobs already?

Phew, yes I'm with you...

> We've long since passed the point where there was a meaningful amount of work to be done for every adult.

Have we? It feels like a lot of stuff in my life is unnecessarily expensive or hard to afford.

> The number of "jobs" available is now merely a function of who controls the massive stockpiles of accumulated resources and how they choose to dole them out.

Do you mean that it has nothing to do with how the average person decides to spend their money?

> Attack that, not the technology.

How? What are you proposing exactly?

Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#130

Post by acuozzo »

jacquesm wrote: post #128
acuozzo wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please dig into this more deeply or suggest somewhere in which I can read more?

It's really simple: if you crash the market and you are liquid you can buy up all of the assets for pennies. That's pretty much the playbook right now in one part of the world, just the same happened in the former Soviet Union in the 90's.

I get (and got) that. My focus was specifically on: "its not clear if, approximately speaking, anyone actually has the 'money' to buy any goods now."
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