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What is happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality

siepr.stanford.edu

171–180 of 412 posts

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

#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.

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

#172
post #2

A challenge with this kind of study is that coding agents (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex) only started working really well in late November, which for most people meant early January due to the December break. General agents (OpenClaw, Anthropic Copilot, ChatGPT "Work") started working even later than that. This category of software may have a much more meaningful impact on work than the mostly-chat systems we were using…

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

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You think the world is lacking in LLM benchmarks?

A benchmark doesn't prove "although we said it before, this time it's true". People pointed to the benchmarks then as well.

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

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The quality of the output is so variable. It depends on the model, “effort level”, prompting, probably even the programming language/app functionality, and libraries involved. For example, I find LLMs are best at making simple web apps. These web apps, while simple, would still take a senior engineer perhaps a week or two to create, but LLMs can spit them out inside of an hour. Conversely, LLMs struggle with things l…

What model struggles with Docker or local model deployment? I have had good results in that area with GPT 5.5 in the past. On the subscription plan I don't use anything but xhigh effort and Fable, 5.6 Sol, or now also Opus 5. Is that the class of model that struggles with Docker for you?

I'll give a recent example: the past month I had been using Codex cloud and it was working great writing Rust modules. Suddenly last week they made a few changes and everything went to shit, couldn't get a single good result out of it. Same text box, same prompting, same model, totally different results because they changed the cloud tool's resource limits.

So whereas before my debugging time would have been spent in Rust docs looking up traits and such, these days I feel more like an AI therapist trying to figure out why it's not feeling up to task on any particular day. It can be anything from regular service outages to geopolitics that on any given day my workflow is fucked up.

In my before-AI workflow, I was never restricted from compiling Rust code because of concerns that Cargo is a national security threat. So you really have to broadly scope the notion of "reliability" with these AI tools; it's much larger than whether it can give a good output but whether it can do so consistently enough to depend on.

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

#175
post #93

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…

I have seen a bad hire having instant impact on team and after person was let go, team was still getting back on track to pre-hire productivity for another 3 months.

We know all managers that say "stack doesn't matter, we can swap devs". We had C/C++ dev hired to do web dev with C# and Typescript.

Guy was utterly incompatible even if he was smart but management wanted someone who is local and can come to the office and that was this guy selling point.

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

#176

Recently poked around the job market to see what I qualify for in this day and age. Working as a solo builder in my org I would say that I have done enough in the last 18 months to consider myself “with it”. What I found was pretty brutal. Companies asking for 4 years of agentic AI experience… pardon? Then it hit me. Oh they are all making shit up now and have no bar that anyone can hit because they are believing in…

Maybe they mean agentic man-years? So if you are juggling 5 of the for a year you get there

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

#177
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah the lead lecturer on my data engineering masters once told us about a job posting he saw asking for 8 years of Hadoop experience, even though Hadoop had only been publicly available for 5 years at the time. it's often HR / hiring managers throwing some numbers into a text document based on what they've heard is important for the role, not what you'll actually need for the job. similarly, something like "has prev…

If a tech company can't even do basic math — or rather, openly cares so little about accuracy — does that sound like a place you would want to work though?

The recruiters who make these boneheaded mistakes are typically organizationally separate from the actual engineering group you'd be working in.

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

#178
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 -…

IMO it doesn’t replace software engineers, but it certainly changes the job. The problem lies with VPs and executives that rose to their positions through managing phones and printers and shit who don’t appreciate all of the work that isn’t “write code”, and those people are the majority outside of big tech in my experience.

Currently in a re-org justified by AI, AI changing the roles people will need to play. It’s disturbing how much content in the materials about the new org structure and roles and whatnot is clearly ai generated and contradictory. We’re laying off about half of 500 people.

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

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are junior devs becoming qualified “guiding hands” these days? If the expert with LLM assistance is multiplied, what’s a company’s incentive to pay for a junior, and how would they train to get good in these conditions?

Juniors are still useful, but not as pure "coders". The juniors you want to hire now can wear product, engineering and QA hats, and are self starters with good attention to detail and AI skills. These types of people are actually a bargain.

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

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think the world is lacking in LLM benchmarks?

A benchmark doesn't prove "although we said it before, this time it's true". People pointed to the benchmarks then as well.

Anecdotes aren't real. Don't believe any of them if you don't want to.
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