this keeps me up at night. i’m in a role that is essentially deployment management for LLMs at faang esque company. very little coding or need to code, mostly navigating guis, pipelines, and docker to get deployments updated with a new venting or model version or some patch
Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence
181–190 of 584 posts
Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
I totally get tech CEOs who threaten to fire their devs who do not embrace AI tools. I'm not a tech CEO but people who are anti-LLM for programming have no place on my team.
And you are paying for their tokens on top of their salary, right? Right?
You can do a lot with just $20 Codex CLI subscription. Tokens are cheap compared to the $20k we're paying for a dev each month.
Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a classic case of Productivity Paradox when personal computers were first introduced into workplaces in the 80s. A famous economist once said, "You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics." There are many reasons for the lag in productivity gain but it certainly will come. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox
That's only certain if investments in tech infrastructure always led to productivity increases. But sometimes they just don't. Lots of firms spent a lot of money on blockchain five years ago, for instance, and that money is just gone now.
Ironically, abstraction bloat eats away any infra gains. We trade more compute to allow people less in tune with the machine to get things done, usually at the cost of the implementation being eh... Suboptimal, shall we say.
Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence
#184People who are saying they're not seeing productivity boost, can you please share where is it failing? Because, I am terrified by the output I am getting while working on huge legacy codebases, it works. I described one of my workflow changes here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47271168 but in general compared to old way of working I am saving half of the steps consistently, whether its researching the codebas…
The companies laying off people have no vision. My company is a successful not for profit and we are hiring like crazy. It’s not a software company, but we have always effectively unlimited work. Why would anyone downsize because work is getting done faster? Just do more work, get more done, get better than the competition, get better at delivering your vision. We put profits back in the community and actually make l…
These are words without weights. At some point the put money into software option will max out. Perhaps what we should all be doing is hiring more lawyers, there's always more legal work to be done. When you don't have weights then you can reason like this.
Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence
#185People who are saying they're not seeing productivity boost, can you please share where is it failing? Because, I am terrified by the output I am getting while working on huge legacy codebases, it works. I described one of my workflow changes here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47271168 but in general compared to old way of working I am saving half of the steps consistently, whether its researching the codebas…
The companies laying off people have no vision. My company is a successful not for profit and we are hiring like crazy. It’s not a software company, but we have always effectively unlimited work. Why would anyone downsize because work is getting done faster? Just do more work, get more done, get better than the competition, get better at delivering your vision. We put profits back in the community and actually make l…
> Just do more work, get more done
That's one of the reasons why I am terrified, because it can lead to burn out, and I personally don't like to babysit bunch of agents, because the output doesn't feel "mine", when its not "mine" I don't feel ownership.
And I am deliberately hitting the brake from time to time not to increase expectations, because I feel like driving someone else's car while not understanding fully how they tuned their car (even though I did those tunings by prompting)
Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ops hasn't been in the crosshairs of Ai yet. Imo it's only a matter of time as companies start to figure out how to use ai. Companies don't seem to have real plans yet and everyone is figuring out ai in general out. Soon though I will think agents start popping up, things like first line response to pages, executing automation
We've had deterministic automation of tier one response for over a decade now. What value would indeterminacy add to that?
To deal with the problems where there is ambiguity in the problem and the approach to solving it. Not everything is a basic decision tree. Humans aren't deterministic either, the way we woukd approach a problem is probably different. Is one of us right or wrong? We're generally just focused on end results.
Maybe 2 years ago Ai was doing random stuff and we got all those funny screenshots of dumb gemini answers. The indeterminism leading to random stuff isn't really an issue any more.
The way it thinks keeps it on track.
Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
The companies laying off people have no vision. My company is a successful not for profit and we are hiring like crazy. It’s not a software company, but we have always effectively unlimited work. Why would anyone downsize because work is getting done faster? Just do more work, get more done, get better than the competition, get better at delivering your vision. We put profits back in the community and actually make l…
These are words without weights. At some point the put money into software option will max out. Perhaps what we should all be doing is hiring more lawyers, there's always more legal work to be done. When you don't have weights then you can reason like this.
I don’t know what kind of software your used to but software is pretty much universally dog shit these days. I could probably count on one hand the number of programs that I actually like using. There is an astronomical room for improvement. I don’t think we are hitting diminishing returns any time soon.
Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence
#188People who are saying they're not seeing productivity boost, can you please share where is it failing? Because, I am terrified by the output I am getting while working on huge legacy codebases, it works. I described one of my workflow changes here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47271168 but in general compared to old way of working I am saving half of the steps consistently, whether its researching the codebas…
I asked opus 4.6 how to administer an A/B test when data is sparse. My options are to look at conversion rate, look at revenue per customer, or something else. I will get about 10-20k samples, less than that will add to cart, less than that will begin checkout, and even less than that will convert. Opus says I should look at revenue per customers. I don't know the right answer, but I know it is not to look at revenue per customers -- that will have high variance due to outlier customers who put in a large order. To be fair, I do use opus frequently, and it often gives good enough answers. But you do have to be suspicious of its responses for important decisions.
Edit: Ha, and the report claims it's relatively good at business and finance...
Edit 2: After discussion in this thread, I went back to opus and asked it to link to articles about how to handle non-normally distributed data, and it actually did link to some useful articles, and an online calculator that I believe works for my data. So I'll eat some humble pie and say my initial take was at least partially wrong here. At the same time, it was important to know the correct question to ask, and honestly if it wasn't for this thread I'm not sure I would have gotten there.
Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence
#189People who are saying they're not seeing productivity boost, can you please share where is it failing? Because, I am terrified by the output I am getting while working on huge legacy codebases, it works. I described one of my workflow changes here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47271168 but in general compared to old way of working I am saving half of the steps consistently, whether its researching the codebas…
The companies laying off people have no vision. My company is a successful not for profit and we are hiring like crazy. It’s not a software company, but we have always effectively unlimited work. Why would anyone downsize because work is getting done faster? Just do more work, get more done, get better than the competition, get better at delivering your vision. We put profits back in the community and actually make l…
This is exactly right IMO. I have never worked for a company where the bottleneck was "we've run out of things to do". That said, plenty of companies run out of actual software engineering work when their product isn't competitive. But it usually isn't competitive because they haven't been able to move fast enough
Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence
#190the numbers they show are barely distinguishable from noise as far as I can interpret them. For me, the impact is absolutely in hiring juniors. We basically just stopped considering it. There's almost no work a junior can do that now I would look at and think it isn't easier to hand off in some form (possibly different to what the junior would do) to an AI. It's a bit illusory though. It was always the case that hand…
Doesn't make sense to stop hiring juniors. If AI increases productivity, and juniors are cheaper to hire, but is just as able to hand off tasks to ai as a senior, then it makes more sense to hire more juniors to get them working with an AI as soon as possible. This produces output faster, for which more revenue could be derived. So the only limiting factor is the possibility of not deriving more revenue - which is no…
> but is just as able to hand off tasks to ai
I think this is the crux of it. Someone who doesn't know the right thing to do just isn't in a position to hand off anything. Accelerating their work will just make them do the wrong thing faster.