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The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

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Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#231

Post by catigula »

gedy wrote: post #225
catigula wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off-shoring is pretty big right now but what shocks me is that when I walk around my company campus I see obscene amounts of people visibly and culturally from, mostly, India and China. The idea that literally massive amounts of this workforce couldn't possibly be filled by domestic grads is pretty hard to engage with. These are low level business and accounting analyst positions. Both sides of the aisle retreated fr…

I was working at a SoCal company a couple years ago (where I’m from), and we had a lot of Chinese and Indian folks. I remember cracking up when one of the Indian fellows pulled me aside and asked me where I was from, because I sounded so different with my accent and lingo. He thought I was from some small European country, lol.

Just to note interpersonally I find pretty much any group to be great on average but being a participant of US labor and sympathetic to other US laborers this is clearly not something I can support.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#232

Post by alephnerd »

mechagodzilla wrote: post #210
CKMo wrote: post #185

There's definitely a big problem with entry-level jobs being replaced by AI. Why hire an intern or a recent college-grad when they lack both the expertise and experience to do what an AI could probably do? Sure, the AI might require handholding and prompting too, but the AI is either cheaper or actually "smarter" than the young person. In many cases, it's both. I work with some people who I believe have the capacity…

Interns and new grads have always been a net-negative productivity-wise in my experience, it's just that eventually (after a small number of months/years) they turn into extremely productive more-senior employees. And interns and new grads can use AI too. This feels like asking "Why hire junior programmers now that we have compilers? We don't need people to write boring assembly anymore." If AI was genuinely a big pr…

It's a monetary issue at the end of the day.

AI/ML and Offshoring/GCCs are both side effects of the fact that American new grad salaries in tech are now in the $110-140k range.

At $70-80k the math for a new grad works out, but not at almost double that.

Also, going remote first during COVID for extended periods proved that operations can work in a remote first manner, so at that point the argument was made that you can hire top talent at American new grad salaries abroad, and plenty of employees on visas were given the option to take a pay cut and "remigrate" to help start a GCC in their home country or get fired and try to find a job in 60 days around early-mid 2020.

The skills aspect also played a role to a certain extent - by the late 2010s it was getting hard to find new grads who actually understood systems internals and OS/architecture concepts, so a lot of jobs adjacent to those ended up moving abroad to Israel, India, and Eastern Europe where universities still treat CS as engineering instead of an applied math disciple - I don't care if you can prove Dixon's factorization method using induction if you can't tell me how threading works or the rings in the Linux kernel.

The Japan example mentioned above only works because Japanese salaries in Japan have remained extremely low and Japanese is not an extremely mainstream language (making it harder for Japanese firms to offshore en masse - though they have done so in plenty of industries where they used to hold a lead like Battery Chemistry).

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#233

Post by InitialLastName »

mjburgess wrote: post #191
CKMo wrote: post #185

There's definitely a big problem with entry-level jobs being replaced by AI. Why hire an intern or a recent college-grad when they lack both the expertise and experience to do what an AI could probably do? Sure, the AI might require handholding and prompting too, but the AI is either cheaper or actually "smarter" than the young person. In many cases, it's both. I work with some people who I believe have the capacity…

This is always the case though. A factor of 50x productivity between expert and novice is small. Consider how long it take you to conduct foot surgery vs. a food surgeon -- close to a decade of medical school + medical experience -- just for a couple hours of work. There have never been that many businesses able to hire novices for this reason.

I think for a surgeon as an example, quality may be a better metric than time. I'll bet I could conduct an attempted foot surgery way faster than a foot surgeon, but they're likely to conduct successful foot surgeries.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#234

Post by FirmwareBurner »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #226
CKMo wrote: post #185

There's definitely a big problem with entry-level jobs being replaced by AI. Why hire an intern or a recent college-grad when they lack both the expertise and experience to do what an AI could probably do? Sure, the AI might require handholding and prompting too, but the AI is either cheaper or actually "smarter" than the young person. In many cases, it's both. I work with some people who I believe have the capacity…

This is where the horrific disloyalty of both companies and employees, comes to bite us in the ass. The whole idea of interns, is as training positions. They are supposed to be a net negative. The idea is that they will either remain at the company, after their internship, or move to another company, taking the priorities of their trainers, with them. But nowadays, with corporate HR, actively doing everything they ca…

>At my old company, we trained Japanese interns. They would often relocate to the US, for 2-year visas, and became very good engineers,

Damn, I wish that was me. Having someone mentor you at the beginning of your career instead of having to self learn and fumble your way around never knowing if you're on the right track or not, is massive force multiplier that pays massive dividends over your career. It's like entering the stock market with 1 million $ capital vs 100 $. You're also less likely to build bad habits if nobody with experience teaches you early on.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#235

Post by dylan604 »

CKMo wrote: post #185

There's definitely a big problem with entry-level jobs being replaced by AI. Why hire an intern or a recent college-grad when they lack both the expertise and experience to do what an AI could probably do? Sure, the AI might require handholding and prompting too, but the AI is either cheaper or actually "smarter" than the young person. In many cases, it's both. I work with some people who I believe have the capacity…

Are you honestly trying to tell us that the code you receive from an AI is not requiring any of your time to review and tweak and is 100% correct every time and ready to deploy into your code base with no changes what so ever? You my friend must be a steely eyed missile man of prompting

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#236

Post by xp84 »

catigula wrote: post #199
mlsu wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that these "AI layoffs" are really "interest rate" layoffs in disguise. Software was truly truly insane for a bit there. Straight out of college, no-name CS degree, making $120, $150k (back when $120k really meant $120k)? The music had to stop on that one.

That really only happened in HCOL areas.

Sure, but there was a massive concentration of such people in those areas.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#237

Post by munificent »

mjburgess wrote: post #198
swyx wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

its not part of the conversation because the influence here is tangential at best (1) and your sense of how much vc money is on the table at any given time is not good (2). 1a. most seed/A stage investing is acyclical because it is not really about timing for exits, people just always need dry powder 1b. tech advancement is definitely acyclical - alexnet, transformers, and gpt were all just done by very small teams w…

I'm not seeing how you're replying to this comment. I'm not sure you've understood their point. The point is that there's a correlation between macroeconomic dynamics (ie., the price of credit increasing) and the "rise of AI". In ordinary times, absent AI, the macroeconomic dynamics would fully explain the economic shifts we're seeing. So the question is why do we event need to mention AI in our explanation of recent…

> What phenomena, exactly, require positing AI disruption?

AI company CEOs trying to juice their stock evaluations?

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#238

Post by nyarlathotep_ »

mlsu wrote: post #183
idkwhattocallme wrote: post #23

I worked at two different $10B+ market cap companies during ZIRP. I recall in most meetings over half of the knowledge workers attending were superfluous. I mean, we hired someone on my team to attend cross functional meetings because our calendars were literally too full to attend. Why could we do that? Because the company was growing and hiring someone to attend meetings wasn't going to hurt the skyrocketing stock.…

I suspect that these "AI layoffs" are really "interest rate" layoffs in disguise. Software was truly truly insane for a bit there. Straight out of college, no-name CS degree, making $120, $150k (back when $120k really meant $120k)? The music had to stop on that one.

The irony now is that 120k is basically minimum wage for major metros (and in most cases that excludes home ownership).

Of course, that growth in wages in this sector was a contributing factor to home/rental price increases as the "market" could bear higher prices.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#239

Post by diogolsq »

CKMo wrote: post #185

There's definitely a big problem with entry-level jobs being replaced by AI. Why hire an intern or a recent college-grad when they lack both the expertise and experience to do what an AI could probably do? Sure, the AI might require handholding and prompting too, but the AI is either cheaper or actually "smarter" than the young person. In many cases, it's both. I work with some people who I believe have the capacity…

You’re right that AI is fast and often more efficient than entry-level humans for certain tasks — but I’d argue that what you’re describing isn’t delegation, it’s just choosing to do the work yourself via a tool. Implementation costs are lower now, so you decide to do it on your own.

Delegation, properly defined, involves transferring not just the task but the judgment and ownership of its outcome. The perfect delegation is when you delegate to someone because you trust them to make decisions the way you would — or at least in a way you respect and understand.

You can’t fully delegate to AI — and frankly, you shouldn’t. AI requires prompting, interpretation, and post-processing. That’s still you doing the thinking. The implementation cost is low, sure, but the decision-making cost still sits with you. That’s not delegation; it’s assisted execution.

Humans, on the other hand, can be delegated to — truly. Because over time, they internalize your goals, adapt to your context, and become accountable in a way AI never can.

Many reasons why AI can't fill your shoes:

1. Shallow context – It lacks awareness of organizational norms, unspoken expectations, or domain-specific nuance that’s not in the prompt or is not explicit in the code base.

2. No skin in the game – AI doesn’t have a career, reputation, or consequences. A junior human, once trained and trusted, becomes not only faster but also independently responsible.

Junior and Interns can also use AI tools.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#240

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #234
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is where the horrific disloyalty of both companies and employees, comes to bite us in the ass. The whole idea of interns, is as training positions. They are supposed to be a net negative. The idea is that they will either remain at the company, after their internship, or move to another company, taking the priorities of their trainers, with them. But nowadays, with corporate HR, actively doing everything they ca…

>At my old company, we trained Japanese interns. They would often relocate to the US, for 2-year visas, and became very good engineers, Damn, I wish that was me. Having someone mentor you at the beginning of your career instead of having to self learn and fumble your way around never knowing if you're on the right track or not, is massive force multiplier that pays massive dividends over your career. It's like enteri…

Yup. It was a standard part of their HR policy. They are all about long, long-term employment.

They are a marquée company, and get the best of the best, direct from top universities.

Also, no one has less than a Master's, over there.

We got damn good engineers as interns.

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