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US is starting to see heavy job losses in roles exposed to AI

bloomberg.com

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Re: US is starting to see heavy job losses in roles exposed to AI

#231

Post by KoolKat23 »

cdrnsf wrote: post #141

Every interaction I have with AI where I previously would’ve interacted with a person is worse. Whether that’s something mundane like scheduling an appointment, use at a doctor’s office, chat support. I imagine it’s cheaper for the company deploying it, but it’s all bad. It lines up with companies being more concerned with investors than actual users and customers though.

If you're competitors are doing it and your clients keep returning there's no downside.

So long as it achieves something and saves money, great.

I do feel from my own anecdotal experience, they're getting better, it's hit and miss but still some terrible implementations out there.

Re: US is starting to see heavy job losses in roles exposed to AI

#232

Post by matrix87 »

hysan wrote: post #159
amazingamazing wrote: post #31

The reality no one ever wants to talk about is that big tech doesn't need as many employees that it has. Anyone who has worked in big tech knows it is true.

I’ve had a longstanding belief that big tech purposely over-employed because it denied resources to competitors. This gave them a velocity edge despite being big and bureaucratic. In the new AI world, denying resources doesn’t slow competitors down anymore because AI raises the productivity floor. Now that over-employment brings no competitive advantage, we’re seeing huge cuts.

I don't think it's purposeful from a company leadership perspective.

Imo what I've seen happen is it's just empire building. Say you're a billionaire CEO and you have a bunch of money to spend on accomplishing some business goal. To deploy that much money, you need layers of management. Every time you introduce a new layer, that layer will have its own incentives and spin off its own narratives to benefit themselves while simultaneously giving the opposite impression to leadership.

This is probably just a natural byproduct of sufficiently large organizations. The same way the middle layers of the network stack tend to consolidate (e.g. TCP), there's some invisible hand of incentives which makes this inevitable

Re: US is starting to see heavy job losses in roles exposed to AI

#233

Post by nradov »

G0lg0thvn wrote: post #228
nradov wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not doing anything illegal.

Naive at best; Your statement doesn’t exclude greed as a driving factor. The legality of actions have nothing to do with the morality underlying them.

There's nothing immoral here. Shareholders aren't morally obligated to provide extra jobs for people who aren't adding value.

Re: US is starting to see heavy job losses in roles exposed to AI

#234

Post by matrix87 »

sys_64738 wrote: post #219
amazingamazing wrote: post #31

The reality no one ever wants to talk about is that big tech doesn't need as many employees that it has. Anyone who has worked in big tech knows it is true.

I'm at that point in my working life that I don't care about AI but I'd hate to be starting out or mid-career where I need to pay attention. I sometimes wonder if the glory years of tech are drawing to a close and it's time to draw a line under it before it changes too much. AI has tentacles into everything but the reason I do this career is that certain areas of work provide enjoyment. If AI takes that away then I w…

I think it increases the amount of enjoyment, there's less semantic language specific stuff to deal with and you can spend more time on the core task.

I think from my perspective at least, claude code / codex + improved information retrieval capabilities is good enough. The rest of the handwavey billionaire bullshit is just noise to me. I think it's wrong to sour on the technology, better to sour on the rich assholes who want to taint it with their personal agenda

Re: US is starting to see heavy job losses in roles exposed to AI

#235

Post by nradov »

fidotron wrote: post #229
nradov wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was never a major factor in employment statistics. Only a handful of the most profitable tech companies ever had the financial resources to even attempt that strategy, and only for a small fraction of their employees.

At FAANG it has been huge. Whole departments/products/divisions level, including many of the most expensive employees. There are reasons so many products get made to go precisely nowhere, because no one ever seriously intended for them to do otherwise. There are even cases where things succeeded by accident which were not supposed to and then have to be redone properly. As observed in another (more eloquent) comment…

Even if your claim was true (and I don't really believe it) we're still talking about a tiny fraction of the overall tech labor market. The impact is insignificant.

Re: US is starting to see heavy job losses in roles exposed to AI

#236

Post by sarchertech »

bdangubic wrote: post #218
insane_dreamer wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

much of our current economic and social problems stem from efforts to collect _less_ takes from corporations and the wealthy. So yeah, collecting more taxes -- from those who can afford it -- would make a big difference.

except that it wouldn’t. this is just another type of political shit that was put together by politicians here to fuck with us. if your family is running a budget deficit, there are two ways to mitigate it - make more money (drive uber and pizza (at the same time to make double money at night) or get a higher paying job - stop spending so much fucking money it seems politically, the left-leaning part of the countries…

Families don’t print the currency they owe their debt in, they don’t owe the their debt to themselves, and they also aren’t the largest employer and consumer in their economy, so the comparison doesn’t work.

Re: US is starting to see heavy job losses in roles exposed to AI

#237

Post by [deleted] »

nz wrote: post #187
interstice wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay but - if an industry can afford more employees than it has is there a real reason not to have them? Aside from shareholder greed etc.

Each of those employees is a liability, for various reasons, not just financial. Even if their salaries were completely subsidized by the state, there are many problems that come from having a very large number of employees. Firstly, there is more coordination overhead, and that is not great. Secondly, people are very political and very envious, and that has a corrosive effect on, well everything. Thirdly, people are…

[deleted]

Re: US is starting to see heavy job losses in roles exposed to AI

#238

Post by mapontosevenths »

LogicFailsMe wrote: post #225
mapontosevenths wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure there are some organizations that have yet to correct. Most already have.

In a world where most is logically equivalent to few or some, and it is, this is a weak flex.

"Most" means "the greatest amount", or to be pedantic more than the alternative. In common usage it implies a number closer to 100%.

I believe I'm accurate in saying that most employers who overhired during COVID corrected long ago. Especially in tech. The layoffs have been ongoing since 2022. Wih more than 127k just in tech last year.[0] For most people COVID ended half a decade ago. Though technically the WHO called it in May of 2023, three years ago.

[0] https://news.crunchbase.com/startups/tech-layoffs/

Re: US is starting to see heavy job losses in roles exposed to AI

#239

Post by matrix87 »

skippyboxedhero wrote: post #42
awfulneutral wrote: post #15

That thing that reassures me is that I kind of think most people in software aren't doing much useful work anyway, so if the whole thing was really driven by hiring the fewest humans possible to get the work done, companies probably could have fired half of us even without AI.

I think the bigger issue is that management clearly have no idea how to tell which people are actually working. Output could be higher with less people but the situation that managers have crafted is the maximum number of people with minimum level of output. Not good. The answer to every problem at my place is: more headcount, productivity drops further and further, more headcount, more headcount.

> management clearly have no idea how to tell which people are actually working

they probably do, it's just a matter of incentives, i.e. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it"

maybe companies try to fix this with PIP quotas or something, but then this gets taken and perverted by the managers to where it has the opposite purpose and the highest rating goes to whoever helps build the empire the fastest

Re: US is starting to see heavy job losses in roles exposed to AI

#240

Post by kjellsbells »

bdangubic wrote: post #218
insane_dreamer wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

much of our current economic and social problems stem from efforts to collect _less_ takes from corporations and the wealthy. So yeah, collecting more taxes -- from those who can afford it -- would make a big difference.

except that it wouldn’t. this is just another type of political shit that was put together by politicians here to fuck with us. if your family is running a budget deficit, there are two ways to mitigate it - make more money (drive uber and pizza (at the same time to make double money at night) or get a higher paying job - stop spending so much fucking money it seems politically, the left-leaning part of the countries…

> make more money > stop spending so much fucking money

I'm all in favor of this but part 1 has been made politically toxic for decades, and part 2 only seems to be taken seriously when the Other Guys are in power.

For example, in the US I simply cant take the Republican party's fiscal opinions seriously when they bleat about the debt on the one hand and yet dont blink when asked to fund another foreign war.

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