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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

#241

Post by dylan604 »

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…

I really think the loss of a mentor/apprentice type of experience is one of those baby-with-the-bath-water type of losses. There are definitely people with the personality types of they know everything and nothing can be learned from others, but for those of us who would much rather learn from those with more experience on the hows and whys of things rather than getting all of those paper cuts ourselves, working with mentors is definitely a much better way to grow.

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

#242

Post by izabera »

abletonlive wrote: post #203
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 a big issue in the short term but in the long term I actually think AI is going to be a huge democratization of work and company building. I spend a lot of time encouraging people to not fight the tide and spend that time intentionally experimenting and seeing what you can do. LLMs are already useful and it's interesting to me that anybody is arguing it's just good for toy applications. This is a poisonous mi…

what does "huge democratization of work" even mean? what world do you people live in? the current global unemployment rate on my planet is around 5% so that seems pretty democratised already?

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

#243

Post by potatoman22 »

psadauskas wrote: post #83
sevensor wrote: post #12

What AI is going to wipe out is white collar jobs where people sleepwalk through the working day and carelessly half ass every task. In 2025, we can get LLMs to do that for us. Unfortunately, the kind of executive who thinks AI is a legitimate replacement for actual work does not recognize the difference. I expect to see the more credulous CEOs dynamiting their companies as a result. Whether the rest of us can surviv…

AIs are great at generating bullshit, so if your job involves generating bullshit, you're probably on the chopping block. I just wish that instead of getting more efficient at generating bullshit, we could just eliminate the bullshit.

Some of the best applications of LLMs I've seen are for reducing bullshit. My goal for creating AI products is to let us act more like humans and less like oxen. I know it's idealistic, but I need to act with some goal.

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

#244

Post by xp84 »

icedchai wrote: post #148
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've worked at smaller companies where half the people in the meetings were just there because they had nothing else to do. Lots of "I'm a fly on the wall" and "I'll be a note taker" types. Most of them contributed nothing.

My friend's company (he was VP of Software & IT at a non-tech company) had a habit of meetings with no particular agenda and no decisions that needed making. Just meeting because it was on the calendar, discussing any random thing someone wanted to blab about. Not how my friend ran his team but that was how the rest did.

Then they had some disappointing results due to their bad decision-making elsewhere in the company, and they turned to my friend and said "Let's lay off some of your guys."

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

#245

Post by alephnerd »

nyarlathotep_ wrote: post #238
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.

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.

CoL in London or Dublin is comparable to much of the US, but new grad salaries are in the $30-50k range.

The issue is salary expectations in the US are much higher than those in much of Western Europe despite having similar CoL.

And $120k for a new grad is only a tech specific thing. Even new grad management consultants earn $80-100k base, and lower for other non-software roles and industries.

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

#246

Post by FirmwareBurner »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #240
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

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

I feel this is pretty much the norm everywhere in Europe and Asia. No serious engineering company in Germany even looks at your resume it there's no MSc. degree listed, especially since education is mostly free for everyone so not having a degree is seen as a "you problem", but also it leads to degree inflation, where only PhD or post-docs get taken seriously for some high level positions. I don't remember ever seeing a senior manager/CTO without the "Dr." or even "Prof. Dr." title in the top German engineering companies.

I think mostly the US has the concept of the cowboy self taught engineer who dropped out of college to build a trillion dollar empire in his parents garage.

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

#247

Post by einpoklum »

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…

> 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?

1. Because, generally, they don't.

2. Because an LLM is not a person, it's a chatbot.

3. "Hire an intern" is that US thing when people work without getting real wages, right?

Grrr :-(

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

#248

Post by einpoklum »

brookst wrote: post #211
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…

I just can't agree with this argument at all. Today, you hire an intern and they need a lot of hand-holding, are often a net tax on the org, and they deliver a modest benefit. Tomorrow's interns will be accustomed to using AI, will need less hand-holding, will be able to leverage AI to deliver more. Their total impact will be much higher. The whole "entry level is screwed" view only works if you assume that companies…

> will need less hand-holding, will be able to leverage AI to deliver more

Well, maybe it'll be the other way around: Maybe they'll need more hand-holding since they're used to relying on AI instead of doing things themselves, and when faced with tasks they need to do, they will be less able.

But, eh, what am I even talking about? The _senior_ developers in a many companies need a lot of hand-holding that they aren't getting, write bad code, with poor practices, and teach the newbies how to get used to doing that. So that's why the entry-level people are screwed, AI or no.

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

#249

Post by geraneum »

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…

> horrific disloyalty of both companies and employees

There’s no such a thing as loyalty in employer-employee relationships. There’s money, there’s work and there’s [collective] leverage. We need to learn a thing or two from blue collars.

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

#250

Post by baxtr »

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…

I think it’s the other way around.

If LLMs continue to become more powerful, hiring more juniors who can use them will be a no-brainer.

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