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Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

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Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#261

Post by hobofan »

oytis wrote: post #257
throwaw12 wrote: post #154

People 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 have stopped writing code, occasionally I jump into the changes proposed by LLM and make manual edits if it is feasible, otherwise I revert changes and ask it to generate again but based on my learnings from the past rejected output Isn't it a very inefficient way to learn things? Like, normally, you would learn how things work and then write the code, refining your knowledge while you are writing. Now you don't…

> you would learn how things work and then write the code

In a legacy codebase this may require learning a lot of things about how things work just to make small changes, which may be much less efficient.

Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#263

Post by Noyra-X »

What's interesting from a practical standpoint: the paper confirms what we're seeing in SME deployments – AI augments, not replaces. But the real productivity gain only kicks in when you redesign the process around the AI, not just bolt it on. Most small businesses skip that step entirely and then wonder why their 'AI tool' isn't delivering. The organizational restructuring is the hard part, not the technology. Anyone here seen teams actually get this right systematically?

Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#264

Post by avidiax »

holografix wrote: post #69

One of the more interesting takes I heard from a colleague, who’s in the marketing department, is that he uses the corporate approved LLM (Gemini) for “pretend work” or very basic tasks. At the same time he uses Claude on his personal account to seriously augment his job. His rationale is he won’t let the company log his prompts and responses so they can’t build an agentic replacement for him. Corporate rules about s…

It's not his company that will train using his prompts. It's the personal account, unless it is fully paid and he's opted out of training on his prompts.

Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#265

Post by Ekaros »

HWR_14 wrote: post #205
sdf2df wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You prove my point. Guys like you dont get it. You think OAI, Amazon etc can freely put large amounts of money into this for 5-10 years? Lmao - delusional. Investors are impatient. Show huge jumps in revenue this year or you no longer have permission to put monumental amounts of money into this anymore. Short of that they'll just destroy the stock price by selling off; leaving employees who get paid via SBC very unha…

Whatever you want to say about other companies, Amazon (and Meta) is quite willing to spend many years pouring billions into technology they think will pay off later.

Looking at VR and Meta. They absolutely can be wrong. So even after investing what seems to be enough, there might not be any payoff.

Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#266

Post by margorczynski »

bicx wrote: post #119
torben-friis wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>My PM is currently shipping major features (with my review) faster and with higher-quality code than any engineer did last year That's... not a good look for your engineers?

It’s hard to compare, honestly. Last year, my PM didn’t have the AI tools to do any of this, and engineers were spread thin. Now, the PM (with a specialized Claude Code environment) has the enthusiasm of a new software engineer and the product instincts of a senior PM.

This is how it will go at least in the near term. Engineers will be phased out slowly by product/project management that will prompt the tool instead of the tech lead for the changes they want.

And in the longer term those people will also get deprecated.

Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#267

Post by bob1029 »

> Claude is extensively used for coding, Computer Programmers are at the top, with 75% coverage

I think there are some advantages to being first.

It's time to re-evaluate strategies if we've been operating under the assumption that this is going to be a bubble, or otherwise largely bullshit. It definitely works. Not everywhere all the time, but often enough to be "scary" now. Some of my prior dismissals like "text 2 sql will never work" are looking pale in the face today.

Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#268

Post by danbolt »

httpz wrote: post #111
bandrami wrote: post #42

I don't write code for a living but I administer and maintain it. Every time I say this people get really angry, but: so far AI has had almost no impact on my job. Neither my dev team nor my vendors are getting me software faster than they were two years ago. Docker had a bigger impact on the pipeline to me than AI has. Maybe this will change, but until it does I'm mostly watching bemusedly.

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

My unfounded hunch for the computing bit is that home computers became more and more commonplace in the home as we approached the 21st century.

A Commodore 64 was a cool gadget, but “the family computer” became a device that commoditized the productivity. The opportunity cost of applying a computer to try something new went to near zero.

It might have been harder for someone to improve the productivity of an old factory in Shreveport, Louisiana with a computer than it was for the upstarts at id to make Doom.

Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#269

Post by kranke155 »

uxcolumbo wrote: post #258
kranke155 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in commercials. We can now make 1$ million dollar commercials with 100,000$ or less. So a 90% reduction in costs - if we use AI. The issue is they don’t look great. AI isn’t that great at some key details. But the agencies are really trying to push for it. They think this is the way back to the big flashy commercials of old. Budgets are lower than ever, and shrinking. Big issue here is really the misunderstand…

Advertisement is not that effective in general or just for certain channels, i.e. TV? Also what are you existing to?

So my understanding - from a friend at WPP who told me the same and from a freakonomics episode - is that advertising was wildly oversold before digital.

When the metrics arrived with digital, they saw that advertising, in some ways, was just not as effective as they’d hoped. In some ways the ROI wasn’t there. Seth Godin agrees. He says that advertising in the digital era could be as simple as just having a good product. I think this is Tesla’s position on it - make the best product and the internet takes care of it.

Legacy companies have kept large ad budgets but those are diminishing. From what I spoke with my friend at WPP, he said their data science team showed that outside of a new product or a product that is not recognised by consumers, the actual outcomes from ads are marginal or incremental. Thats what he told me. If your product is already known to consumers, the ROI is questionable.

Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#270

Post by discreteevent »

ako wrote: post #246
throwaw12 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 h…

I'm currently a product manager (was a software engineer and technical architect before), so i already lost the feeling of ownership of code. But just like when you're doing product management with a team of software engineers, testers, and UXers, with AI you can still feel ownership of the feature or capability you're shipping. So from my perspective, nothing changes regarding ownership.

> So from my perspective, nothing changes regarding ownership.

The engineer who worked with you took ownership of the code! Have you forgotten this?

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