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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

#331

Post by kstrauser »

ajmurmann wrote: post #289
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 am VERY pro-immigration. I do have concerns about the H1B program though. IMO it's not great for both immigrant workers, as well as non-immigrant workers because it creates a class of workers for whom it's harder to change employers which weakens their negotiation position. If this is the case for enough of the workforce it artificially depresses wages for everyone. I want to see a reform that makes it much easier…

I agree with all of that. I've seen employers treat workers with H1B visas as slaves, basically. Local employees had a pretty decent work-life balance, but H1B employees got calls at 8PM on a Friday night to add a feature. And why not? What were they going to do quit (and have, what is it, something like 48 hours to get out of the country)?

I felt enormous sympathy for my coworkers here with that visa. Their lives sucked because there was little downside for sociopathic managers to make them suck.

Most frustrating was when they were doing the same kind of work I was doing, like writing Python web services and whatnot. We absolutely could hire local employees to do those things. They weren't building quantum computers or something. Crappy employers gamed the system to get below-market-rate-salary employees and work them like rented mules. It was infuriating.

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

#332

Post by ozim »

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.…

Bad part is all those guys attending meetings start feeling important. They start feeling like they are doing the job.

I’ve seen those guys it is painful to watch.

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

#333

Post by hnthrow90348765 »

trealira wrote: post #81
darth_avocado wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All the people employed by the government and blue collar workers If people don’t have jobs, government doesn’t have taxes to employ other people. If CEOs are salivating at the thought of replacing white collar workers, there is no reason to think next step of AI augmented with robotics won’t replace blue collar workers as well.

> If CEOs are salivating at the thought of replacing white collar workers, there is no reason to think next step of AI augmented with robotics won’t replace blue collar workers as well. Robotics seems harder, though, and has been around for longer than LLMs. Robotic automation can replace blue collar factory workers, but I struggle to imagine it replacing a plumber who comes to your house and fixes your pipes, or a w…

>or a waiter serving food at a restaurant

I've seen this already at a pizza place. Order from a QR code menu and a robot shows up 20-25 minutes later at your table with your pizza. Wait staff still watched the thing go around.

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

#335

Post by smeeger »

if being redundant would lead to mass layoffs then half of white collar workers would have been laid off decades ago. and white collar people will fiddle with rules and regulations to make their ever more bloated redundancy even more brazen with the addition of AI… and then later when AI has the ability to replace blue collar workers it will do so immediately and swiftly while the white collar people get all the money. its happened a thousand times before and will happen again.

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

#336

Post by stefan_ »

fny wrote: post #50

I think everyone is missing the bigger picture. This is not a matter of whether AI will replace humans whole sale. There are two more predominant effects: 1. You’ll need fewer humans to do the same task. In other forms of automation, this has led to a decrease in employment. 2. The supply of capable humans increases dramatically. 3. Expertise is no longer a perfect moat. I’ve seen 2. My sister nearly flunked a coding…

I don't understand, no one ever needed an LLM to automate air traffic controllers. 1980s tech could do that just fine. The reason they continue to exist is essentially cultural. Fell into a local maximum trap and now the entire industry and governance is incapable of lifting itself out of it and instead come up with stuff like "standardized phrases for the voice coms that we have inexplicably made crucial to the entire system" while riding cultural cliches like "the pilot must be in control" as they continue manual flight into big rocks.

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

#337

Post by idkwhattocallme »

LPisGood wrote: post #320
spamizbad wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, my spiciest take is that Jr. Dev salaries really started getting silly during the 2nd half of the 2010s. It was ultimately supply (too little) and demand (too much) pushing them upward, but it was a huge signal we were in a bubble.

As someone who entered the workforce just after this, I feel like I missed the peak. A ton if those people got boatloads of money, great stock options, and many years of experience that they can continue to leverage for excellent positions.

Don't worry, there is always another bubble on the horizon

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

#338

Post by stephc_int13 »

The main culprit behind the hype of the AI revolution is a lack of understanding of its true nature and capabilities. We should know better, Eliza demonstrated decades ago how easily we can be fooled by language, this is different and more useful but we rely so much on language fluency and knowledge retrieval as a proxy for intelligence that we are fooled again.

I am not saying this is a nothing burger, the tech can be applied to many domains and improve productivity, but it does not think, not even a little, and scaling won’t make that magically happen.

Anyone paying attention should understand this fact by now.

There is no intelligence explosion in sight, what we’ll see during the next few years is a gradual and limited increase in automation, not a paradigm change, but the continuation of a process that started with the industrial revolution.

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

#339

Post by boogieknite »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #188
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.…

This is so true. We had a (admittedly derogatory) term we used during the rise in interest rates, "zero interest rate product managers". Don't get me wrong, I think great product managers are worth their weight in gold, but I encountered so many PMs during the ZIRP era who were essentially just Jira-updaters and meeting-schedulers. The vast majority of folks I see that were in tech that are having trouble getting hir…

first job out of college i was one of these pms. luckily i figured it out quickly and would spend maybe 2 hours a day working, 6 hours a day teaching myself to program. i cant believe that job existed and they gave it to me. one of my teammates was moved to HR and he was distraught over how he actually had work to do

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

#340

Post by bradlys »

boredatoms wrote: post #282
yobbo wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The idea that literally massive amounts of this workforce couldn't possibly be filled by domestic grads One theory is that the benefit they might be providing over domestic "grads" is lack of prerequisites for promotion above certain levels (language, cultural fit, and so on). For managers, this means the prestige of increased headcount without the various "burdens" of managing "careerists". For example, less plaus…

I think that would backfire as the intrinsic culture of the company changes as it absorbs more people. Verticals would form from new hires who did manage to get promoted

Which is exactly what has happened. Anyone in the industry for 15 years can easily see this.
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