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What young workers are doing to AI-proof themselves

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Re: What young workers are doing to AI-proof themselves

#351

Post by glitchc »

alistairSH wrote: post #265
edwcross wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure how it works in the US, but in some parts of Europe, blue collar trades are currently much better, for several reasons: - Price of housing and associated maintenance keeps rising, and so do small jobs like fixing plumbing, gardening, etc; - You can easily avoid paying VAT if you know how to, so that's a 20% increase, or even more, if you can benefit from social services (e.g. since you don't earn a lot, you…

Is it actually true that the savings on home maintenance and social services offsets the higher salaries of white collar work? That's kind of crazy if it's true. In the US, you can make pretty good money in the trades, but generally, there are many caveats - you have to be your own boss, preferably with a few employees; you pay your own benefits; you don't get any paid leave; and depending on the trade, you could be…

> Is it actually true that the savings on home maintenance and social services offsets the higher salaries of white collar work? That's kind of crazy if it's true.

Yes, this is called Baumol's cost disease.

Re: What young workers are doing to AI-proof themselves

#352

Post by glitchc »

AStrangeMorrow wrote: post #288
alistairSH wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it actually true that the savings on home maintenance and social services offsets the higher salaries of white collar work? That's kind of crazy if it's true. In the US, you can make pretty good money in the trades, but generally, there are many caveats - you have to be your own boss, preferably with a few employees; you pay your own benefits; you don't get any paid leave; and depending on the trade, you could be…

Might be surprising but I am kinda willing to believe it. Since we bought our house, we had quite a bit of work done by professionals. But whenever I can I do things myself. Like I had multiple companies quote me $300-500 based on the job for things that take me maybe 2-3 hours total to do, including learning about it (will be faster next time), getting the materials, and doing the job. When you have a few of these a…

If your hourly wage is $150 or more, then the cost is break-even, or possibly cheaper to hire someone else.

Re: What young workers are doing to AI-proof themselves

#353

Post by LtWorf »

red-iron-pine wrote: post #282
alistairSH wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it actually true that the savings on home maintenance and social services offsets the higher salaries of white collar work? That's kind of crazy if it's true. In the US, you can make pretty good money in the trades, but generally, there are many caveats - you have to be your own boss, preferably with a few employees; you pay your own benefits; you don't get any paid leave; and depending on the trade, you could be…

$10-20k of home improvement work adds considerable value for reselling, and you're only on the hook for raw materials -- you've already got the tools and skills and time one of the wealthiest dudes I know is a carpenter who loves workin wood. his free time is spent making cabinets and furnature and blasting obscure music

Most people don't like working in addition to working. Plus if you're constantly home renovating, it's kinda of hell living in there and your partner might go to greener pastures.

Re: What young workers are doing to AI-proof themselves

#354

Post by menaerus »

whatever1 wrote: post #144

Specialized shoemakers lost their jobs to generic shoe factory workers but there is more shoe consumption than ever before in history. LLMs like manufacturing will multiply the coding throughput. Likely the mythical 10x swe will not be as valuable, but the work expectation from anyone in the field will just multiply.

> but there is more shoe consumption than ever before in history.

Is it because the population is constantly growing or is it because per-person shoe-units is increasing due to that person increased wealth or is it because per-person shoe-units is increasing due to 5x lower price of generic shoe-units? How does that exactly transfer to the production of software and market absorbing the software hyper-inflation?

Re: What young workers are doing to AI-proof themselves

#356

Post by Animats »

analog31 wrote: post #279
Animats wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a generic problem with oil states. Or, more generally, where most income is generated by some centralized industry with strong government involvement. See "Dutch disease".[1] It's a strange situation in which having high income from valuable resources ends up making a state less industrial, and usually both more corrupt and poorer. Is AI going to do this? Quite possibly. One of the symptoms is most investment…

This is something I've wondered for a long time. Does a software state become more like an oil state, or more like an industrial state?

It's becoming painfully clear that we have no idea how to run a society where machines do most of the thinking.

Maybe there will be a glut of smart people. Historically, that was the case until roughly WWII. Humans produced a certain fraction of smart people, but there were more smart people than jobs for them. Pikkety points out that through most of history, about 97-98% of the population was doing manual work. That started to change with the Industrial Revolution. Not until roughly WWII did an actual shortage of smart people develop. Hence the postwar boom in college education. Not until the 1990s did the nerds take over.

We think of a large group of smart people making society go as normal. Historically, it wasn't like that. The robust, the entitled, and the religious were in charge. Pikkety has a long analysis of this in his Capital and Ideology. Look who runs the Trump administration.

We're already at a smart people glut. In the US, only about half of college graduates find jobs that really need a college education. That's pre-AI. Now what?

Re: What young workers are doing to AI-proof themselves

#357

Post by jbxntuehineoh »

glitchc wrote: post #352
AStrangeMorrow wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might be surprising but I am kinda willing to believe it. Since we bought our house, we had quite a bit of work done by professionals. But whenever I can I do things myself. Like I had multiple companies quote me $300-500 based on the job for things that take me maybe 2-3 hours total to do, including learning about it (will be faster next time), getting the materials, and doing the job. When you have a few of these a…

If your hourly wage is $150 or more, then the cost is break-even, or possibly cheaper to hire someone else.

only if you _have_ an hourly wage, if you're salaried it really doesn't make sense to value your time that way

Re: What young workers are doing to AI-proof themselves

#358

Post by Larrikin »

altruios wrote: post #329
ForHackernews wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're willing to commit fraud anyway, just run a crypto scam. The payout is a lot higher, and it will use the white collar tech skills you already have rather than forcing you to learn a trade.

I mean, or you could help build houses instead of drain electricity. One is clearly less lazy and helping humanity more.

Not paying taxes is a drain on society

Re: What young workers are doing to AI-proof themselves

#359

Post by squeaky-clean »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #289
ghufran_syed wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I look forward to seeing your company actually producing and selling food for “next to nothing”, given how easy it apparently is

We can produce enough food for everyone on earth to eat, and as more automation sets in, labor costs will decline. We are already at artificial scarcity - other than political animus rooted in racism and toil is moral there’s no reason for anyone anywhere to starve. This trend won’t reverse, but will become increasingly perverse. For example, in my neck of the woods there’s the company Carbon Robotics, which is prett…

Producing the food is only 10% of the challenge. How do you deliver it to everyone at no cost without rotting? How do you deal with a delivery of flour if you have no oven?

If it's so easy this is ripe for a startup to disrupt. Food is the most necessary thing to human existence. Every living person is a potential customer.

Re: What young workers are doing to AI-proof themselves

#360

Post by gambiting »

menaerus wrote: post #349
gambiting wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> plumber or electrician can easily earn more than a researcher with PhD, with much shorter studies, better job security and more options for starting a business. And every single plumber and electrician I know is completely worn out(physically) by the time they hit 50. Both are these are incredibly demanding on the body, more than most people imagine. So they get to that point where they actually can't move and the…

> It looks like a great option compared to someone who just got their PhD, sure. But long term I'm not sure if that's such a great option. Why? I am sure we can agree that SWE domain has its own set of disadvantages, no? Many people I know have been burnt out in their 30s on their jobs and are unable to continue with the same capacity in their 40s, not to even mention 50s, and later ages. What company wants to hire a…

I think that for some reason you took my critique of being a plumber or electrician as an endorsement of being a software engineer, and it's not entirely clear to me why.
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