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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

#361

Post by anthomtb »

CSMastermind wrote: post #349

Huge amounts of white collar jobs have been automated since the advent of computers. If you look at the work performed by office workers in the 1960s and compared it to what people today do it'd be almost unrecognizable. They spent huge amounts of time on things that software either does automatically or makes 1,000x faster. But by and large that actually created more white collar jobs because those capabilities mean…

> Huge amounts of white collar jobs have been automated since the advent of computers

One of which was the occupation of being a computer!

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

#362

Post by neilv »

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…

I agree that interns are pretty much over in tech. Except maybe for an established company do do as a semester/summer trial/goodwill period, for students near graduation. You usually won't get work output worth the mentoring cost, but you might identify a great potential hire, and be on their shortlist.

Startups are less enlightened than that about "interns".

Literally today, in a startup job posting, to a top CS department, they're looking for "interns" to bring (not learn) hot experience developing AI agents, to this startup, for... $20/hour, and get called an intern.

It's also normal for these startup job posts to be looking for experienced professional-grade skills in things like React, Python, PG, Redis, etc., and still calling the person an intern, with a locally unlivable part-time wage.

Those startups should stop pretending they're teaching "interns" valuable job skills, admit that they desperately need cheap labor for their "ideas person" startup leadership, to do things they can't do, and cut the "intern" in as a founding engineer with meaningful equity. Or, if you can't afford to pay a livable and plausibly competitive startup wage, maybe they're technical cofounders.

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

#363

Post by causal »

gcanyon wrote: post #347

...everyone here saying "someday AI will but not today" while failing to acknowledge that for a lot of things "someday" is 2026, and for an even larger number of things it's 2027, and we can't even predict whether or not in 2028 AI will handle nearly all things...

The problem is that it's hard to pin down any job that's been eliminated by AI even after years of having LLMs. I'm sure it will happen. It just seems like the trajectory of intelligence defies any simple formula.

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

#364

Post by al_borland »

Kirby64 wrote: post #200
al_borland wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the laundry machine and dishwasher, it still requires effort. A human needs to collect the dirty stuff, put it into the machine properly, decide when it should run, load the soap, select a cycle type, start it, monitor the machine to know when it’s done, empty the machine, and put the stuff away properly, thus starting the human side of the process again. It’s less work than it used to be, but remove the human w…

> A human needs to collect the dirty stuff, put it into the machine properly, decide when it should run, load the soap, select a cycle type, start it, monitor the machine to know when it’s done, empty the machine, and put the stuff away properly, thus starting the human side of the process again. The really modern stuff is pretty much as simple as “load, start, unload” - you can buy combo washing machines that wash a…

Unload timing on the washer/dryer matters.

Leave things wet in the washer too long and they smell like mold and you have to run it again. Leave them in the dryer too long and they are all wrinkled, and you have to run it again (at least for a little while).

I grew up watching everyone in my family do this, sometimes multiple times for the same load. That’s why I set timers and remove stuff promptly.

The dishwasher I agree, and it’s usually best to leave them in there at least for a little while once it’s done. However, not unloading it means dirty dishes start to stack up on the counter or in the sink, so it still creates a problem.

As far as “load, start, unload” goes. We covered unload, but load is also an issue where some people do have issues. They load the dishwasher wrong and things don’t get clear, or they start it wrong and are left with spots all over everything. Washing machines can be overloaded, or unbalanced. Washing machines and dryers can also be started wrong, the settings need to match the garments being washed. Some clothes are forgiving, others are not. There is still human error in the mix.

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

#366

Post by alvah »

lukev wrote: post #307
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.…

Whenever I think about AI and labor, I can't help thinking about David Graeber's [Bullshit Jobs]( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs ). And there's multiple confounding factors at play. Yes, lots of jobs are bullshit, so maybe AI is a plausible excuse to downside and gain efficiency. But also the dynamic that causes the existence of bullshit jobs hasn't gone away. In fact, assuming AI does actually provide m…

Exactly. For as long as I can remember, in any organisation of any reasonable size I have worked in, you could get rid of the ~50% of the headcount who aren't doing anything productive without any noticeable adverse effects (on the business at least, obviously the effects on the individuals would be somewhat adverse). This being the case, there are obviously many other factors other than pure efficiency keeping people employed, so why would an AI revolution on it's own create some kind of massive Schumpeterian shockwave?

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

#367

Post by hluska »

underlipton wrote: post #323
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…

We all get 5 conspiracy theories before we advance from "understandably suspicious, given the complexity of the modern world" to "reliable tinfoil purchasers", and one of mine is that the prevalence of Indian execs and, to a lesser extent, Indian and Chinese workers in tech is a backdoor concession to countries who could open a demographic can of whoop-ass on us if they really wanted to. We let them bleed off the amb…

Edited:

Actually disregard, this isn’t worth it, but I don’t grant any freebies.

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

#368

Post by lokar »

mechagodzilla wrote: post #210
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…

Interns and new grads have always been a net-negative productivity-wise in my experience, it's just that eventually (after a small number of months/years) they turn into extremely productive more-senior employees. And interns and new grads can use AI too. This feels like asking "Why hire junior programmers now that we have compilers? We don't need people to write boring assembly anymore." If AI was genuinely a big pr…

Where I have worked new grads (and interns) were explicitly negative.

This is part of why some companies have minimum terminal levels (often 5/Sr) before which a failure to improve means getting fired.

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

#369

Post by daxfohl »

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.…

Agree, but two questions:

First, is AI really a better scapegoat? "Reducing headcount due to end of ZIRP" maybe doesn't sound great, but "replacing employees with AI" sounds a whole lot worse from a PR perspective (to me anyway).

Second, are companies actually using AI as the scapegoat? I haven't followed it too closely, but I could imagine that layoffs don't say anything about AI at all, and it's mostly media and FUD inventing the correlation.

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

#370

Post by senderista »

Spooky23 wrote: post #346
ajmurmann wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In context of tech, H1B is great for the money people in the US and India. It suppresses wages in both countries and is a powerful plum for employee “loyalty”. There’s a whole industry of companies stoking the pipeline of cheap labor and corrupting the hiring process. In big dollar markets, the program is used more for special skills. But when a big bank or government contractor needs marginally skilled people onshor…

H1-B also makes CS masters programs a cash cow for US schools.
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