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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

#41

Post by Rury »

vkou wrote: post #33
johnfn wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems unlikely. My company is in competition with a number of other startups. If AI removes one of my co-workers, our competitors will keep the co-worker and out-compete us.

> This seems unlikely. It is absolutely likely. The hiring market for juniors is fucked atm.

That's not necessarily a result of AI, you also have to consider the broader economic environment. I mean, it was also difficult to get a job as a graduate in 2008, whereas it's typically been easier to get a job when credit is cheap.

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

#42

Post by bandrami »

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.

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

#43

Post by causal »

tl2do wrote: post #20

From my experience as a software engineer, doubling my productivity hasn’t reduced my workload. My output per hour has gone up, but expectations and requirements have gone up just as fast. Software development is effectively endless work, and AI has mostly compressed timelines rather than reduced total demand.

This - I can't think of any place I've ever worked where development ever outpaced backlog and tech debt.

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

#44

Post by sdf2df »

sp4cec0wb0y wrote: post #13

My speed shipping software increased but so did the demands of features by my company.

I don't really get this TBH.

Shipping speed never/is was the issue. Most companies are terrible at figuring out what exactly they should be allocating resources behind.

Speeding up does not solve the problem that most humans who are at the top of the hierarchy are poor thinkers. In fact it compounds it. More noise, nice.

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

#45

Post by gedy »

johnfn wrote: post #30
liuliu wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not going to reduce your workload. It is going to remove one of your co-workers.

This seems unlikely. My company is in competition with a number of other startups. If AI removes one of my co-workers, our competitors will keep the co-worker and out-compete us.

There's definitely tone deaf statements from managers/leaders like "AI will allow us to do more with less headcount!" As if the end worker is supposed to be excited about that, knuckleheads, lol.

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

#46

Post by bandrami »

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.

The dev team is committing more than they used to. A lot, in fact, judging from the logs. But it's not showing up as a faster cadence of getting me software to administer. Again, maybe that will change.

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

#47

Post by johnfn »

vkou wrote: post #33
johnfn wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems unlikely. My company is in competition with a number of other startups. If AI removes one of my co-workers, our competitors will keep the co-worker and out-compete us.

> This seems unlikely. It is absolutely likely. The hiring market for juniors is fucked atm.

Aren't we both responding to an article which says:

> We find no systematic increase in unemployment for highly exposed workers since late 2022

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

#48

Post by vkou »

Rury wrote: post #41
vkou wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This seems unlikely. It is absolutely likely. The hiring market for juniors is fucked atm.

That's not necessarily a result of AI, you also have to consider the broader economic environment. I mean, it was also difficult to get a job as a graduate in 2008, whereas it's typically been easier to get a job when credit is cheap.

It sure was, but as far as I'm aware, 2026 isn't in the middle of a generation-scale economic collapse.

(And if it is, what is the cause?)

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

#49

Post by righthand »

bandrami wrote: post #46
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.

The dev team is committing more than they used to. A lot, in fact, judging from the logs. But it's not showing up as a faster cadence of getting me software to administer. Again, maybe that will change.

In my experience it is now twice the amount of merge requests as a follow-up appears to correct any bugs no one reviewed in the first merge request.

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

#50

Post by thewebguyd »

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.

Same here, more or less, in the ops world. Yeah, I use AI but I can't honestly say it's massively improved my productivity or drastically changed my job in any way other than the emails I get from the other managers at my work are now clearly written by AI.

I can turn out some scripts a little bit quicker, or find an answer to something a little quicker than googling, but I'm still waiting on others most of the time, the overall company processes haven't improved or gotten more efficient. The same blockers as always still exist.

Like you said, there has been other tech that has changed my job over time more than AI has. The move to the cloud, Docker, Terraform, Ansible, etc. have all had far more of an impact on my job. I see literally zero change in the output of others, both internally and externally.

So either this is a massively overblown bubble, or I'm just missing something.

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