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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

#401

Post by bandrami »

demorro wrote: post #357
kdheiwns wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. All AI has done for me is give me the power of how good search engines were 10+ years ago, where I could search for something and find actually relevant and helpful info quickly. I've seen lots of people say AI can basically code a project for them. Maybe it can, but that seems to heavily depend on the field. Other than boilerplate code or very generic projects, it's a step above useless imo when it comes to gam…

It makes me wonder if the majority of all-in on AI folks are quite young and never experienced pre-enshittification search.

Also I see so much talk about "boilerplate" I can't help but wonder if people just never had decent text editors, or never bothered to customize them at all?

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

#402

Post by stiiv »

rich_sasha wrote: post #392
vividfrier wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I often wonder what I am missing. Recently I wanted to wrap a low level vendor API with a callback API (make a request struct and request id, submit, provide a callback fn, which gets called with request IDs and messages received from vendor) to async Python (await make_request(...)). Kinda straightforward - lots of careful code of registering and unregistering callbacks, some careful thread synchronisation (callback…

> On exception it exits dirtily and crashes, which is good enough for now

Silent failures and unexplained crashes are high on my list of things to avoid, but many teams just take them for granted in spite of the practical impact.

I think that a lot of orgs have a culture of "ship it and move on," accompanied by expectations like: QA will catch it, high turnover/lower-skill programmers commit stuff like this all the time anyway, or production code is expected to have some rough edges. I've been on teams like that, mostly in bigger orgs with high turnover and/or low engineering standards.

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

#403

Post by baxtr »

m_ke wrote: post #377
vb7132 wrote: post #347

I was at a big tech for last 10 years, quit my job last month - I feel 50x more productive outside than inside. Here is my take on AI's impact on productivity: First let's review what are LLMs objectively good at: 1. Writing boiler plate code 2. Translating between two different coding languages (migration) 3. Learning new things: Summarizing knowledge, explaining concepts 4. Documentation, menial tasks At a big tech…

having been an early employee and founder of a few startups and then working at a few larger companies, most people who only ever worked at FAANG have no idea how much more productive tiny teams with ownership are.

I love tiny teams. I hate big corp.

Big corporations are full with people who love to entertain 20+ people in video calls. 1-2 people speak, the other nod their heads while browsing Amazon.

I wouldn’t be sad if those jobs vanished.

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

#404

Post by palmotea »

thbb123 wrote: post #327
adelie wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not in translation, but a number of close friends are in the industry. Two trends I've noticed in the industry, which I think we're seeing mirrored in tech: 1. No one cares about quality. Even in fields you'd expect to require the 'human touch' (e.g. novel translation), publishers are replacing translators with AI. It doesn't matter if you have higher-level knowledge or skills if the company gains more from cutti…

It is not entirely true that no one cares about quality. I'd like to stay optimistic and believe that those who are demanding on the quality of their production will acquire sufficient market differentiation to prevail. After all, this has been Apple strategy since the 80's, and, even though there were some up's and down's, overall it's a success.

> It is not entirely true that no one cares about quality. I'd like to stay optimistic and believe that those who are demanding on the quality of their production will acquire sufficient market differentiation to prevail.

Maybe, but it probably requires a very strong and opinionated leader to pull off. The conventional wisdom in American business leadership seems to be to pursue the lowest level of quality you can get away with, and focus on cutting costs. And you'll have to fight that every second.

I don't think that's true at the individual-contributor level (pursing quality is very motivating), but they people who move up are the ones who sound "smart" by aping conventional wisdom.

> After all, this has been Apple strategy since the 80's, and, even though there were some up's and down's, overall it's a success.

I might give you that "since the late 90s," but there have been significant periods where that wasn't true (e.g. the early mid-90s Mac OS was buggy and had poor foundations).

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

#405

Post by bdangubic »

staticassertion wrote: post #356
bdangubic wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

of course you need a human but do not need nearly as many humans as there are currently in the labor force

Maybe, but I'm not really convinced. LLMs make some aspects of the job faster, mainly I don't have to type anymore. But... that was always a relatively small portion of the job. Design, understanding constraints, maintaining and operating code, deciding what to do, what not to do, when to do it, gaining consensus across product, eng, support, and customers, etc. I do all of those things as an engineer. Coding faster…

I think the core issue (evidenced by constant stream of debates on HN) is the everyone’s experience with LLMs is different. I think we can all agree that some experiences are like yours while there are others that are vastly different than yours. Sometimes I hear “you just don’t know how to use them etc…” as if there is some magic setup that makes them do shit but the reality is that our actual jobs are drastically different even though we all technically have same titles. I have been a contractor for a decade now and have been on projects that require real “engineers” doing real hardcore shit. I have also been on projects where tens of people are doing work I can train my 12-year old daughter to be proficient in a month. I would gauge that percentage of the former is much smaller than later

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

#406

Post by sph »

leptons wrote: post #238
KronisLV wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m currently working across like 5 projects (was 4 last week but you know how it is). I now do more in days than others might in a week. Yesterday a colleague didn’t quite manage to implement a loading container with a Vue directive instead of DOM hacks, it was easier for me to just throw AI at the problem and produced a working and tested solution and developer docs than to have a similarly long meeting and have th…

>I now do more in days than others might in a week. I've always done more in days than others might in a week. YMMV.

So do I, this is why I work 15 hours a week [1] and laugh at those that use this new productivity tool to work themselves even harder for the same pay. Wasn’t the point of automation to work less?

1: pre-AI. Not keen on becoming a manager of an idiot savant, so I’m planning my exit.

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

#407

Post by sgc »

demorro wrote: post #399
sgc wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand, but the improvement is actually more than that. It is not directly programming, but look at this page [1] for example. I spent years handcrafting parallel texts of English and Greek and had managed to put just under 400 books online. With AI, I managed to translate and put in parallel 1500 more books very quickly. At least 2/3 of those have never been translated into English, ever. That means I have don…

... you know what. Whilst I suspect the quality of these translations is probably not great. Fair play this is a valid example.

Of course they are not perfect, but no translation is even close to perfect. The floor is actually incredibly low. All I can say is that many doctoral-level scholars, including myself and some academic publishers, find them to be somewhere between serviceable and better than average.

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

#408

Post by mikkupikku »

ausbah wrote: post #325
mikkupikku wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Art should be done foremost because it's a passion for the artist. If you give up art just because you can no longer sell it, because you're being out competed by computer generated furry porn, then the world hasn't really lost anything of value.

that seems a bit harsh. if you’re livelihood has been from making some sort of visual art for however many years and work has even drying up bc of AI, just doing a sudden career pivot is pretty difficult.

True, it's harsh. But the way I see it, artists producing real art from their soul are going to keep at it even while corporate graphic designers and furry porn fanart illustrators are getting decimated. Society at large won't be culturally impoverished by this, so I'm viewing corporate graphic artists with the same mindset as buggy whip manufacturers. Technology coming for the careers of artists isn't even new, the invention of photography greatly diminished demand for painted portrays. Sad for those painters, but photography was then made into an art of it's own, and similarly I think creatively driven people will find new ways to exploit these new tools.

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

#409

Post by demorro »

bandrami wrote: post #401
demorro wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes me wonder if the majority of all-in on AI folks are quite young and never experienced pre-enshittification search.

Also I see so much talk about "boilerplate" I can't help but wonder if people just never had decent text editors, or never bothered to customize them at all?

Aye, I know. Don't get me wrong, I knew that the majority of devs have always been worse than useless, but it's been disconcerting to see quite how much value folk are getting out of agents for problems that have been solved for decades.

Arguably this solution is "better" because you don't even really need to understand that you have specific problems to have the agent solve them for you, but I fail to see the point of keeping these people employed in that case. If you haven't been able to solve your own workflow issues up until now I have zero trust in you being able to solve business problems.

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

#410

Post by bearjaws »

We are rewriting our entire frontend from Webpack + Gatsby to Vite + React, we converted all static pages in one day using Claude Code.

We basically have ~40 components and 6 pages to go until complete rewrite, I am sure we will run into bumps in the road, but it's been crazy to watch.

We also added i18n (English + Spanish), ThemeProvider for white labeling solution, and WCAG 2A compliance, all in one shot.

If I went to a third party and asked them to rewrite just the static pages it would have been $200k and 3 months of work.

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