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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

#551

Post by ehnto »

anthonypasq wrote: post #447
ehnto wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was my insight also. As a manager, you already have the headcount approved, and your people just allegedly got some significant percentage more productive. The first thought shouldn't be, great let's cut costs, it should be great now we finally have the bandwidth to deliver faster. On a macro level, if you were in a rising economic tide, you would still be hiring, and turning those productivity gains into more b…

business success does not scale at the speed of increased profits from layoffs.

It's true but it's also not real growth. It will look good the first time you do it. It also relies on there being no negative growth induced by AI not meeting the same quality of output that thousands of workers were once doing.

If it is truly because of AI, then it's still a losing strategy long term in my opinion.

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

#552

Post by krackers »

rich_sasha wrote: post #461
Bewelge wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a guess, but to me it sounds like you're trying to do too much at once. When trying something like this: > lots of careful code of registering and unregistering callbacks, some careful thread synchronisation (callbacks get called in another thread), thinking about sane exception handling in async code. Fiddly but not rocket science. I'd expect CC to fail this when just given requirements. The way I use it is to…

> The way I use it is to explicitly tell it things like: "Make sure to do Y when callback X gets fired" and not "you have to be careful about thread synchronisation". "Do X, so that Exceptions are always thrown when Y happens" instead of "Make sure to implement sane Exception handling". At this point I'm basically programming in English, no? Trying to squeeze exact instructions into an inherently ambiguous representa…

I'm reminded of the notion of "komolgorov complexity" here. There might be some tasks for which a short natural language description is sufficient, and others for which a sufficiently formal description is needed to the point that it's easier to actually write the code than describe it in English.

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

#553

Post by thewhitetulip »

joquarky wrote: post #539
thewhitetulip wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand why they used Electron. But since AI is so amazing they should be using Claude to generate super optimized native software! They do claim that Claude is better than humans and AI is replacing programmers any day now. So why aren't they using their own software to generate a linux optimized package for linux, a Swift software for MacOS and whatever windows uses. That would be the best ad for AI. See, we u…

GenAI currently has substantially more training from web tech than native.

Yes, that's there. But look at the marketing. They don't market for webdevs, do they?

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

#554

Post by bandrami »

redhale wrote: post #334
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.

I don't doubt your sincerity. But this represents an absolutely bonkers disparity compared to the reality I'm experiencing. I'm not sure what to say. It's like someone claiming that automobiles don't improve personal mobility. There are a lot of logical reasons to be against the mass adoption of automobiles, but "lack of effectiveness as a form of personal mobility" is not one of them. Hearing things like this does g…

I don't think I'm asking for something unreasonable: I'll believe this actually speeds up software creation when one of my vendors starts getting me software faster. That's not some crazy ludditism on my part, I don't think?

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

#555

Post by vb7132 »

random3 wrote: post #463
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…

Interesting. Are you generating revenue or, otherwise, what productivity are you measuring? Without generating revenue (which to be clear is a very good proxy to measure impact) everyone can be indeed very prolific in their hobbies. But labor market is about making money for a living and unless you can directly impact your day-to-day needs from your work, it can't be called productive.

Very valid point. I will lay down the facts for you:

At my previous employer, I was generating $2.5million per year (revenue per employee). I didn't ship a single line of code. All the time was spent trying to convince various stake holders.

Now, I have already built a couple of apps that help me better manage my tech news (keeps me sane) plus I am writing a blog that generates $0. It's only been a month.

If you measure the immediate dollar value, you are right. But in life, pay-offs are not always realized immediately. Just my opinion anyway.

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

#556

Post by vb7132 »

Madmallard wrote: post #349
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…

2. Translating between two different coding languages (migration) I have a game written in XNA 100% of the code is there, including all the physics that I hand-wrote. All the assets are there. I tried to get Gemini and Claude to do it numerous times, always with utter failure of epic proportions with anything that's actually detailed. 1 - my transition from the lobby screen into gameplay? 0% replicated on all attempt…

Yes, you are right: amongst the four points, migration is the most contentious one. You need to be fairly prudent about migration and depending on the project complexity, it may or may not work.

But I do feel this is a solvable problem long term.

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

#557

Post by linsomniac »

bandrami wrote: post #548
linsomniac wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>still only marginally faster. Is it? A couple days ago I had it build tooling for a one-off task I need to run, it wrote ~800 lines of Python to accomplish this, in <30m. I found it was too slow, so I got it to convert it to run multiple tasks in parallel in another prompt. Would have taken a couple days for me to build from hand, given the number of interruptions I have in the average day. This isn't a one-off, it'…

Did that need to be 800 lines of Python, though, is the question

NEED to be? No.

But, to be robust you want a signal handler with clean shutdown, a circuit breaker, argument processing (100 lines right there), logging, reporting progress to our dashboard (it's going to run 10-15 days), checking errors and exceptions, retrying on temp fail, documentation... It adds up.

So it could be shorter, but it's not like there is anything superfluous in it.

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

#558

Post by YesBox »

gilbetron wrote: post #544
YesBox wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can we verify if you dont post the code? I appreciate you testing, even though it's not a great comparison: - My feedback cycle of LLM prompting forced me to be more explicit with each call, which benefited your prompt since I gave you exactly what to look for with fewer nuances. - Maybe GPT 5.1 is old or kneecapped for newer versions of GPT - Maybe Opus/Claud is just a way better model :P Please post the code! E…

I didn't prompt anything odd, just standard prompt "etiquette", actually I significantly prompted less than I would usually do, trying to do a simple prompt like you did.

I’ll believe it when I see the code

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

#559

Post by ehnto »

throwaw12 wrote: post #260
superfrank wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an EM as well and I've been telling my teams for a while now that I think they really only need to start worrying once our backlog starts going down instead of up. Generally, I still agree with that (and your) sentiment when you look at the long term, but in the short term, I think all of the following arguments can be made in favor of layoffs: - AI tools are expensive so until the increased productivity translat…

I see similar arguments and I don't agree as well, here is why: > rehire people with the skills we want in a year or two than it is to try and retrain. before that future comes your company might become obsolete already, because you have lost your market share to new entrants > We expect the bottlenecks in our org to move from writing code to something else I would love to tell them, hey lets leverage current momentu…

Your last point I think is the crux for now, if you can get so much more value out of talent then the market will eventually price that into wages. I think the idea some have instead is that I can use cheap, unskilled people to get the same value as before, which is probably true for some aspects of the industry. My experience of that so far for boutique software is AI propels unskilled employees at light speed into dead ends, similar to how a junior would spend two weeks following ideas from stack overflow and being unable to execute on it.

However AI definitely is capable of lower end software tasks and really well trodden ground, especially when managed by a developer, so perhaps what we will see is a bigger gap in pay and talent not too different from the off-shore vs on-shore market comparisons.

The key for me though for me is that, if AI makes your employees 20% more valuable, that will either get priced into their wage or captured by the business, but it still doesn't replace the need for good talent (software engineer, agent handler, whatever it will get called).

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

#560

Post by izacus »

tomhow wrote: post #540
izacus wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Because your ignorance is painful. It's not acceptable to attack a fellow community member like this on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're aiming for better than this: Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling na…

Being kind to people who blatantly lie about history and hide suffering of thousands is how we got into the current mess.
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