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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

#571

Post by gentleman11 »

mikkupikku wrote: post #408
ausbah wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'll pass that along to my starving artist friends who work minimum wage jobs. thanks

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

#572

Post by fragmede »

thewebguyd wrote: post #433
leptons wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's my experience too. It's okay at a few things that save me some typing, but it isn't really going to do the hard work for me. I also still need to spend significant amounts of time figuring out what it did wrong and correcting it. And that's frustrating . I don't make those mistakes, and I really dislike being led down bad paths. If "code smells" are bad, then "AI" is a rotting corpse.

> If "code smells" are bad, then "AI" is a rotting corpse. This is what's so frustrating about the hype bros for me. In most cases, everything AI spits out are code smells. We're all just supposed to toss out every engineering principle we've learned all so the owner class can hire less developers and suppress wages? I'm sure it's working great for everyone working on SaaS CRUD or web apps, but it's still not anywher…

That's interesting because I've been having pretty good luck with AI on SwiftUI. It didn't use to be but at some point they got good at that.

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

#573

Post by duncangh »

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.

This is my favorite type of interaction to see when browsing HN. I feel like this respectful mosh pit of ideas and practitioners is uniquely rad. Thanks for the serendipity dopamine this Sunday

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

#574

Post by pllbnk »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #179
throwaw12 wrote: post #154

People who are saying they're not seeing productivity boost, can you please share where is it failing? Because, I am terrified by the output I am getting while working on huge legacy codebases, it works. I described one of my workflow changes here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47271168 but in general compared to old way of working I am saving half of the steps consistently, whether its researching the codebas…

The companies laying off people have no vision. My company is a successful not for profit and we are hiring like crazy. It’s not a software company, but we have always effectively unlimited work. Why would anyone downsize because work is getting done faster? Just do more work, get more done, get better than the competition, get better at delivering your vision. We put profits back in the community and actually make l…

I have a hope that many of today's engineers working at various companies will start realizing that instead of employers receiving tools to get them laid off, it is they, the engineers, who received the tools to compete with said employers and outcompete them.

If, and it's a big if, AI models really boost productivity by an order of magnitude (I personally, while being skeptical a year or two ago, am leaning towards this idea) then engineers have a chance to realize their ideas, improve current system design patterns and build successful companies, which will inevitably (hopefully) require hiring personnel to keep competing, bringing entire software engineering market to a newly balanced state.

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

#575

Post by davidvartanian »

mirsadm wrote: post #317
20k wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And now you have no idea how any of the code works AI writes bad software by virtue of it being written by the AI, not you. No actual team member understands what's going on with the code. You can't interrogate the AI for its decision making. It doesn't understand the architecture its built. There's nobody you can ask about why anything is built the way it is - it just exists Its interesting watching people forget th…

My own observation is that the initial boost to productivity results in massive crippling technical debt.

That's just because everyone is misusing AI. If you ask AI to do a job and you have no idea what it did, you lost ownership, which means you're asking to be replaced. You need to own the task. If you fully delegate your task to anyone else or to AI, you no longer know what's going on. AI does not necessarily produce more tech debt, but AI might do things you don't expect because it lacks context and specificity to perform accurately.

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

#576

Post by HWR_14 »

Ekaros wrote: post #265
HWR_14 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatever you want to say about other companies, Amazon (and Meta) is quite willing to spend many years pouring billions into technology they think will pay off later.

Looking at VR and Meta. They absolutely can be wrong. So even after investing what seems to be enough, there might not be any payoff.

There may be no payoff in the end, but it won't be for lack of resources thrown at the problem or investor impatience.

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

#577

Post by HWR_14 »

sdf2df wrote: post #483
Ekaros wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at VR and Meta. They absolutely can be wrong. So even after investing what seems to be enough, there might not be any payoff.

And the investors were correct to crush the stock price down to 90-odd dollars. Which finally forced Zuck to face the music. This place is full of bozos.

Did Zuck change because the stock price went down or he was dissatisfied with the lack of progress/adoption?

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

#578

Post by wek »

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'm excited about Agents helping many tiny teams succeed. There has been hype around the "who will be the first solo founder to a billion" but I am hoping for many small teams to succeed and I think this is the more interesting story.

I agree its in the 2-7 person range.

The challenge for those teams is distribution. They will crush at building, but I'm not sure how they can crack distribution. Some will, but maybe there is a way to help thousands of small teams distribute.

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

#579

Post by fnordpiglet »

camdenreslink wrote: post #471
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm very confused about this. Salary is only one portion of your total compensation. The vast majority of tech companies offer equity in a company. The two ways to increase the FMV of your equity is: increase your equity stake or increase the value of the total equity available. Hitting the same goals with fewer people means your run rate is lower, which increases the value of your equity (the FMV prices in lower COG…

Equity is negotiable just like salary, and if supply of developer labor increases with the same or less demand, you'll get less equity just like you will get less salary.

They’re also betting they’re the P99 engineer. Most do. 98% aren’t.

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

#580

Post by 8note »

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…

Consistently over time, ive gotten really bad results trying to make anything with python using claude, so that might be it.

i think ive done some python on each major model release, not necessarily woth claude code, but it feels like if it touches python, it gets stupid, quickly.

and not just for the python, it stays stupid when it wants to say, write html. for a tiny data labeling tool, it turned off user select, for instance

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