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IBM tripling entry-level jobs after finding the limits of AI adoption

fortune.com

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Re: IBM tripling entry-level jobs after finding the limits of AI adoption

#71

Post by williamcotton »

Insanity wrote: post #33
Nextgrid wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that bad? You write better code when you actually understand the business domain and the requirement. It's much easier to understand it when you get it direct from the source than filtered down through dozens of product managers and JIRA tickets.

Not sure why this is being downvoted. It’s spot on imo. Engineers who don’t want to understand the domain and the customers won’t be as effective in an engineering organization as those who do. It always baffles me when someone wants to only think about the code as if it exists in a vacuum. (Although for junior engineers it’s a bit more acceptable than for senior engineers).

Isn't it a bit of both? When it comes to noticing whether or not code will be a security nightmare, a performance nightmare, an architectural nightmare, etc, haven't experienced developers already learned to watch out for these issues?

Re: IBM tripling entry-level jobs after finding the limits of AI adoption

#74

Post by jnaina »

dgxyz wrote: post #50
layer8 wrote: post #34

The title is a bit misleading. Reading the article, the argument seems to be that entry-level applicants (are expected to) have the highest AI literacy, so they want them to drive AI adoption.

Sounds like the first step of a galactic scale fuck up

"Galactic scale" and "Fuck Up" are on brand for IBM.

Re: IBM tripling entry-level jobs after finding the limits of AI adoption

#76

Post by slopinthebag »

You know when someone is singing the praises about AI and they get asked "if you're so much more productive with AI, what have you built with it"? Well I think a bunch of companies are asking this same question to their employees and realising that the productivity gains they are betting on were overhyped.

LLM's can be a very useful tool and will probably lead to measurable productivity increases in the future, at their current state they are not capable of replacing most knowledge workers. Remember, even computers as a whole didn't measurably impact the economy for years after their adoption. The real world is a messy place and hard to predict!

Re: IBM tripling entry-level jobs after finding the limits of AI adoption

#77

Post by giantg2 »

_heimdall wrote: post #68
layer8 wrote: post #34

The title is a bit misleading. Reading the article, the argument seems to be that entry-level applicants (are expected to) have the highest AI literacy, so they want them to drive AI adoption.

At least today, I expect this will fail horribly. The challenge today isn't AI literacy in my experience, its domain knowledge required to keep LLMs on the rails.

People literate in AI, but inexperienced in all other facts. What could go wrong!

Re: IBM tripling entry-level jobs after finding the limits of AI adoption

#78

Post by themafia »

Nextgrid wrote: post #21
alienbaby wrote: post #19

"software engineers will spend less time on routine coding—and more on interacting with customers" Ahh, what could possibly go wrong!

Why is that bad? You write better code when you actually understand the business domain and the requirement. It's much easier to understand it when you get it direct from the source than filtered down through dozens of product managers and JIRA tickets.

You write more efficient software for the task.

Having had to support many of these systems for sales or automation or video production pipelines as soon as you dig under the covers you realize they are a hot mess of amateur code that _barely_ functions as long as you don't breath on it too hard.

Software engineering is in an entirely nascent stage. That the industry could even put forward ideas like "move fast and break things" is extreme evidence of this. We know how to handle this challenge of deep technical knowledge interfacing with domain specific knowledge in almost every other industry. Coders were once cowboys, now we're in the Upton Sinclair version of the industry, and soon we'll enter into regular honest professional engineering like every other new technology ultimately has.

Re: IBM tripling entry-level jobs after finding the limits of AI adoption

#79

Post by cootsnuck »

int0x29 wrote: post #25
Nextgrid wrote: post #16

Bold move. Not because it's wrong, but because it risks initiating the collapse of the AI bubble and the whole "AI is gonna replace all skilled work, any day now, just give us another billion". Seems like IBM can no longer wait for that day.

Is IBM invested big in LLMs? I don't get the impression they have much to lose there.

They said they're going to invest like $150B over five years. Which is quite a bit smaller than other big tech firms.

They have their Granite family of models, but they're small language models so surely significantly less resources are going into them.

Re: IBM tripling entry-level jobs after finding the limits of AI adoption

#80

Post by AlexCoventry »

cruffle_duffle wrote: post #51
MikeNotThePope wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just run sub agents in parallel. Yesterday I used Codex for the first time yesterday. I spun up 350,640 agents and got 10 years of experience in 15 minutes.

New metric: agent-hours spent on a task. Or so we measure in tokens. Clearly more tokens burned == more experience right?

There are actually books which recommend that organizations track employee tokens burned as a proxy for AI adoption. Surprised me a bit.
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