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The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

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Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#861

Post by ccorcos »

jajko wrote: post #640
droopyEyelids wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they're fixing all the little bugs that should give everyone much more time to think about product design and do the research.

Or a lot of small fixes all over the place. Yet in reality we dont see this anywhere, not sure what exactly that means. Maybe overall complexity creeping up rolls over any small gains, or devs are becoming more lazy and just copy paste llms output without a serious look at it? My company didnt even adapt or allow use of llms in any way for anything so far (private client data security is more important than any produ…

It’s also possible that all of these gains fixing bugs are simply improving infrastructure and stability rather than finding new customers and opening up new markets.

Having worked on software infrastructure, it’s a thankless job. You’re most heroic work has little visibility and the result is that nothing catastrophic happened.

So maybe products will have better reliability and fewer bugs? And we all know there’s crappy software that makes tons of money, so there isn’t necessarily a strong correlation.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#862

Post by asadotzler »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #544
tdeck wrote: post #416

Maybe someone can help me wrap my head around this in a different way, because here's how I see it. If these tools are really making people so productive, shouldn't it be painfully obvious in companies' output? For example, if these AI coding tools were an amazing productivity boost in the end, we'd expect to see software companies shipping features and fixes faster than ever before. There would be a huge burst in in…

Regarding the impact of LLMs on non-programming tasks, check out this one: https://www.ft.com/content/4f20fbb9-a10f-4a08-9a13-efa1b55dd... > The bank [Goldman Sachs] now has 11,000 engineers among its 46,000 employees, according to [CEO David] Solomon, and is using AI to help draft public filing documents. > The work of drafting an S1 — the initial registration prospectus for an IPO — might have taken a six-person te…

Claims by companies with an interest in AI without supporting documentation are just that, claims, and probably more PR and marketing than anything.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#863

Post by asadotzler »

strangattractor wrote: post #511
tdeck wrote: post #416

Maybe someone can help me wrap my head around this in a different way, because here's how I see it. If these tools are really making people so productive, shouldn't it be painfully obvious in companies' output? For example, if these AI coding tools were an amazing productivity boost in the end, we'd expect to see software companies shipping features and fixes faster than ever before. There would be a huge burst in in…

Most significant technology takes almost a generation to be fully adopted. I think it is unlikely we are seeing the full effect of LLM's at the moment. Content producers are blocking scrapers of their sites to prevent AI companies from using their content. I would not assume that AI is either inevitable or on a easy path to adoption. AI certainly isn't very useful if what it "knows" is out of date.

In 10 years with the same amount of money and time that's been pumped into AI, still a financial black hole, we had the entire broadband internet build out completed and the internet was responsible for adding a trillion dollars a year to the global economy.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#864

Post by leptons »

yellow_lead wrote: post #816
leptons wrote: post #809

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's happening now is similar to what happened during the 2000's "dot-com bubble burst". Having barely survived that time, I saw this one coming and people told me I was crazy when I told them to hold on to their jobs and quit job-hopping, because the job-hopper is very often the first one to get laid off. In 2000 I was moved cities and I had a job lined-up at a company that was run by my friends, I had about 15 go…

Those are some great friends. Aside from job hoppers, I noticed there are a lot of company loyalists getting canned too though (i.e worked at MSFT 10 years)

It's not exactly the same this time around, the dot-com bubble was a bit different, but both then and now were preceded by huge hiring bubbles and valuations that were stupid. Now it's a little different 25 years later, tech has advanced and AI means cutting the fat out of a lot of companies, even Microsoft.

AI is somewhat creating a similar bubble now, because investors still have money, and the current AI efforts are way over-hyped. 6.5 billion paid to aquihire Jony Ive is a symptom of that.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#865

Post by [deleted] »

bootsmann wrote: post #634
simonsarris wrote: post #465

I think the real white collar bloodbath is that the end of ZIRP was the end of infinite software job postings, and the start of layoffs. I think its easy to now point to AI, but it seems like a canard for the huge thing that already happened. just look at this: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1JmOr In terms of magnitude the effect of this is just enormous and still being felt, and never recovered to pre-2020 lev…

[flagged]

[deleted]

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#866

Post by Teever »

topspin wrote: post #475
tdeck wrote: post #416

Maybe someone can help me wrap my head around this in a different way, because here's how I see it. If these tools are really making people so productive, shouldn't it be painfully obvious in companies' output? For example, if these AI coding tools were an amazing productivity boost in the end, we'd expect to see software companies shipping features and fixes faster than ever before. There would be a huge burst in in…

"shouldn't it be painfully obvious in companies' output?" No. The bottleneck isn't intellectual productivity. The bottleneck is a legion of other things; regulation, IP law, marketing, etc. The executive email writers and meeting attenders have a swarm of business considerations ricocheting around in their heads in eternal battle with each other. It takes a lot of supposedly brilliant thinking to safely monetize all…

Maybe in some industries and for some companies and their products but not all.

Like let's take operating systems as an example. If there are great productivity gains from LLMs while aren't companies like Apple, Google and MS shipping operating systems with vastly less bugs and cleaning up backlogged user feature requests?

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#868

Post by danenania »

wcfrobert wrote: post #811
danenania wrote: post #776

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If AI makes everyone 10x engineers, you can 2x the productive output while reducing headcount by 5x. Why wouldn't you just 10x the productive output instead?

I don't think it would be trivial to increase demand by 10x (or even 2x) that quickly. Eventually, a publicly traded company will get a bad quarter, at which point it's much easier to just reduce the number of employees. In both scenarios, there's no need for any new-hire.

I think there’s always demand for more software and more features. Have you ever seen a team without a huge backlog? The demand is effectively infinite.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#869

Post by sfblah »

jatora wrote: post #633

While I agree that the current 'bloodbath' narrative is all hype, I'm honestly confused by a lot of the sentiment i see on here towards AI. Namely the dismissal of continual improvement and the rampant whistling past the graveyard attitude of what is coming. It is confusing because many of the dismissals come from programmers, who are unequivocally the prime beneficiaries of genAI capability as it stands. I work as a…

You're right, of course. Most of this thread is some sort of weird motivated reasoning by people who are terrified of the reality of what lies ahead. I work at a top-10 tech company. We've stopped hiring junior talent, and it's 100% because of AI. I'm something like 2x more productive since using AI. We're now deploying agentic AI systems to further reduce headcount. The actual bloodbath will happen when there's any kind of financial pressure on the company (a recession).

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#870

Post by ta12653421 »

aianus wrote: post #414
absurdo wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically yeah. You live in a world of layered servitude and, short of a financial windfall that hoists you up for some time, you’re basically guaranteed to work your entire life, and grow old, frail and poor. This isn’t a joke, it’s reality for many people that’s hidden from us to keep us deluded. Similar to my other mini-rant, I don’t have any valid answers to the problem at hand. Just acknowledging how fucked thin…

No, it's quite easy to make $1mm in a rich country and move to a poorer country and chill if you so desire.

++1

Fun fact what most people ignore: There have been around ~7000 people on Mount Everest - while the US alone has around 300.000 / 350.000 people earning more than 1 million USD a year.

So - its clear: Is more easier to become an "income-millionaire" than to climb Mount Everest! :-)

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