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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

#91

Post by sdf2df »

silentkat wrote: post #84
righthand wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience it is now twice the amount of merge requests as a follow-up appears to correct any bugs no one reviewed in the first merge request.

I’m at a big tech company. They proudly stated more productivity measures in commits (already nonsense). 47% more commits, 17% less time per commit. Meaning 128% more time spent coding. Burning us out and acting like the AI slop is “unlocking” productivity. There’s some neat stuff, don’t get me wrong. But every additional tool so far has started strong but then always falls over. Always. Right now there’s this “orche…

Lol its gonna take longer than it should for this to play out.

Sunk cost fallacy is very real, for all involved. Especially the model producers and their investors.

Sunk cost fallacy is also real for dev's who are now giving up how they used to work - they've made a sunk investment in learning to use LLMs etc. Hence the 'there's no going back' comments that crop up on here.

As I said in this thread - anyone who can think straight - Im referring to those who adhere to fundamental economic principles - can see what's going on from a mile away.

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

#92

Post by enraged_camel »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #82

I'm working on a project right now, that is heavily informed by AI. I wouldn't even try it, if I didn't have the help. It's a big job. However, I can't imagine vibe-coders actually shipping anything. I really have to ride herd on the output from the LLM. Sometimes, the error is PEBCAK, because I erred, when I prompted, and that can lead to very subtle issues. I no longer review every line, but I also have not yet got…

>> I no longer review every line, but I also have not yet gotten to the point, where I can just "trust" the LLM.

Same here. This is also why I haven't been able to switch to Claude Code, despite trying to multiple times. I feel like its mode of operation is much more "just trust to generated code" than Cursor, which let's you review and accept/reject diffs with a very obvious and easy to use UX.

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

#94

Post by sdf2df »

majormajor wrote: post #86
vkou wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This seems unlikely. It is absolutely likely. The hiring market for juniors is fucked atm.

FAANG realizing that they can't make infinite money by expanding into every possible market while paying FAANG salaries for low-scale-CRUD-prototyping roles has a lot to do with this, and that started a bit earlier than the AI wave. Lots going on right now in the market, but IMO that retreat is the biggest one still. Many companies were basically on a path of infinite hiring between ~2011 and ~2022 until the rapid CO…

You can't be a manager without anyone to manage.

There's a lot of perverse interests and incentives at play.

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

#95

Post by whateveracct »

bandrami wrote: post #46
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.

The dev team is committing more than they used to. A lot, in fact, judging from the logs. But it's not showing up as a faster cadence of getting me software to administer. Again, maybe that will change.

I think they feel more productive but aren't actually.

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

#96

Post by httpz »

tl2do wrote: post #20

From my experience as a software engineer, doubling my productivity hasn’t reduced my workload. My output per hour has gone up, but expectations and requirements have gone up just as fast. Software development is effectively endless work, and AI has mostly compressed timelines rather than reduced total demand.

There's a famous quote by a cyclist, "It never gets easier, you just go faster"

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

#97

Post by kdheiwns »

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.

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 gamedev. It's about as useful as a guy who read some documentation for an engine a couple years ago and kind of remembers it but not quite and makes lots of mistakes. The best it can do is point me in the general direction I need to go, but it'll hallucinate basic functions and mess up any sort of logic.

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

#98

Post by applfanboysbgon »

keeda wrote: post #87
thewebguyd wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here, more or less, in the ops world. Yeah, I use AI but I can't honestly say it's massively improved my productivity or drastically changed my job in any way other than the emails I get from the other managers at my work are now clearly written by AI. I can turn out some scripts a little bit quicker, or find an answer to something a little quicker than googling, but I'm still waiting on others most of the time,…

> ... but I'm still waiting on others most of the time, the overall company processes haven't improved or gotten more efficient. The same blockers as always still exist. And that's the key problem, isn't it? I maintain current organizations have the "wrong shape" to fully leverage AI. Imagine instead of the scope of your current ownership, you own everything your team or your whole department owns. Consider what that…

> Imagine instead of

> Now imagine

> Imagine what that would do

Imagine if your grandma had wheels! She'd be a bicycle. Now imagine she had an engine. She could be a motorcycle! Unfortunately for grandma, she lives in reality and is not actually a motorcycle, which would be cool as hell. Our imagination can only take us so far.

To more substantively reply to your longer linked comment: your hypothesis is that people spend as little as 10% of time coding and the other 90% of time in meetings, but that if they could code more, they wouldn't need to meet other people because they could do all the work of an entire team themselves[1]. The problem with your hypothesis is that you take for granted that LLMs actually allow people to do the work of an entire team themselves, and that it is merely bureacracy holding them back. There have been absolutely zero indicators that this is true. No productivity studies of individual developers tackling tasks show a 10x speedup; results tend to be anywhere from +20% to minus 20%. We aren't seeing amazing software being built by individual developers using LLMs. There is still only one Fabrice Bellard in the world, even though if your premise could escape the containment zone of imagination anyone should be able to be a Bellard on their own time with the help of LLMs.

[1] Also, this is basically already true without LLMs. It is the reason startups are able to disrupt corporate behemoths. If you have just a small handful of people who spend the majority of their work time writing code (by hand! No LLMs required!), they can build amazing new products that outcompete products funded by trillion-dollar entities. Your observation of more coding = less meetings required in the first place has an element of truth to it, but not because LLMs are related to it in any particular way.

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

#99

Post by stevenhuang »

sdf2df wrote: post #51
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 will personally say right now... its not gonna change lol. People who actually know how to think can see it a mile away.

It's telling you feel the need to create a throw away to voice this opinion.

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

#100

Post by majormajor »

sdf2df wrote: post #94
majormajor wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FAANG realizing that they can't make infinite money by expanding into every possible market while paying FAANG salaries for low-scale-CRUD-prototyping roles has a lot to do with this, and that started a bit earlier than the AI wave. Lots going on right now in the market, but IMO that retreat is the biggest one still. Many companies were basically on a path of infinite hiring between ~2011 and ~2022 until the rapid CO…

You can't be a manager without anyone to manage. There's a lot of perverse interests and incentives at play.

Manager gigs at FAANG are pretty rough right now in my network, you can't be a manager when the higher-ups notice your group isn't a big revenue generator and so doesn't justify new hires and bigger org charts, and cutting the middlemen is the easiest way to juice the ROI numbers. If the ICs that now have 1/3 the managerial structure and have to wear more hats don't turn things around, oh well, it's not a critical area anyway, just nuke it.

You can be an exec with 10-20% fewer random products/departments in your company, and maybe 40% fewer middle managers in the rest of them. You might even get a nice bonus for cutting all that cost! Bonuses for growth, bonuses for "efficiency" when the macro vibe shifts. Trim sails and carry on.

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