>> I keep trying to get it to review my personal credit card statements. I have my own budget tracking app that I made, and sometimes there's discrepancies. Resolving this by hand is annoying, and an LM should be able to do it: scrape the PDF, compare the records to mine, find the delta.

This is a perfect example of what people don't understand (or on HN keep forgetting). LLMs do NOT follow instructions, they predict the next word in text and spit it out. The process is somewhat random, and certainly does not include an interpreter (executive function?) to execute instructions - even natural language instructions.

Yeah the boring part is definitely true. It is a good path to a reasonably high paycheque with bulletproof job security. To take your Enron example - even when it turned into a smoking crater and all business stopped they still had accountants working on the wreckage years later.

Very nearly went programming (now do that as a hobby). Still not sure how I feel about that choice, especially around mental stimulation. But if we're about to hit a recession/depression then it's not a bad place to be. The space I'm in has future revenues locked in for 10+ years.

It should also be noted that there are some pretty big flaws in the analysis. They mention "the distribution of firms using ADP services does not exactly match the distribution of firms across the broader US economy," but make no attempt to adjust their analysis for it. They also drop 30% of the data for which there is no job title recorded. With such a skewed sample, it's hard to tell how the analysis is supposed to generalize.

This seems to assign a cause without merit other than AI is the buzzword of the day.

Receptionist jobs down.. this has been the case for a while, and does include some AI, but AVR and general speech recognition and matching has gotten pretty good for a while, I'd say AI is half a step back.

Translators, maybe AI, but again, speech recognition in general is pretty good and not strictly an AI thing... but I'll give that one credit.

Software Engineers, maybe it's more about the (I don't even know the right current FAANG acronym anymore) companies that have laid off tens of thousands in the past few years and largely replaced (if at all) them with either contract or h1b workers? Only to grow short term margins on already profitable companies.

Yeah - classifying an invoice into building rent or say printer ink it'll have some success. So we'll see some of it at the very bottom end.

>LLMs can't do arithmetic or count.

Yes. The fancy copilot stuff does use pandas/python to look at excel files so stuff like add up a table does work sometimes, but the parameters going into the pandas code need to make sense too in the garbage in garbage out sense. The base LLM doesn't seem to understand the grid nature of Excel so it ends up looking at the wrong cells or misunderstands how headings relate to the numbers etc.

It'll get better but there doesn't seem to be the equivalent of "use LLM to write boilerplate code" in this world.

Nothing super sophisticated - the key part is telling it the categories I want. It seems really good at sticking to that out of the box and seems to do 2-3 items for each category.

```Summarize today's news stories in concise bullet points focusing on relevance and clarity. Organize the summary into the following sections:

* World Events: Major global developments and international headlines

* Geopolitics: Political tensions, alliances or diplomatic events

* London: Local news and developments specific to London

* Supply chains: etc ```

One thing I've had ZERO luck is making it look for forward looking economic indicators. No idea why but it doesn't work at all

What I described is a setup that DOES have pandas & python access and uses it heavily to figure out the excel files. Which is neat, but the output is still wrong

Which drives me a little crazy. Every LLM worth its salt should just... MCP or whatever the arithmetic of any question, I assume the good ones do.

> There are a lot of jobs which don't require meticulous accuracy - coming up with marketing plans, press releases, writing HR policies, reading and summarising reports, etc.

I'm sorry but you think marketing plans, press releases, HR policies and report summaries do not need to be accurate? What sort of organization do you work with??

As a US-based developer I do not feel threatened by the "cheap" offshore developers I encounter. I've repeatedly been hired to clean up after offshore developers who:

* lied about their capabilities/experience to get the job,

* failed to grok requirements through the language barrier,

* were unable to fix critical bugs in their own code base,

* committed buggy chatgpt output verbatim,

* and could not be held liable because their firm is effectively beyond the reach of the US legal system.

In a couple of projects I've seen a single US based developer replace an entire offshore team, deliver a superior result, and provide management with a much more responsive communication loop, in 1% of the billable hours. The difference in value is so stark that one client even fired the VP who'd lead the offshoring boondoggle.

Software talent is simply not as fungible as some MBAs would like to believe.

> what stops the employer from hiring someone who lives in a cheaper place?

I've worked with remote workers from around the world. Let me preface by saying there are of course exceptions but:

What I've found is that most often Americans exhibit self-starting and creativity. What I mean by that is non-us workers are great if you give them a specific task, even a really hard task.

But if you give them a nebulous problem, or worse, a business outcome, they tend to perform much more poorly. And I rarely see non-americans say something like "I think our customers would like it if we added X to the product, can I work on that?".

I don't think it's because Americans are better at this -- I think it's cultural. America has a much higher risk tolerance than the rest of the world. Failing is considered a good thing in the USA. And the USA is much more entrepreneurial than the rest of the world.

These two things combined create a culture difference that makes a business difference.

Additionally, what I've found is that the exceptions tend to move here because their risk taking is much more acceptable here (or they are risk takers willing to move across the world, hard to say which way the causation goes).

I'm one of those offshore people that live in a cheaper place and works remotely for a US co.

The majority of people in the company are still in the US, and even for the East coast, the timezones are just annoying to work around sometimes. Either I need to do late days, or they have to do uber early mornings/SUPER late days, don't even get me started on West coast where the hours basically never match. And I'm in the closest timezone I can be for the US.

And there's also a cultural aspect to it. I simply work differently to how the US bosses expect, because my employer has to respect worker's rights if they want to hire people in the EU unless they hire them as contractors (they still have many protections in that case though). I clock off at exactly 17:00, I never answer messages outside working hours, I don't do overtime or anything resembling it etc. And yes, they don't pay me the same as I would in the US, but it's really not that much lower, plus life is just cheaper, even here in the Netherlands. I get paid less relatively, but from what I can tell other that the people getting paid obscene amounts, my quality of life is higher than most of my US counterparts

I've noticed my US colleagues are much more willing to waste away their lives for their employer as well, even if there's no real expectation for them to do so, and the business obviously prefers those kind of employees over the ones like me.

So there's still plenty of reasons to keep hiring US-based devs, from cultural to logistical. Maybe you guys should work on getting some actual worker protections first, though...

As some have said, it's not about being superior. Common language, background, maybe overlaps in education, and avoiding cultures like those at Indian offshore companies where there is a lot of churn, maybe 1 Sr person you "hired" really farming the work out to multiple Jr people.

Timezone overlap is also a big one.

It’s amusing to see these comments as if American tech companies don’t already have offices all over the world.

Even a mid-size tech company I worked for had over a dozen small offices around the world to collect as many qualified developers as they could. They had some remote work too.

Still hired a lot of Americans. Thinking that remote work will be the end of American workers has been the driving force behind outsourcing pushes for decades, but it hasn’t worked that way.

As an outsider I think Americans still have the upper hand in, for lack of a better term, work ethic.

A lot of that stems from a lack of job security. Stuff like suddenly being locked out of your work email/slack or being escorted out of company premises is largely unheard of in the rest of the world.

As a point of comparison: I'm a contractor based in a popular outsourcing destination. My contract is extended well over a month before it expires and I would need to do something particularly harmful to be let go just like that, as our client values continuity of services and will hold the agency accountable should that suffer.

Over here if a job listing mentions "US client" it typically means considerably more work for considerably more pay. Some go for that, others opt for more relaxed roles. I can't imagine having US jobs as the only option.

You’ll get downvoted but in my experience, which may not be representative of the entire population, this is true.

A mid-size US tech company I know well went fully remote after a lot of insistence from the workforce, prior to the pandemic they were fully in office.

Soon enough they started hiring remotely from EU, and now the vast majority of their technical folks are from there. The only US workers remaining are mostly GTM/sales. I personally heard the founder saying “why should we pay US comp when we can get extremely good talent in EU for less than half the cost”. EU workers, on average, also tend to not switch job as frequently, so that’s a further advantage for the company.

Once you adapt to remote-only, you can scoop some amazing talent in Poland/Ukraine/Serbia/etc for $50k a year.

It doesn't matter what they promote, remote labor is an economic reality. It's not as if employers are going to forget they can offshore your job because you show up to the office 8am sharp every morning.

The moment they can replace you for cheaper, they will, whether you insist on working remotely or not.

It's not intellectual superiority. They've already offshored all the other jobs they can. If they could offshore my job, they would. But it's very hard to find reliable talent anywhere, much less offshore. It is easier to find the talent here, and there's more of it. Then there's the complexity of hiring, the timezones, language barrier, and all the other small complications that add up.

Once you have world-class experts all over the developing world, my job might disappear. But you need experience to get there, which they aren't getting, because they aren't here. It's privilege 101: if you have it, you get more of it; if you don't have it, you don't get any of it. We're very privileged to be high-value domestic workers.

And by the way, remote work has been a thing here for decades, yet the calculation hasn't changed. Our remote jobs are still safe.

The trend of offshoring came and went nearly two decades ago.

Time zone differences, language barriers and cultural differences proved insurmountable.

Hybrid remote seems to work quite well, on the other hand.

And being "superior" doesn't necessarily mean extraordinary coding skills. The vast majority of code to be written doesn't require that. What it requires however is a combination of common sense and good understanding of the underlying business. This is in short supply in many of the locations the jobs are being offshored to. But let's be honest, it was also on short supply in the corporate IT departments being offshored, though not quite to the same degree.

Yes. I think American programmers are at a local optimum for combining ingenuity and work ethic. You can get more ingenuity vs work ethic or the other way around elsewhere, but the American blend seems to be best.

In an ideal world, we'd have some sort of central system that businesses are bound by, in the interest of the common good, to employ domestic workers.

But alas, such a system is fundamentally impossible. Physics just won't allow it.

That's my argument against looking for a 100% remote job. Even if the company is happy with you now, eventually there will be new management that sees your job as low-hanging fruit for expense reduction.

Being in the office won't stop offshoring anyway.

They've been trying to offshore the work for most of a century now. There are still millions of software engineers in the US.

I have no comment on your strawmanning about programmers thinking they're geniuses or something.

But I've yet to meet an accountant who puts in their 40 hours a week and somehow manages to grow their backlog rather than shrink it.

Whereas bad programmers who will do that exist in spades.

Clearly the two professions are not identical.

That said, I've had two mind bogglingly bad accountants on my payroll in the past who made $100K+ mistakes if we hadn't caught them and fired the fuck out of those dumbasses. One was American and one was Filipino.

When I was on projects with India, churn there was very much higher than from EU sources.

You're getting downvoted, but IMO what you're saying is exactly true, and I've seen it happen.

In my experience, pre-2015 or so, offshoring was limited in its utility. Communication was a bitch because videoconferencing from everyday laptops wasn't quite there yet, and a lot of the favored offshoring centers like India had horrible time zone overlap with the US. And perhaps most importantly, companies as a whole weren't used to fully supporting remote colleagues.

Now, though, if I interact with the majority of my colleagues over Zoom/Teams/Meet anyway, what difference does it matter where they're sitting? I've worked with absolutely phenomenal developers from Argentina, Poland and Ukraine, and there was basically no difference logistically between working with them and American colleagues. Even the folks in Eastern Europe shifted their day slightly later so that we would get about 4 hours of overlap time, which was plenty of time for communication and collaboration, and IMO made folks even more productive because it naturally enforced "collaboration hours" vs. "heads down hours".

I understand why people like remote, but I agree, US devs pushing for remote should understand they're going to be competing against folks making less than half their salaries.

Regulation is for when businesses cannot regulate themselves.

In many larger companies also, nationstate threats and national security are a trending issue.

If you deal with a lot of PII, outsourcing your data processing pipelines to China isn't going to fly with Congress when you get subpoena'ed for a round with Hawley.

I mean, while this might be true, Europe is full to the brim of developers who speak fluent English, and yet cost maybe a third of their US counterparts. Programming is really quite far from being a global market.

You think having a HQ in US would prevent a company from opening an office in another country?

>>Do those people really believe they're the most intellectually superior to the rest of the world? If a job can be done purely remotely, what stops the employer from hiring someone who lives in a cheaper place?

capitalism dictates that a capable remote person will not keep working for a single employer, as it will be a waste of time.

he/she will work for multiple employers (overemployed and such), maximizing earnings, thus it will constantly keep a gap between in-office and remote workers

Oh look, another person who thinks engineers are commodities, especially in a field as loosely defined and unregulated as software engineering.

They always ask “if a job can be done remote why not just hire a foreigner in a cheap place?” and never ask “if the foreigner was so good as the American engineer why wouldn’t they be getting paid the same as the American?”

It’s like they think companies are dumb and there is some undiscovered engineering arbitrage opportunity waiting to be tapped that will end the high 6 figure salaries of American software engineers forever.

And yet, since the 90s, software engineer salaries only go up. Millions of Indians flood the foreign markets, but American tech salaries only go up. Covid hits and everyone goes remote, but the salaries only go up. They always go up. American tech holds a supremacy over the world that you will likely not see the end of in your lifetime. There is so much money, so much risk taking, so much drive to dominate, other countries are generations behind.

But hey keep doing what you’re doing. Maybe you’ll save a couple bucks while your competitors gobble up the market with far better engineering talent. Not “equivalent” talent: better talent..

If remote work is cheaper for the owners, then why are the workers the ones promoting it?

And some jobs, offshored or not, are just human frontend to datacenters.

> AI potentially solves many of those challenges

Isn't it exactly the opposite?

Language barriers: LLMs are language models and all of the major ones are built in English, speaking that language fluently is surely a prerequisite to interacting with them efficiently?

Knowledge: famously LLMs "know" nothing and are making things up all of the time and sometimes approximate "knowledge"

I think you are conflating 2 things. AI could be going after new entry level jobs in software engineering. I am not a professional engineer but an accountant by trade (I like writing software as a hobby lol) but this article looks like evidence that IIT grads will have a harder time getting these jobs that AI is attacking. My comment rests on the fact that the report doesn't really reconcile with AI destroying entry level jobs for accounting, but rather this type of work being offshored to APAC/India. There are still new COEs being built up for mid cap companies for shared services in India to this day and I don't mean Cognizant and Wipro, but rather the end customer being the company in question with really slick offices there.

Maybe for software engineering but not for accounting. I've had to interface with many offshored teams and interviewed at places where accounting ops were in COE centers in EU/APAC.

Do you have any actual evidence that supports the headline? The article does not. It simply mentions 13% decline in relative employment and then blames AI with no actual evidence. Given what I know about the current state of AI and off-shoring, I think off-shoring is a million times more likely to be the culprit than AI.

The entire account department at my firm has moved to Poland. That’s nice for them, but as a US citizen it does mean the writing is on the wall. On the plus side I learned a fun fact. Malgorzata is a more common name than I had ever imagined.

IT help was outsourced to India years ago. I expect them to be replaced with AI the minute their government stops handing the firm big contracts because I’ve never spoken to anyone from that group who was actually better than a chat bot.

Have you seen how the profession has worked post SOX? Did you know 2016 was the peak year where you had accounting students enrolled in uni in the states? I want you to think laterally about this.

Where is the evidence for this? Who is "applying pressure on the labour market"?

The current system is not long term stable, and poor accounting is part of the reason more people don't know that. Even worse accounting would speed up the decline.

> Likewise for the legal profession, if all judges made twice the number of mistakes, how much would the world suffer?

Is this hyperbole? It seems like the real question being asked here is "would the world be worse off without deterministic checks and balances", which I think most people would agree is true, no?

Then you would have to think twice about the company you may be giving money to (ie the stock market and private bank loans). That's the whole objective of this. Every company is going to need an accountant in one way or another and you don't really need to follow strict GAAP for management requirements (what else is EBIDTA for if anything?), but it's something completely different than saying: I made x dollars and spent y dollars, here is what I have and what I owe, please give me money.

At the end of the day it is a question of convenience/standards, if GAAP didn't exist maybe firms could use a modified accrual standard that is wholly compliant with tax reporting and that's it.

I got out of school 15 years ago so its been a while now, but at that time there were a ton of junior roles.

I got a CS bachelors from a decent state school, nothing fancy, and everyone I kept in touch with had found an entry level role pretty quickly after graduation.

I did do an internship and had an offer from them, but the psy was pretty low and I really didn't want to move where they were. It was a bit stressful turning that down early senior year without a backup yet, but I ended up with quite a few interviews and an offer before graduation.

It took me ~2 years after graduation to find a development job, which was from a "can you code HTML by hand?" classified on craigslist.

That's funny because I've been rejected from Booz Allen so many times lol

The US economy is not in a recession, at least by the standard definition of recession.

TikTok and video games are also a more viable path to making $100,000 a month than any other professional path.

No it can't replace graphical designers except in low stakes projects. Companies won't risk their projects on cheap AI with other larger costs on the line.

I could consolidate those 5 with a trained chimp, but it wouldnt mean that chimps are about to overthrow mankind.

Eventually, maybe. Right now I see a lot more people wasting time with AI in search of these promised efficiencies. A lot of companies reducing headcount are simply hiding the fact that they are deprioritizing projects or reducing their overall scope because the economy is shit (I know, I know - but it feels worse than reported IMO) and that's the right business cycle thing to do. If you're dramatic and take the DOGE/MAGA approach to management, just fire everyone and the important issues will become obvious where investment is actually needed. It's a headcount 'zero based budget' played out IRL. The truth is, there is a lot of fat to be cut from most large companies and I feel like it's the current business trend to be ruthless with the blade, especially since you have AI as a rose colored scapegoat.

The way I like to describe it is that you can't go from 1 developer to 0 thanks to AI, but you might be able to go from 10 to 9. Although not sure what the exact numbers are.

For cost centers, maybe. If your development team or org is a revenue generator with a backlog, I don't see why the team would be trimmed.

No, it does not stand, because you think linearly. Companies can't simply drop 33% of employees because there is competition. If competition uses both humans and AI they will get more value from both. No AI has sufficient autonomy or capability to be held accountable for its mistakes.

There is less upswing in reducing costs than in increasing profits. Companies want to increase profits actually, not just reduce costs which will be eaten away by competition. In a world where everyone has the same AIs, human still make the difference.

It also means that with lower costs your service becomes more attractive and maybe attracts more customers, so might even grow the number of workers.

This is known as Jevons Paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

there hasn’t been a single study that concludes any benefits to AI yet.

Either it’s a cover for something or people are a bit too overzealous to believe in gains that haven’t materialised yet.

Have you ever been at a company where the limiting factor was finding stuff to build? I've never seen one personally. If there's any productivity increase, they'll just build even more stuff.

(And that's if we agree about a 50% increase I'd say 5% is already generous)

I know I have dozens of tasks like that but I can’t seem to think of them when I’m wondering what to do with AI!

gnu parallel + pdfgrepper saved my ass too many times

This is what HasanAbi mentioned the other day. Betting on AI to do a job (especially if it fails to replace it) is a double economic whammy. You get rid of original people who did the job, and then you don't have funding for other things (also includes people) because you need to recover the AI costs.

Collective delusion about AI (or similar craze) can be large enough to actually tank the economy.

The problem is people (not sure if it's coping) present an argument that either it can perfectly replace someone 100% or it's an useless fad.

Even increasing the average productivity by 10-20% is huge and in some areas (like copywriting as you've mentioned) the gains are much bigger than that. Of course there's also the argument of the infinite demand (i.e. demand will always overshadow any gains in supply caused by AI) but evidence is never provided.

no

Yeah this is what we are seeing today, also its not just junior jobs going, according to Amazon they are using it to get rid of expensive senior employees while they are actually holding onto juniors using ai tools.

We have seen a lot of use of h1b and outsourcing despite the massive job shortage. Seeing lots of fake job sites filled with ai generated fake openings and paid membership for access to "premium jobs."

They're using ICE to effectively pay half the country to murder the other half, but the ICE budget is limited so that automated systems can then gun down the ICE community to replace 99.9% of humans with machines.

Ultimately this is great for Russia because they'll still be able to invade even if they have only 300 soldiers left in their military, after they hit a low orbit nuke blast to shutdown the Ai US, basically only Melania swinging her purse at the troops will be one of the few left alive to resist.

Dark. But I can't think of a way to rebuke it…

> When you don’t need as many people because of automation

You want to sell your stuff to someone, tho. So, unless you find a way to automate consumption as well, you do need people and lots of it.

This works even better with a declining fertility rate!

The current wave of automation (LLMs) aren't capable of "fighting your wars".

Why does Mr Beast dig wells in Africa?

palantir and anduril :))

That's optimistic.

Ancient egypt (elite in pyramids, slaves otherwise) is more likely.

You got there in the end. Hiring people is a necessary evil and ai allows companies to massive reduce the necessity of that evil. Having done budgeting and forecasting for a wide range or organizations companies will do anything to avoid hiring an employee. I’ve seen companies spend 3x what an employee would cost just to avoid the increased headcount.

The forces of capital do not want to share a single penny and are solely focused on getting to a place of rent.

Don't underestimate how much of the economy is "superfluous email jobs". Have you seen how stupid the average person is?[0] These people need jobs too.

[0] I was going to going to mark this as sarcasm but then I remembered that the US elected Donald Trump as president, 2 times so far, so I'm going to play it straight.

Implying "superfluous email jobs" isn't a significant portion of the international job market. Most people that work in offices fit under this definition.

Sounds like a snake eating it's own tail.

If your job is to swing a hammer, then hammer swinging robot automates your job.

If your job is to swing a hammer, then drill robot augments your job (your job is now swing hammer and drill hole).

How that is different from drill bot automating human driller's job is an exercise left to the reader.

> What is the effective difference between augment and automate?

The paper says one of those is impacted, and the other isn't.

So, yeah, not only that's what the GP is asking, but I'd like to know it too.

> What is the effective difference between augment and automate?

If the field has a future.

The total output isn't going to stay the same, though.

Long... term... risk? What is this archaic concept? I just want to get into a position where I can extract rent from children when they grow up. Why do I need to worry about this so called long term risk?

These days normally what corporates do is bring in people from abroad who have the skills.

The idea that companies would seek to train up domestic workers if there is a skill shortage is outdated today – even if theoretically this might be good for the domestic workforce. It's just cheaper and easier to import the skills needed.

The beauty is that, as mere workers, it's not our problem. Let the ruling class figure it out.

Free labour, easy to dispose of labour? Even though it’s low quality at that price point it can’t be beat. That’s the only use I have ever seen.

Oh he is understanding the abuse perfectly

If interns existed like that they haven’t in the 21st century. They are a free disposable short term labour to be ripped through.

Also what company do you know of thinks in 40 year terms? The longest budgeting process I’ve been part of has been 3 years and the year 3 numbers were understood to be pure wish fulfilment

And then they hire supervisors, helpers and checkout guards/security. I hope it at least makes sense on paper.

I've seen it in Japan, the machine just handles the money. But you still need a human to scan things/check to make sure things are scanned correctly.

It’s also just resulting in atrocious customer experience.

I can go to Safeway or the smaller chain half a block away.

The Safeway went all in on self checkouts. The store is barely staffed, shelves are constantly empty, you have to have your receipt checked by security every time, they closed the second entrance permanently, and for some reason the place smells.

Other store has self checkouts but they also have loads of staff. I usually go through the normal checkout because it’s easier and since they have adequate staff and self checkout lines it tends to be about the same speed to.

End result is I don’t shop at Safeway if I can avoid it.

Cashiers should not, and will not prevent theft. They're not paid nearly enough to get in danger, and it is not their job.

I'm sure you can find videos of thefts in San Francisco if you need a visual demonstration. No cashier is going to jump in front of someone to stop a theft.

Is the theft really happening at the checkout?

And if so, why can't we detect it via camera + AI?

You seem to like self-checkout processes. I don't. I avoid any place where I have to interact with a screen. Be it a screen installed on-premise or the screen on my phone. It is not a relaxing experience for me.

Japan does this a lot of places, and it makes the experience much easier.

And I think the entire mid and low range restaurants could replace servers with a tablet and people would be happier. I'm not sure how it doesn't make more money for the restaurant too, making it so easy to order more during a meal.

Self check-out machines aren't automation.

Serverless restaurants have been common in Australia for decades. You just get a buzzer and then need to go pick up your food when it is ready. There's a single person behind the bar to take orders and pour beer/wine/soda.

I don't use self-checkouts at the stores, nor would I eat at automated or self-service restaurants. I have a kitchen for that already.

But it's good if both are available, as apparently there will be customers for both.

Seems like perfect option for robots (not humanoid). Bring me my food. You can still keep people in kitchen for a bit, but well servers in many restaurants are not really needed.

Please actually understand what pharmacists actually do and _why_ AI is not a good replacement for them yet, unless you want to die of certain drugs interactions.

Pharmacists are a fantastic example. My pharmacy is delivered my prescription by computer. They text me, by computer, when it's ready to pick up. I drive over there … and it isn't ready, and I have to loiter for 15 minutes.

Also, after the prescription ends, they're still filling it. I just never pick it up. The autonomous flow has no ability to handle this situation, so now I get a monthly text that my prescription is ready. The actual support line is literally unmanned, and messages given it are piped to /dev/null.

The existing automation is hot garbage. But C-suite would have me believe our Lord & Savior, AI, will fix it all.

I appreciate the link to differences in differences, I didn't know what to call this method.

The OP's point could still be valid: it’s still possible that macro factors like inflation, interest rates, or tariffs land harder on the exact group they label ‘AI-exposed.’ That makes the attribution messy.

Interesting technique, that DID. But it assumes the non treatment factors would affect both the treatment group and control group equally, that the effect would scale linearly. If the treatment group was more exposed to the non-treatment factors, then an increase could account for a larger difference than the one seem at time 1. Idk which other industry they used as the controll group but interest rates could have a superlinear effect on tech as compared to on that, so the difference of difference would be explained by the non-treatment factor too

Were entry level jobs the first to go in earlier developer downturns?

Is AI being used to attempt to mitigate that effect?

I don't think their methods or any statistical method could decouple a perfectly correlated signal.

Without AI, would junior jobs have grown as quickly as other?

My personal theory is that the stock market rewards the behavior of cutting jobs as a signal of the company being on the AI bandwagon. Doesn't matter if the roles were needed or not. Line goes up, therefore it is good.

This is a complete reversal in the past where having a high headcount was an easy signal of a company's growth (i.e. more people, means more people building features, means more growth).

Investors are lazy. They see one line go down, they make the other line go up.

CEOs are lazy. They see line go up when other line goes down. So they make other line go down.

(I am aware that "line go up" is a stupid meme. But I think it's a perfect way to describe what's happening. It is stupid, lazy, absurd, memetic. It's the only thing that matters, stripped off of anything that is incidental. Line must go up.)

Juniors become seniors.

If we replace all juniors with AI, in a few years there won't be skilled talent for senior positions.

AI assistance is a lot different than AI running the company. Making expensive decisions. While it could progress, bear in mind that some seniors continue to move up in the ranks. Will AI eventually be the CEO?

We all dislike how some CEOs behave, but will AI really value life at all? CEOs have to have some place to live, after all.

Given the timeline this is more likely a reversion to the mean following the end of zero interest rate policy.

Software development is one of the listed industries. Well before AI we have seen that few companies wanted entry level devs due to the training and such.

Reducing in call centers has been going on for a while as more people use automated solutions (not necessarily AI) and many of the growing companies make it hard to reach a real person anyways (Amazon, Facebook, etc). I feel like AI is throwing fuel on the existing fire, but isn't as much of a driver as the headlines suggest.

The jobs are going to India

> You really do have to account for why this is mainly happening in industries that are adopting AI

Correlation is not causation. The original research paper does not prove a connection.

> I doubt very much that these three Stanford professors would be blindsided by the concept of rates and tarriffs.

They are nonetheless subject to publish or perish pressure and have strong incentives to draw publishable attention-grabbing results even where the data is inconclusive.

It seems more true than the "this is good for bitcoin" meme now that bitcoin seems to track the dollar very closely

It is in their interest to find explanations for reductions in labor that don't assign the blame to corporate greed.

For example, a call center might use the excuse of AI to fire a bunch of people. They would have liked to just arbitrarily fire people a few years ago, but if they did that people would notice the reduction in quality and perhaps realize it was done out of self-serving greed (executives get bigger bonuses / look better, etc). The AI excuse means that their service might be worse, perhaps inexcusably so, but no one is going to scrutinize it that closely because there is a palatable justification for why it was done.

This is certainly the type of effect I feel like underlies every story of AI firing I've heard about.

It doesnt need to be a conspiracy. Incentives allign sometimes. Alot of people are invested in AI replacing jobs and it would be nice for them if the buzz was that it is actually the case

Fitting, since it came up with unrelated information (the R&D tax thing) and the 3rd bullet point. Also started talking about tariffs as if it had addressed them, then notes that it doesn't address them.

I have to admit that something is "single-faceted" would be a nice break from hearing that something is "complex and multifaceted".

The jobs are going overseas

But usually one is more true. I'm on the camp of high interests and high tariffs being the cause more.

> I'm not sure it's that our job is the most automatable

I don't know. It seems pretty friendly to automation to me.

When was the last time you wrote assembly? When was the last time you had map memory? Think about blitting memory to a screen buffer to draw a square on a screen? Schedule processes and threads?

These are things that I routinely did as a junior engineer writing software a long time ago. Most people at that time did. For the most part, the computer does them all now. People still do them, but only when it really counts and applications are niche.

Think about how large code bases are now and how complicated software systems are. How many layers they have. Complexity on this scale was unthinkable not so long ago.

It's all possible because the computer manages much of the complexity through various forms of automation.

Expect more automation. Maybe LLMs are the vehicle that delivers it, maybe not. But more automation in software is the rule, not the exception.

I do think software engineering is more exposed than many other jobs for multiple reasons:

There is an unimaginable amount of freely accessible training data out there. There aren't for example many transcribed therapy sessions out there.

The only thing that matters about software is that it's cheap and it sort of works. Low-quality software is already common. Bugs aren't usually catastrophic in the way structural failures would be.

Software engineers are expensive compared to many other white-collar workers.

Software engineering is completely unregulated and there is no union or lobby for software engineers. The second an LLM becomes good enough to replace you, you're gone.

Many other "sit at desk" jobs have at least some tasks that can't be done on a computer.

Software engineering feels like an extremely uncertain career right now.

I'm not so certain that non-desk jobs will be safe either. What makes the current LLMs great at programming is the vast amount of training data. There might be some other breakthrough for typical jobs - some combination of reinforcement learning, training on videos of people doing things, LLMs and old-fashioned AI.

The only thing that AI is good at is a job that someone has already done before.

> These models are extremely unreliable when unsupervised.

> It doesn't feel like that will change fundamentally with just incrementally better training.

I could list several things that I thought wouldn't get better with more training and then got better with more training. I don't have any hope left that LLMs will hit a wall soon.

Also, LLMs don't need to be better programmers than you are, they only need to be good enough.

Does it have to? Stack enough "it's 5% better" on top of each other and the exponent will crush you.

That's plan C, plan B is to one person SAAS a better app than my current company makes.

Is it hard to date with a trailer?

>Buy a trailer, live somewhere cheap, do odd jobs

Unrelated to the discussion, but I love these kinds of backup plans. I've found that most guys I talk to have one. Just a few days ago a guy was telling me that, if his beloved wife ever divorces him, then he'd move to a tropical island and become a coconut seller.

(My personal plan: find a small town in the Sonoran Desert that has a good library, dig a hole under a nice big Saguaro cactus, then live out my days reading library books in my cool and shady cave.)

Despite being the target of a lot of schadenfreude, most software developers aren't working on automation.

Nice watching it tear down recruiters though.

> If we were all smarter

Its not really an intelligence thing. You could have the most intelligent agent, but if the structural incentives for that agent are for example, "build and promote your own library for X for optimal career growth.", you would still have massive fragmentation. And under the current rent-seeking capitalist framework, this is a structural issue at every level. Firefox and Chrome? Multiple competing OSes? How many JS libraries? Now sure, maybe if everyone was perfectly intelligent _and_ perfectly trusting, then you could escape this.

You don’t need to perfect AI to the point of becoming credentialed professionals to gut job markets— it’s not just developers, or creative markets. Nobody’s worried that the world won’t have, say, lawyers anymore — they’re worried that AI will let 20% of the legal workforce do 100% of the requisite work, making the skill essentially worthless for the next few decades because we’d have way too many lawyers. Since the work AI does is largely entry-level work, that means almost nobody will be able to get a foothold in the business. Wash, rinse, repeat to varying levels across many white collar professions and you’ve got some real bad times brewing for people trying to enter the white collar workforce from now on— all without there being a single AI lawyer in the world.

Same thing for doctors. Turns out radiologists are fine, it's software engineers that should be scared.

I'm not necessarily opposed to unionization in general but it's never going to save many US software industry jobs. If a unionization drive succeeds at some big tech company then the workers might do well for a few years. But inevitably a non-union startup competitor with a lower cost structure and more flexible work rules will come along and eat their lunch. Then all the union workers will get laid off anyway.

Unionization kind of worked for mines and factories because the company was tied to a physical plant that couldn't easily be moved. But software can move around the world in milliseconds.

This was when programmers were making software to time Amazon worker's bathroom breaks so believing "this could never happen to me" was probably an important psychological crutch.

This is, if true, a fundamental shift in the value of labor. There really isn’t a non-Luddite way to save these jobs without destroying American tech’s productivity.

That said, I’m still sceptical it isn’t simply a reflection of an overproduction of engineers and a broader economic slowdown.

Unions can only prevent automation up to a point. Really the only thing that could have reasonably prevented this would have been for programmers to not produce as much freely accessible training data (formerly known as "open source software").

So what your argument is we're so special that we deserve to hold back human progress to have a privileged life? If it's not that what would you want a union to do in this situation?

Unions won’t solve this for you. If a company just decides they have enough automation to reduce union workforce it can happen the next time contracts get negotiated.

Either way, there are layoff provisions with union agreements.

Unions wouldnt stop any of this but professionalization would

Unions work in physical domains that need labor “here and now”, think plumbers, electricians, and the like. You can’t send that labor overseas, and the union can control attempts at subversion via labor force importation. But even that has limitations, e.g. union factory workers simply having their factory shipped overseas.

Software development at its core can be done anywhere, anytime. Unionization would crank the offshoring that already happens into overdrive.

We're not "too important." All a union would do is create extra problems for us.

There are two possibilities:

a) This is a large scale administrative coordination problem

b) We don't need as many software engineers.

Under (a) unionizing just adds more administrators and exacerbates the problem, under (b) unions are ineffective and just shaft new grads or if they manage to be effective, kills your employer (and then no one has a job.)

You can't just administrate away reality. The reason SWEs don't have unions is because most of us (unlike blue collar labor) are intelligent enough to understand this. I think additionally there was something to be said about factory work where the workers really were fungible and it was capital intensive, software development is almost the polar opposite where there's no capital and the value is the theory the programmers have in their head making them a lot less fungible.

Finally we do have legal tools like the GPL which do actually give us a lot of negotiating power. If you work on GPL software you can actually just tell your employer "behave or we'll take our ball and leave" if they do something stupid.

Unions would just delay the inevitable while causing other downsides like compressing salary bands, make it difficult to fire non-performers, union fees, increasing chance of corruption etc.

For a recent example:

> Volkswagen has an agreement with German unions, IG Metall, to implement over 35,000 job cuts in Germany by 2030 in a "socially responsible" way, following marathon talks in December 2024 that avoided immediate plant closures and compulsory layoffs, according to CNBC. The deal was a "Christmas miracle" after 70 hours of negotiations, aiming to save the company billions by reducing capacity and foregoing future wage increases, according to MSN and www.volkswagen-group.com.

I mean, I still don't want to unionize with the guys who find `git` too complicated to use (which is apparently the majority of HN). Also, you guys all hate immigrants which is not my vibe, sorry.

The experiences people are having when working with big, complex codebases don’t line up with your gloomy outlook. LLMs just fall apart beyond a certain project size, and then the tech debt must be paid.

If you want to know what will happen to software engineers in the US just follow the path of US factory workers in the 90s.

all of them, which not a brilliant argument when you discover where, who and how the majority of our clothes are made today to be fair.

I’ll upvote you though because I hadn’t read the whole backstory of the luddites before.

Tax incentives , labor laws,etc..

Yes, stunt growth if that growth is immediately harmful to the public. Provide adverse incentives that increase the cost of replacing humans. Less or no government subsidies, incentives or tax breaks if you replace humans with LLMs. Even without replacing humans, tax LLM usage like cigarettes.

In the short term that is. over time, wind down these artificial costs, so that humans transition to roles that can't be automated by LLMs. Go to school, get training,etc.. in other fields. Instead of having millions of unemployed restless people collapsing your society.

But everyone is on the take, they want their short term lobbying money and stock tips so they can take what's theirs and run before the ship sinks. (if I can be a bit over dramatic :) )

boomer-adjacent seemed like a mouthful

genx is now proto-boomer

My company did exactly this earlier in the year. It was a blatant lie and everyone who works here knew it. None of the people laid off were actually replaced with AI, the work they did was just eliminated.

Yeah, unquestioning “journalists” have allowed them to turn laying off thousands into an ad for their new tech.

I do wonder, will this drive the value of software “things” way down? Once everyone starts solo building their own things…

Fewer and fewer people to buy said thing when layoffs and no-hiring continues

It just means they bought the hype and thought they could actually use AI to fire people. Many companies try to do it, and I don't know how many it works for.

But I do know that companies fire people and stay short-staffed just to keep payroll down all the time. Even when externally that seems like a terrible idea, and likely impacts bottom line. It's important to realize just how much companies hate payroll. And AI is a great way to try to reduce it.