As I've mentioned ad nauseum on HN for years yet no one listened - much of the time we as corporates in the tech industry used "AI" as an excuse for layoffs was for the same reason we used "COVID" as an explanation for layoffs before GPT4 was GAed.

The reality is, hiring severely overshot in 2021-22 with a degradation in quality. And 2-3 years of remote first showed that you can offshore with little-to-no operational impact.

Dario's messaging made sense as the underdog - which Anthropic was until a year ago. Their moat used to be FedRAMP until Emil Michael called their bluff.

It is obviously too early for any of this. Technologist have a highly distorted view of the overall economy. Most things just don't move that fast outside of information technology.

I routinely talk to people at my current non-tech job who don't even know what Claude is.

Technologist talk about tokenmaxxing while I can't imagine more than 10% of the non-tech workforce could even explain what a token is.

This level of automation is going to have an extremely slow roll out because of regulatory and sociological reasons.

There is no equivalent to the contagion of AI coding agents outside of programming. I am still fighting just to get access to Claude Cowork at work. I have quite a few automation ideas but there is not much in it for my manager. They have to sign off on something they don't understand with the best outcome their department shrinks. I can understand from their perspective, the status quo is perfectly fine. The risk is long term to the whole business not being competitive but neither my manager or I will be at this company by the time that materializes.

There is this cultural sorting function too that if you don't like change you probably don't work in tech. The culture that creates is night and day different to the non-technology workforce culture. Most people outside technology hate change. Time and time again, I have seen that even the most simple and obvious changes don't get made, even if it makes the task easier because of this bias against change.

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Those are the wrong jobs. AI cannot yet be a nurse, for example.

Talk about learning the wrong lesson

Yeah the base requirement has gone up. So more training/schooling is required.

Imagine when jobs started adding the requirement entry level positions require ability to read? That cut out so many people when that requirement was added yet the economy survived

Companies didn't like hiring entry level engineers even before AI came along because it took them such a long time to become productive and they had a habit of job hopping as soon as they did.

LLMs didn't really change anything about that but people like to give it credit for stuff.

In the long run it meant seniors commanded high salaries. It's the tragedy of the commons i guess except where the apocalypse is you need to build a free sushi restaurant and on site laundry for your spoiled developers.

I am still recovering from a project where everything that could go wrong, did. People without experience coding in Python vibing Python code. People cosplaying software architects. People vibing specs, Jira tickets based on the code they vibed... architects telling devs to "upload the zip file into Claude and figure out what the code does" because there is no design, no spec, no requirements... madness.

Door dash

Zombocom is proof of a time traveling AI god being real.

You get experience by having an active interest, doing projects on your own, and not needing it spoonfed to you. When I was in college we learned some basic data structures and made an employee time clock program. I learned far more from the stuff I fiddled around with on my own time. I started tinkering in elementary school. The students that had done nothing with comp sci their entire lives and just wanted to make video games dropped out in 2 weeks.

> But maybe for a preview look at COBOL, there is huge demand for experience people.

Is there? I actually looked into this once, and nearly all the Cobol work I saw mentioned was being outsourced to software consulting companies in India. And it didn't sound like an especially good job there, either.

If anyone is genuinely paying disgusting amounts of money for deep Cobol expertise, I'd love to see any public evidence that this is happening on any significant scale!

To this age old question the answer is between the lines that by the time seniors are gone AI would be fully taking over, at least by their assumptions.

And maybe due to falling population by then whoever left would have something useful to do nonetheless.