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.

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.

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.

>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.

```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

* 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.

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).

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...

Timezone overlap is also a big one.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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..

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

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"

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.

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?

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

[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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.)

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.

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.

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

Either way, there are layoff provisions with union agreements.

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

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.

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

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 :) )

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.

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.

If the field has a future.

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.