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> I wonder also how much of a driver new programmer productivity tools like copilot and ChatGPT are factoring into this. If your top 10% productivity workers ju

• enriquec 3y ago
  everyone looking for any reason when its obviously a massive recession due to govt. spending
  • hdjjhhvvhga 3y ago
    Massive government spending? Sure. But "massive recession"? Really?
    • enriquec 3y ago
      Recession = two quarters of negative growth. We've had a lot more. I'm not playing with the kafkaesque political redefinitions and find them pretty pathetic actually.
      • maneesh 3y ago
        The economy has been growing in 2023 though https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-growth https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-growth
        • mistrial9 3y ago
          consolidated economic activity has been growing massively, while Main Street continues to fail. how is this "us" or "we" .. investors here tell one side of a story.. look at the cities where people live.
      • algoatecorn 3y ago
        They aren't "kafkaesque political redefinitions". You are just choosing to use an overly simple definition because it supports your argument. The NBER determines recession based on a sophisticated methodology. One that considers the holistic status of the economy. This whole "two quarters of negative growth" is unga bunga economics
        • enriquec 3y ago
          So then it's not a recession solely according to NBER - and this departs from their characterizations for the last 60 years before this last election cycle. "A recession is a significant, widespread, and prolonged downturn in economic activity. A common rule of thumb is that two consecutive quarters of negative gross domestic product (GDP) growth mean recession, although more complex formulas are also used." - [investopedia]("https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/recession.asp#:~:text=What%20Is%20a%20Recession%3F,-Investopedia%20%2F%20Laura%20Porter&text=A%20recession%20is%20a%20significant,complex%20formulas%20are%20also%20used https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/recession.asp#:~:text=W....")
      • JakeAl 3y ago
        They've been playing games with the numbers but it's true, we're looking at a depression not a recession as it's going to last much longer. US debt t GDP ratio > 120% which by IMF definition means the US is in an economic death spiral. By 2028 the payments we make on all that money they printed (at our expense) will only go to the interest and no longer the principal. After that the death spiral becomes irreversible with US insolvency by 2042. Historically, inside the next ten years is when we have a depression/massive austerity for everyone, war, and/or a new monetary system. Which if you ask me is more stupid and irresponsible than a balanced budget amendment and single line item spending bills. Social Security will be insolvent in 10 years, too, and I've also heard the medicare liabilities ae being hidden because they paint an even darker picture about how far gone things are. We've known this for a while BTW, I first learned about the timeline in 2014 watching the budget committee hearing on CSPAN. They showed the slide with the timeline yet no one talked about it. Austerity back then was scheduled to start by 2020 but we got stimulus, like they were steering into driving off the cliff. This guy wrote and updated his book on the topic. https://www.amazon.com/COMING-COLLAPSE-AMERICA-BALANCE-FEDERAL/dp/1669867927/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3SQDJDLBGIHZO&keywords=coming+collapse+of+america&qid=1695934568&sprefix=coming+collapse+of+america%2Caps%2C160&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/COMING-COLLAPSE-AMERICA-BALANCE-FEDER...
  • toomuchtodo 3y ago
    It's monetary policy tightening (effective rate 0% -> ~5%), not government spending. There is no recession, just normalization (zero interest rate policy, or ZIRP, was an abnormality). Unemployment is close to lowest levels in history because of structural demographics. When money gets more expensive, you must perform, adapt, or die as a business. Cashflow is king, and profits juiced from government stimulus mentioned is simply evaporating as the Fed drains money out of the system. Businesses are attempting to discover how to operate in a macro that makes labor and money more expensive than they've been accustomed to over the last 15-20 years. u/DoughnutHole touches on another important point: businesses and capital are clinging to returns that might no longer be obtainable in this new macro (as we've been papering over reality with cheap credit and financialization for some time). What is going to break first? Who knows, first time we're someplace like this. Everyone is going to fight like hell to defend their piece of the pie (note the broad layoffs and back to hiring shortly after, as well as activist investors demanding trimming labor costs aggressively). https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS (Pick 10Y time scale) https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WM2NS https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WM2NS https://www.goldmansachs.com/intelligence/pages/why-the-us-money-supply-is-shrinking.html https://www.goldmansachs.com/intelligence/pages/why-the-us-m... https://fedinprint.org/item/fedkeb/96953 https://fedinprint.org/item/fedkeb/96953 | https://www.kansascityfed.org/Economic%20Bulletin/documents/9801/EconomicBulletin23Cohen0922.pdf https://www.kansascityfed.org/Economic%20Bulletin/documents/... ("The labor market has so far shown remarkable resilience to the Federal Reserve’s recent monetary policy tightening. Severe labor shortages in the post-pandemic era have led many employers to hold on to workers and hire less-skilled workers—even though they expect demand for their goods or services to weaken in the future. As a result, unemployment remains low, and labor productivity has declined.")
    • johnvanommen 3y ago
      This might be the most succinct description of where we're at right now, that I've read all year.
      • enriquec 3y ago
        Kind of - but it ignores the fact that the tightening was to fight inflation due to insane amounts of government spending. And the government just upped the ante and is spending more. Right now the national debt is growing faster than the economy. Expect everything to get a lot worse.
  • Bud 3y ago
    [dead]
  • DoughnutHole 3y ago
    Even if you agree that there was a recession the US exited it a year ago. The economy has been growing since last August. This (and other layoffs) are a response to increased interest rates imposed to combat inflation. Companies don't have access to as cheap credit, so they're trying to appease shareholders by cutting costs to improve profitability. This puts the brakes on the economy and may cause a recession if it goes too far. But the US economy is not currently in recession by any definition.
    • robertlagrant 3y ago
      > Companies don't have access to as cheap credit, so they're trying to appease shareholders by cutting costs to improve profitability. It's not just profitability and shareholders, although those are good indicators of whether or not you're overspending. If the cost of capital goes up, something has to give to pay for that.
    • paulmd 3y ago
      This specifically and undeniably is what is killing unity too. They have always run on free money, they have literally never turned a profit in the history of the company, and with the end of 0% interest rate policy the music is over. The fact that they borrowed bigtime to buy this adtech company (hence the push for “if you use our ads, no fee increase!”) and are now deeply deeply underwater is forcing the issue, they have gone from losing $100-300m per year to losing $800m-1b per year. But, again, unity has literally never turned a profit in the history of its existence. The same thing is happening across the industry where the end of free money is putting some boondoggles out of business, burning out the waste that has resulted from 2+ decades of unconstrained tech growth in a ZIRP environment. A correction was inevitable and healthy, excessively cheap money has all kinds of noxious effects on an economy. The most prominent is xbox - I don't think anyone realized just how bad things have gotten for xbox but the FTC leaks are devastating, they reveal the xbox division has been on the ropes for quite a while. They have been in severe risk of being closed if they can't make gamepass numbers perform, and they've massively undershot the scenarios in which (two or three years ago) Phil Spencer said he'd close the division. It's entirely possible that Starfield is the last straw, and if they don't see a big bump in gamepass subscribers from it (which doesn't seem to have happened) they may spin off the game-studio side and kill xbox, or pivot it into a "nettop" that competes more with appletv and switch pro type hardware. It’s also resulted in some businesses making some crazy pricing model changes and other things, out of a real or perceived need to get to profitability. The unity change will kill the business, and things like google business spinning off domain registry (you need to use a third party service to get a complete offering on google cloud?) are pound-foolish decisions that will/could have long-term negative consequences. But the tide is going out and we’re seeing who’s swimming naked, as they say. There were a lot of businesses and projects that were only sustainable with 0% interest money, and companies are rightfully asking if this is worth it if they have to pay 7% or 8% interest. And that's exactly the type of unproductive work that needs to be burned out of the economy.
  • Mekulpa 3y ago
    It's a self fulfilling prophecy nothing more and slowly fluctuating back Adjustment of COVID, low interest rates and Russian war.
• hiddencost 3y ago
  A lot of big shops are choking under bureaucracy and process right now, which is the sort of things LLMs are good at.
  • paxys 3y ago
    It's the opposite. LLMs are good after you make your way through the bureaucracy and end up with well defined specs and a ton of boilerplate code & tests to churn out. I'd say most devs are spending 90%+ of their time on the former.
    • curiousllama 3y ago
      Idk, ChatGPT has been great boost to my efficiency filling out all those "5 min" pre-review alignment standup meeting intake documents. Now it really DOES just take 5 mins!
      • SoftTalker 3y ago
        Standup meeting intake documents? I think you're doing standups wrong. Do they need a cover sheet as well? Did you get the memo?
        • toomuchtodo 3y ago
          You fix what you can fix.
  • Tainnor 3y ago
    How does an LLM help when you can't get anyone to sign off on a change, or when QA is understaffed, or when there's too many stakeholders making conflicting and sometimes nonsensical requirements? That kind of stuff can't be solved by technology.
    • marcosdumay 3y ago
      In short, an LLM helps in creating enough shit disguised as work to keep the people spouting nonsensical requirements busy enough to not dwell on the important parts of the system. LLMs are phenomenal busywork generators. And as a natural consequence, if you want to stay productive, you should be suspicious of anybody that uses one.
• 0xjmp 3y ago
  Second this. From using LLM within my daily IC workflow, its not that developers are getting a productivity boost, its that our job became more enjoyable. I didn't even realize how much frustration builds up over time while relying on google search for things such as that one obscure api method i forgot the name of. I have to dig and dig... Somehow using GPT in its place has brought a noticeable bump to my quality of life. Most of my dev colleagues share this sentiment. Impact on the tech economy from this? Unknown.
  • smabie 3y ago
    I would imagine that if your job is more enjoyable, you're getting a productivity boost. Unless you're suggesting that using an llm is just as efficient as not, but is somehow more fun?
    • pineapple_guy 3y ago
      Possibly, but why assume that developers are passing on that increased productivity without expecting a relative pay increase?
      • smabie 3y ago
        Why would they get a pay increase? Everyone can use LLMs.