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Evaluating the impact of AI on the labor market: Current state of affairs
- ChrisArchitect 1y agoActual source: https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/evaluating-impact-ai-labor-market-current-state-affairs https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/evaluating-impact-ai-lab...
- dang 1y agoThanks - we've changed the URL to that from https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/01/ai_isnt_taking_people_jobs/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/01/ai_isnt_taking_people....
- neuroelectron 1y agoYou can't make this claim from pushing numbers around in an excel spreadsheet. >As previously noted, the metrics from OpenAI and Anthropic are imperfect proxies for AI risk and usage, while still being the best available. Seems they're just coming out and admitting they refuse to measure it themselves. Not a good sign.
- kbrkbr 1y agoIf it's the right numbers (called measurement data) and the right excel sheet pushing (called running a validated model) that is exactly the way you can make these claims. Overall it's called the scientific method.
- dapperdrake 1y agoWhat is your null-hypothesis and how does your data actually refute your null-hypothesis? And how is your sample representative?
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- Krasnol 1y agoWell we had people being "let go" (how I hate this term...as if they were trying to flee but couldn't before) at our Call Center. Replaced by AI. The women were older. Didn't have long until retirement. Seems to be still worth it to kick them.
- pixelesque 1y agoWhile it's likely due to other factors (i.e. like maybe the stock indices have just completely de-coupled from reality or are just being helped by AI-hype?), the fact that US job openings seemingly de-coupled from S&P 500 in Nov/Dec 2022 when ChatGPT was publicly released (as a web app) is pretty interesting.
- tommy_axle 1y agoThere was more also going on in that time-frame: several interest rate hikes, no fix for section 174 changes by the end of 2022. Maybe someone will pinpoint whatever had the largest impact in a detailed study.
- Ekaros 1y agoI still think some sort of shift in trends. Maybe it could have been COVID totalitarianism ending and as such shifting trend in leadership to reduce investments. Lot of headcount decision might not be actual needs, but what in general looks good for stock market. And if there is no more growth expected from WFH, well less hiring and reducing labour force looks better.
- AznHisoka 1y agoChatGpT was used by probably 0.01% of people back then. I highly doubt it would have a discernable impact back then. Even in 2023, it would be way too early. Early adopters were the main users, not the mainstream public
- an0malous 1y agoNo, it’s because $15T (80% of the money supply) was printed during COVID and while that money initially circulates through the system it eventually pools up into certain places like stocks and housing
- johnnyanmac 1y agoSo much coincidentally happened in 2022 and I'd feel like I'm wearing tinfoil if I tried to connect them. Google/Apple changed how ads worked, S178 was deleted, we were at the tail end of a global pandemic that we're still feeling to this day, and of course ChatGPT started to take the world by storm. And those are just off the top of my head.
- a3w 1y agoI saw a great shift in our data science job offers: we removed the old offers and now only search machine learning experts. We do not know if they would have any problem to work on. But we surely are looking for one.
- jmpetroske 1y agoI think there are 2 different ways to interpret the title. First, is AI itself replacing workers - article is referring to this case says no. 2nd case is what you are mentioning, the AI race has companies reducing hiring in non-AI areas in order to prioritize hiring for developing AI.
- adrianbooth17 1y agoAI won't replace you. But a stupid manager who believes AI could replace you will replace you
- RachelF 1y agoAI has provided a great excuse for your manager to fire you and replace you with someone much cheaper.
- nextworddev 1y agoThat’s a killer use case I gusss, pun intended
- echelon 1y agoI know first hand that this is not the case. At least in film/media. - I've sold software to several mid-scale production firms. Folks that do everything from Netflix title sequence designs to pharmaceutical television ad spots. They're billing at less than a quarter of their previous rate and picking up more clients on account of AI. They're downsizing the folks that do not do VFX or editing. - A neighbor of mine who is a filmmaker was laid off last week. If you've flown Delta, you've seen his in-flight videos. His former employer, who he has worked for for nearly a decade, is attracting clients that are hiring them for AI work. My neighbor was not attached to any of those efforts. - Major ad firm WPP is laying people off. Some of this is the economic macro and decreased ad spend. Another of my neighbors works for them and they haven't had any major projects. She typically manages major F500 clients. They're not spending. Despite that, she says some of the inter-departmental woes are directly attributable to AI. - I spoke with former members in SAG-AFTRA leadership (before Sean Astin came on board). They quit on account of AI. "The writing is on the wall", they said. Direct quote.
- foxyv 1y agoAI has been remarkably good at killing Art and Writing jobs for sure.
- marcosdumay 1y ago
- giancarlostoro 1y agoI'm not surprised, is saving tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of dollars per employee worth screwing up by betting on AI and losing millions? Notice that the headlines of companies wanting AI are wanting their employees to use AI to be more productive, and that's fine, but they still need their employees to be fully aware of the output so they're not just churning out slop.
- exasperaited 1y agoJob numbers? Pretty sure you could make the case that this claim isn't true, but the data might be too nebulous. But it's definitely had an effect on jobs. It's made so many underqualified people think they have a new superpower, and made so many people miserable with the implied belittling of their actual skills. It's really damaging work culture. Of course studies like this are aimed at people who think jobs are interchangeable neutral little black boxes that can be scaled up and scaled down, and who don't like to think about what they involve. > Overall, our metrics indicate that the broader labor market has not experienced a discernible disruption since ChatGPT’s release Because metrics don't tell the story.
- dapperdrake 1y agoErgodicity assumptions will do the rest.
- wilg 1y agoSkill issue: just measure whatever you are worried about.
- caminante 1y agoHeadline could be more clear. Title implies all things AI, when they were actually looking at GenAI. I know it's what everyone thinks of, but I hate how everything gets muddled. I suspect AI is currently fashionable as a smokescreen to justify deep cost cutting (See MSFT example.)
- dang 1y ago(we've since changed the URL and the headline - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45444395 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45444395)
- ge96 1y agoI am a small anecdote where developers who just use chatgpt/cursor are in higher positions than me who learned to code back in 2010. Use as in "chatgpt told me..." about whatever topic. Still they are accomplishing the task (getting code out there that works). I also had a vibe coded prototype get handed to me to fix it
- johnnyanmac 1y ago>Still they are accomplishing the task (getting code out there that works). I suppose at this point there's no debate on if we can call outselves "engineers" anymore. I can't imagine a civil engineer saying "they are accomplishing their task (getting a bridge out there that works)",
- ge96 1y agoyeah for me it takes the fun out of figuring something out if you can just will something into existence with words
- nozzlegear 1y agoA great and relevant quote from a recent Noah Smith article discussing this same subject: > The debate over whether AI is taking people’s jobs may or may not last forever. If AI takes a lot of people’s jobs, the debate will end because one side will have clearly won. But if AI doesn’t take a lot of people’s jobs, then the debate will never be resolved, because there will be a bunch of people who will still go around saying that it’s about to take everyone’s job. Sometimes those people will find some subset of workers whose employment prospects are looking weaker than others, and claim that this is the beginning of the great AI job destruction wave. And who will be able to prove them wrong? Source: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/ai-and-jobs-again https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/ai-and-jobs-again
- rhetocj23 1y agoForget about that. Lets focus on the tech firms that produce software. Two things should happen if AI proliferates into software development: 1) Increasing top line - due to more projects being taken by enabling labour to be more productive 2) Operating margin increasing - due to labour input declining and taking more cost-reduction projects If those 2 things dont occur - the AI investment was a waste of money from a financial perspective. And this is before I even discount the cash flows by the cost of capital of these high-risk projects (high discount rate). At some point everyone will be analysed in this manner. Only Nvidia is winning as it stands, ironically, not because of LLMs. But rather because they sell the hardware that LLMs operate on.
- dapperdrake 1y agoThat only gets you an expected net present value. Looking at the variance and quartiles is way scarier.
- rhetocj23 1y agoThe hucksters will tell you the variance in the cashflows is exactly why they are pursuing AI - real options.
- g42gregory 1y ago
- kmoser 1y agoZero effects on jobs overall, i.e. for every person displaced by AI, another has been hired? Or zero effects on any individual person's job, i.e. not one single person has lost their job due to their boss wanting to replace them with AI?
- Macha 1y agoThe second would be easily disprovable by anecdotes and there's plenty of those to go around, so its more a net zero thing.
- johnnyanmac 1y agoevery person displaced was hired by someone in a lower CoL country.
- outworlder 1y agoThere's been many layoffs attributed to AI. That seems like an excellent cover for market conditions.
- westurner 1y agoFWIU software jobs hiring was/is down along with the cancelling of the R&D tax credit. From "House restores immediate R&D deduction in new tax bill" (2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39213002 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39213002 .. https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=38988189 https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=38988189 : >> "Since amortization took effect [ in 2022 thanks to a time-triggered portion of the Trump-era Tax Cuts and Jobs Act ("TCJA" 2017) ], the growth rate of R&D spending has slowed dramatically from 6.6 percent on average over the previous five years to less than one-half of 1 percent over the last 12 months," Estes said. "The [R&D] sector is down by more than 14,000 jobs" > Hopefully R&D spending at an average of 6.6% will again translate to real growth From "Generative AI as Seniority-Biased Technological Change" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45275202 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45275202 : > Did tech reduce hiring after Section 174 R&D tax policy changes? [...] > From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45131866 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45131866 : >> In 2017 Trump made businesses have to amortize these [R&D] expenses over 5 years instead of deducting them, starting in 2022 (it is common for an administration to write laws that will only have a negative effect after they're gone). This move wrecked the R&D tax credit. Many US businesses stopped claiming R&D tax credits entirely as a result. Others had surprise tax bills > People just want the same R&D tax incentives back: > "Tell HN: Help restore the tax deduction for software dev in the US (Section 174)" (2025 (2439 points)) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44226145 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44226145 It is suspected that hiring levels correlate with the cancelling of the R&D Tax credit. The TCJA (2017 Trump) cancelled the R&D tax credit. The OBBA (2025 Trump) restored the R&D tax credit for tax year 2025.
- mugivarra69 1y ago[dead]
- zaphod12 1y agoOne spot I really find this surprising is call center - but maybe majority of those folks are outside of the US or were reassigned
- Etheryte 1y agoCall centers these days are staffed at the bare minimum as is, adding an AI bot in front of that doesn't really change that fact. At least for me, it's now a regular occurrence that I'll slot a quarter to half an hour of holding time when I need to call support. Local and small companies are better in this regard, there you can usually reach a human pretty quickly. Big international corporations however are a lost cause. Funny, given that they'd have the most funds available to keep their customers.
- asdff 1y agoAutomated call center predate the current AI hype cycle. Jobs were already lost.
- dapperdrake 1y agoAs well as customers.
- dakial1 1y ago>And major companies conducting layoffs like IBM and Salesforce have held themselves up as examples of that narrative, though their employee culls may be more focused on outsourcing than automation. Automation seems to be a better excuse than outsourcing
- 29athrowaway 1y agoAI is a scapegoat. Every year, large companies secretly rank employees and then yank the 10% or so they consider low performing. This is called rank and yank [1]. If your company has performance reviews and is ran by MBAs it almost certainly uses it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve The most important aspect of rank and yank is that it has to be done in secrecy. Your company will not tell you it is using it. Even your manager might not know this. When rank and yank is not done in secrecy, employees react to it by hiring the most mediocre people they can, sabotaging/isolating strong performers, hiring to fire, forming peer review/code review mafias, avoiding helping others as much as possible, etc. Anything they can do to not land in the bottom 10%. This cannibalizes the company and an example is what Ballmer did to Microsoft. Any person with a ChatGPT account can now ask it to analyze the "game" of rank and yank from the perspective of game theory and realize how dumb the whole idea is. The rational strategy for the employee is to destroy the company from within. But MBAs love it because it involves a made up statistical distribution. The only truth about rank and yank is that it's a stupid idea that has impacted the careers of millions of hard working people around the world, while also impacting many families and their future. It has converted thousands of companies into horrible places to work filled with workplace psychopaths at the top. MBAs are people who believe in the work of the person that kickstarted the decline of American manufacturing, Jack Welch. Jack Welch extracted record profits from GE for 20 years, but left it a hollowed-out "pile of shit" according to his successor. The worse part is that MBAs aspire to be like him and in the process have ruined the whole manufacturing industry. So to pull off a rank and yank every year you need a scapegoat, and this year the scapegoat is AI. In previous years it has been the economy, or some other excuse. AI will naturally become the scapegoat for everything. Have you ever wondered why your company is laying off people while having job postings for the same positions? Does it happen every year? Does it happen after performance reviews? Is it always around 10% of the workforce? Oof... that's a tough guess, I wonder what it might be! AI is the perfect scapegoat because the company can claim they're using AI and boost their value somehow. But if AI could reduce your headcount by so much then your company, your business model, your processes, your intellectual property, etc. have no intrinsic value anyways and the correct interpretation of the situation is that everyone should divest and make the share price go to zero.
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- daft_pink 1y agoI know for a fact that companies have fired people and replaced them with AI. I’ve met with business owners and they told me.
- emp17344 1y agoGood to know, but for me, the study is more convincing than your anecdote.
- daft_pink 1y agoI think it's the fact that they say zero effect, which is obviously not true.
- emp17344 1y agoThey didn’t say there’s literally zero effect, they said that there’s negligible disruption to job market from the introduction of AI.
- maxfurman 1y agoEven a net zero effect would mean some people were replaced with AI and the same amount of people were hired to use AI
- scottlamb 1y agoBe careful with "they". The "zero effect" in the headline was likely written by a Register editor, two steps removed from the authors of the study. I think the quote in the fourth paragraph is more telling: > "Overall, our metrics indicate that the broader labor market has not experienced a discernible disruption since ChatGPT’s release 33 months ago, undercutting fears that AI automation is currently eroding the demand for cognitive labor across the economy," said Martha Gimbel, Molly Kinder, Joshua Kendall, and Maddie Lee in a report summary.
- bedatadriven 1y agoOne thing that is real is companies using LLMs to fill roles they couldn't afford to spend on before. Like the tourist who uses Google Translate on a trip to Japan: in principle they are saving 10k on the cost of a professional interpreter. On the other hand they never would have had the resources for a professional interpreter.
- w0m 1y ago[flagged]
- JCM9 1y agoNot surprised. There’s some good applications but the hype bubble is on the verge of bursting. Many companies are boated and inefficient but it’s highly unlikely that “AI” is the fix. Ironically the thing broken in most cases is poor quality management that let things get so bloated and messy in the first place… the same folks that are cluelessly boasting about the potential of AI in their company.
- conductr 1y agoI’m not sure it’s even that. I think the entire tech industry is reaching a maturation stage. Where a majority of customers pain has been solved, opportunities for innovation are slim or negative ROI, and so maintaining the headcount of the growth stage is just unnecessary.
- rmah 1y agoThe key phrase is "the broader labor market has not experienced a discernible disruption".
- gomme 1y ago...also the study is from august 2023.
- teaearlgraycold 1y ago> Overall, our metrics indicate that the broader labor market has not experienced a discernible disruption since ChatGPT’s release 33 months ago Doesn’t seem to be that outdated
- input_sh 1y agoNo it's not, it's from Oct 1st. And the data goes up to 33 months since ChatGPT's release, or in other words Nov 2022 + 33 months = August 2025.
- paxys 1y agoMy personal experience lines up with this. From what I've seen all the AI hype is coming from: - Companies building AI models & tools - this one is obvious. - Executives using AI to justify layoffs - there have been constant rounds of layoffs across corporate America since ~2021, but recent ones have been rebranded as "AI taking the jobs" so no one points to the obvious corporate mismanagement, offshoring and greed. - Bosses using AI to push employees to work harder - I have personally seen this at my own company. AI is an excuse to increase forced attrition. "You aren't good enough" is harder to justify, so now it is "you aren't using AI well enough". Real-world use cases of AI meanwhile haven't really moved beyond the prototype stage.
- someothherguyy 1y ago> Real-world use cases of AI meanwhile haven't really moved beyond the prototype stage. Not sure that is true at this point?
- svachalek 1y agoIs there anything out there other than coding agents? I could see arguing that coding agents are beyond the prototype stage, although I personally wouldn't stake that claim.
- tuatoru 1y agoIt takes companies a long time to reorganise processes. Especially in ways that reduce headount, because manager status is tied to count of reports. This study is far too soon. In 2030, if nothing changes meanwhile, we might know the effect of AI as we have it now in 2025 on employment.
- mushufasa 1y agoAs someone who attended this school and has a degree from their economics department: this finding very consistent from what I learned in classes covering the economics of innovation. Historically, technological revolutions have increased productivity and labor force participation, despite many pundits at the time worried about loss of jobs. The core intuition for this phenomenon is that human society overall takes the tech productivity gains to do more things overall, creating new goods and services. The broader range of goods and services overall also enables more people to find work. Put another way, "“One thing I love about customers is that they are divinely discontent. Their expectations are never static – they go up. It’s human nature. You cannot rest on your laurels in this world. Customers won’t have it.” -- one of Bezos's Amazon shareholder letters. One of my favorite counterintuitive examples: The biggest economic gains from the 1800s Industrial Revolution actually came from the humble washer/dryer. By making routine homeware 100x more efficient, this (along with other home appliances) allowed more women to enter the labor force, nearly doubling labor force participation within a couple generations. Though, at the beginning, lots of people were opining about homemakers losing a sense of purpose or relaxing all the time. It's certainly possible that this study is just reinforcing the researcher's biases from their previous understanding of the economics of innovation, and also possible that this study is accurate today but conditions will change in the future. That said, I believe the burden of proof is on the pundits claiming cataclysmic job loss, which is counter to economic historians' models of innovation.
- mamami 1y agoThis perspective very much ignores economic friction. The luddites were a thing because, metaphorically, not every washer can become a programmer. These large scale analyses often treat one person losing their job and a different person finding a job as equivalent, which does not reflect any kind of material reality
- grafmax 1y agoYeah actually the labor conditions of the working class were horrible as they entered factories, conditions only remedied by the spurs of the labor movement.
- samaltmanfried 1y agoAI might not have much actual impact on software engineering, but AI (Actually Indians) has. Companies are using AI as a justification for layoffs, and then just replacing those roles with cheaper engineers employed by bodyshop companies.
- conductr 1y agoWhen nobody wants to return to office, why not? The work from home shift was always going to accelerate the global pay equilibrium, it will continue to do so.
- hn_acc1 1y agoLots of people would be willing to take a paycut to WFH.
- conductr 1y agoMost western people can’t take a cut that’s puts them on par with even a well paid Indian.
- typewithrhythm 1y agoYou hire discount engineers when you want to move to a maintenance and value extraction stage, something widespread in the industry at the moment due to changes is startup incentives and interest rates making entrenched players feel more safe. It's not about "global equilibrium", because that misses completely that hiring a very expensive westener still has positive roi, but only if you are attempting to innovate.
- conductr 1y agoIt’s a larger shift from growth to mature business stages. All the growth of past couple decades is now maintenance
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
- roadside_picnic 1y agoOh it's certainly effecting jobs. I know plenty of people who would be unemployed right now if not for the insane spending on AI across the board. I think there's many reasons for the AI hype, but one of the basic ones is that it's the only way to keep the economy propped up. I doesn't matter if it's an illusion or not, it means money is flowing many directions (even if a shocking number of those flows are accounting tricks). What we're watching is some mass hysteria like tulip mania. There are many, many people who benefit from this situation independent of whether or not its an illusion. And maybe that bubble will pop and maybe it will soon, but when it does, most of us will wish it hadn't.
- johnnyanmac 1y ago>And maybe that bubble will pop and maybe it will soon, but when it does, most of us will wish it hadn't. It will, and it will be huge. It may in fact be the trigger of the next Great Depression. It's going to be ugly. But maybe that's the pain the US needs. This situation was decades in the making and the US decided instead to blow up the debt to unmaintainable levels. There's very little rope left this time if we have even a recession withotu hyperinflation (let alone a depression). It will be bad, but I'm also beyond tired of everyone kicking the ticking pipe bomb down the road for the next generation to handle. The sooner it blows up, the better chance we have something left to clean up. Maybe we can bring some integrity back to the country.
- ChicagoDave 1y agoThe level of uncertainty in the job market says otherwise. This is the worst tech job market in my entire 40 year career.
- sarchertech 1y agoWe’re coming off of nearly 20 years of growth, years of free money, and the COVID boom that caused massive over-hiring. Then you add the millions and millions tech companies spent promoting coding as a career, and the organic attraction from high salaries that caused CS to became the most popular major at many schools, and pushed droves up people into coding bootcamps. The free money stopped, and without that subsidy we probably have 50% more programmers than we really need.
- johnnyanmac 1y agoI'll keep saying it everytime: don't call it "overhiring". This was intentional and layoffs are a feature, not a consequence. Moreover, look at the hiring numbers in earnings calls. These companies did not slow down hiring. They slowed down hiring in North America. THey clearly didn't "overhire", they want to cheap out on wages and use AI as the scapegoat to impress shareholders.
- simianwords 1y agoThis is a naive explanation. Tech companies increased headcount by more than 2x since 2018. Was this intentional? Did they intentionally double the headcount? To what gain? Why would they deliberately give up their profits by doubling headcount just to layoff around 10% in aggregate? They still have to pay the rest 90%… so they just did that so that the 10% could be laid off?
- johnnyanmac 1y ago> Was this intentional? Did they intentionally double the headcount? Yes >To what gain? - reporting explosive growth - launching a lot of initiatives, of which more than half of are probably shelved c. 2025. Seriously, peek into any company and see all the odd products they were announcing back then. - to gain more of a global foothold. If you want to operate in a new country, you'll need to hire a lot of staff to manage compliance, run offices, work with local companies, etc. - to have a lot of bodies to throw at a problem should they need it. Since hiring was basically "free" is was convinent to have talent on hold just in case. - to poach, be it from competitors or from potential future competition. There's been reports of skilled hires who'd proceed to be on standby for quite a while. But paid very well. That's not something you do normally. >Why would they deliberately give up their profits by doubling headcount just to layoff around 10% in aggregate? That's the oversimplification of S174. They weren't losing much revenue because those labor costs would be balanced out from the taxes they didn't have to pay. It just cancels out. Layoffs started quick once that ended. Remeber, they don't see layoffs as a "bad thing" as a business. The stock even bumps up a tiny bit back on 2022/2023 over layoff news. Something about "being responsible" or some drek. S174 will be back next year, but I think there's multiple other issues that mean the market won't quickly bounce back.
- atleastoptimal 1y agoI think we are still in the period where many new jobs are being created due to AI, and AI models are chiefly a labor enhancer, not a labor replacer. It is inevitable though, if current trends continue (the METR eval and GDPval) that AI models will be labor replacements in many fields, starting with jobs that are oriented around close-ended tasks (customer service reps, HR, designers, accountants), before expanding to jobs with longer and longer task horizons. The only way this won't happen is if at some point AI models just stop getting smarter and more autonomously capable despite every AI lab's research and engineering effort.
- twothamendment 1y agoI feel lucky. Rather than cut workers because AI is making our jobs easier and faster, we are just doing more work, more projects that we wouldn't have had the bandwidth to do. I'm solo on something we we would have assigned a small team to.
- mostlysimilar 1y agoWould you mind elaborating? Generally speaking what is the project? What does the AI enable you to do solo that you would have had to dedicate a team to before? Is the quality of the software the same, worse, or better? What does your day-to-day job look like and how is it different from before? What tools are you using?
- SchemaLoad 1y agoI had a friend tell me about how ChatGPT makes his work so much faster. When I asked about it he told me that he works tech support and after the problem is resolved customers often ask for a root cause analysis. He uses ChatGPT to generate a fake but plausible looking analysis and this seems to satisfy the customers, letting him get tickets done faster and play games in the freed time.
- johnnyanmac 1y agoYeah, this is always my skepticism when I say "I get more work done". What about more good work? We had such a pushback last decade about "bullshit jobs" among the tech sphere, but we seemed to have fallen right into it. At least while the money is flowing to enable it.
- SchemaLoad 1y agoThere's a study in to this now https://hbr.org/2025/09/ai-generated-workslop-is-destroying-productivity https://hbr.org/2025/09/ai-generated-workslop-is-destroying-... "We define workslop as AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task." ChatGPT is basically pushing the real work on to the next person along the line who then has to fix up the generated workslop.
- dwohnitmok 1y agoHmmm Figure 1 makes me more suspicious about this report. However they're measuring changes in occupational mix as a proxy for on what kind of jobs exist, their metric states that computers and the internet both had an impact that is less than their control line. That seems to indicate they've got a bad metric, since I would expect both of those to have an impact higher than their control.
- AznHisoka 1y agoI know this is Yale and we should all assume they have the right methodology, but i think there are a few things wrong with this study. 1) they’re assuming that every company in the world is using AI aggressively. Yes, ChatGpT is popular but there are still a LOT of companies that have not adopted AI in the enterprise. If they wanted to analyze the impact of AI on the labor market, they need to analyze the mix of employees in companies that actually are actively implementing or aggressively using AI. 2) They did not mention how many people they sampled along the unemployed but if its something like 4% or so, the number of software engineers in that sampling is probably pitifully low (ie 10) Definitely not enough to make a conclusion.
- trod1234 1y agoYou don't get anything tangible from that noisy data. IT has been taking the brunt, and you only see labor market changes after they happen by a significant lag. Its premature to do this type of study and try to discount what people on the street who are being impacted are saying.
- zmmmmm 1y agoThe interesting thing about AI to me is it's got a bit of a "meta" effect in that it's giving generic software engineering a boost by increasing productivity there. So you have direct application of AI replacing existing jobs, but then for everything AI can't do, the increase in productivity of regular software engineering is accelerating automation of those things through standard software. For me, the second effect is more prominent: still maintaining / hiring the same staff but we are taking on qualitatively different things that we would not have accepted due to complexity or workload reasons now.
- johnnyanmac 1y ago>it's giving generic software engineering a boost by increasing productivity there. https://theconversation.com/does-ai-actually-boost-productivity-the-evidence-is-murky-260690 https://theconversation.com/does-ai-actually-boost-productiv...
- sinuhe69 1y agoI think except for the economists, for most people here on HN, such reports are not much helpful. The problem is not just the data, but working with aggregated data also has to do with the definition of data categories. After decades, they may have defined a new category for such surveys, after lengthy debates, and therefore a significant shift in employment mix. For ex. we can argue that software programming is also largely a production job because they produce custom software for clients! And computer is only a tool like other machines. Seeing so, I guess the job mix has not even changed much since the industry revolution! But for fast changing situations, such view can be too shallow and harbor dangerous blind spots. Of course it always depends on the perspectives. If we care only about whether there will be more unemployment or the disappear of a whole job category then yes, Yale report and alike are helpful. If people however care about the two 2 millions call-center jobs in the Philippines or the difficulties in the job market for CS fresh graduates then such reports could create a dangerous complacency.
- battwell 1y agoGimbel et al's methodology and limitations are well described. The data is available. And crucially Joshua Kendall's code is available online (https://github.com/Budget-Lab-Yale/AI-Employment-Model https://github.com/Budget-Lab-Yale/AI-Employment-Model). I wish more research was done this way.