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Great article, well written. I'd certainly consider interviewing this guy - if I was hiring. Based on the other comments it's worth noting a few things: 1. Ahm

Great article, well written. I'd certainly consider interviewing this guy - if I was hiring. Based on the other comments it's worth noting a few things: 1. Ahmed seems to be in the UK, not the USA. H1Bs don't affect him. This isn't obvious because he talks about the USA. However, the mass immigration into the UK might have impacted him by saturating the low skill markets such that everyone else has to fight over the remaining high skill jobs. 2. His internships and projects have all been ML/AI, with his most recent at DeepMind. It's not obvious from the article that he's been one of the people working on automating everyone else out of a job; an ironic twist given his predicament (I'm sympathetic but to some extent, those of us who live by the sword...) 3. The British economy is in the toilet at the moment. This is the most likely reason he can't find a job but it doesn't get a mention at all, which is curious. It doesn't make much economic sense to grow a corporate presence in the UK currently given that Labour is raising taxes, attacking the private sector, imposing heavy regulation on the tech industry and so on.

phatfish 1y ago
I wish Labour would impose any regulation on the tech industry, let alone "heavy". The UK is running sacred of Trump and will do nothing to stop the US tech giants avoiding tax and causing social unrest.
- nradov 1y ago
  Why hasn't the UK been able to create any local tech giants? Would more regulations imposed by a Labour government help to turn that around?
  - rolandog 1y ago
    Actually, you have it the other way around! Why hasn't the US done more to create a rich ecosystem of tech companies, instead of a couple of bloated giants that syphon our wealth and avoid taxes?
    - nradov 1y ago
      Actually, you have it the other way around! The US has a rich ecosystem of rapidly growing startup tech companies. Many of us on HN are working for them. There has never been a better time to build something new.
      - brazukadev 1y ago
        > There has never been a better time to build something new. Were you not around 10-20 years ago?
        nradov 1y ago
        Yes, I was! Building new stuff back then was much harder due to lack of enabling infrastructure and tools. Just to take one example, AWS only started offering real cloud services in 2006 and for the first few years it wasn't a platform you could really use to build a whole company.
  - rvz 1y ago
    Because the UK does not care about its own technology businesses and simply offshores the work overseas and even when they don't, they end up selling off the company to a foreign buyer. > Would more regulations imposed by a Labour government help to turn that around? That would accelerate the decline.
  - altacc 1y ago
    > Why hasn't the UK been able to create any local tech giants? In the UK there are several tech or tech adjacent companies valued in the tens or hundreds of billions such as ARM, BAE, Revolut, Sage and delivery companies like Deliveroo & Ocado are tech equivalents. Sure there could be more but given that the UK only recently came out of 14 years of being run by pro-capitalist, pro-privatization, small-government conservatives, I don't think it's 18 months of weak Labour rule that is the issue. Personally, from having spent half my life there working in tech, I think it's more a mix of culture and market size. I often hear "why are the big tech companies only in the US" but there are big tech companies all over the world that people haven't heard of because "we" have a US focused media. The big 7 do definitely dominate globally but I'd argue that this isn't actually a healthy situation or model that other countries should emulated. I suspect smaller, localized versions of US companies would probably have better consequences.
rorylawless 1y ago
It seems he graduated early this year so hasn't been in the market for too long. A few months out of work is a soul destroying experience, however, it can get worse, unfortunately.
visarga 1y ago
> Great article, well written. >> The question is no longer whether a model can cover the job that was going to exist anyway. The question is whether a human can justify their presence next to a stack of models. >> The central question for future labour markets is not whether you are clever or diligent in some absolute sense. It is whether what you do is ordinary enough for a model to learn or strange enough to fall through the gaps. Well written by GPT? Besides a few telltale signs, it has a very uniform structure and cadence that is not natural. Apparently AI is automating the AI automation cry as well. The article is well written. I think it is a LLM discussion with the author, where the author made his case, then rewritten as an article by the LLM and revised manually for signs of LLM
- mizzao 1y ago
  It didn't have LLM smell to me, at all. LLM-written essays are often very fluffy because expanding a prompt into more words often produces lots of air — but this one felt very "dense" with lots of ideas per capita.
  - jfewhfuehg 1y ago
    You realise you can change the writing style and not rely on the default?
    - derwiki 1y ago
      Or give it samples of your writing
    - array_key_first 1y ago
      You realize that this argument can then be used to claim literally anything is AI generated? And, thereby, the criticism of AI-ness becomes worthless noise?
- simianwords 1y ago
  the awkward punctuation like using commas suggest that it wasn't LLM generated
ForHackernews 1y ago
It's hard to fault a young CS student for focusing on AI (that's where all the hype is) but there is a certain irony that he'd probably be more employable if he had some experience working on Boring Line of Business (BLOB) apps. The tech industry will probably always have orders of magnitude more "can you make this CSV/XML/JSON format slightly different" jobs than frontier AI gigs.
port11 1y ago
> The British economy is in the toilet at the moment. I had no idea, but is it much worse than everywhere else in Europe? I've spoken to a few recruiters and the main reason they're not posting job in Belgium is because they're offshoring to Poland, Serbia, and Bulgaria. That might be the issue in UK as well. It's especially bad for juniors.

phatfish 1y ago

I wish Labour would impose any regulation on the tech industry, let alone "heavy". The UK is running sacred of Trump and will do nothing to stop the US tech giants avoiding tax and causing social unrest.

nradov 1y ago
Why hasn't the UK been able to create any local tech giants? Would more regulations imposed by a Labour government help to turn that around?
- rolandog 1y ago
  Actually, you have it the other way around! Why hasn't the US done more to create a rich ecosystem of tech companies, instead of a couple of bloated giants that syphon our wealth and avoid taxes?
  - nradov 1y ago
    Actually, you have it the other way around! The US has a rich ecosystem of rapidly growing startup tech companies. Many of us on HN are working for them. There has never been a better time to build something new.
    - brazukadev 1y ago
      > There has never been a better time to build something new. Were you not around 10-20 years ago?
      - nradov 1y ago
        Yes, I was! Building new stuff back then was much harder due to lack of enabling infrastructure and tools. Just to take one example, AWS only started offering real cloud services in 2006 and for the first few years it wasn't a platform you could really use to build a whole company.
- rvz 1y ago
  Because the UK does not care about its own technology businesses and simply offshores the work overseas and even when they don't, they end up selling off the company to a foreign buyer. > Would more regulations imposed by a Labour government help to turn that around? That would accelerate the decline.
- altacc 1y ago
  > Why hasn't the UK been able to create any local tech giants? In the UK there are several tech or tech adjacent companies valued in the tens or hundreds of billions such as ARM, BAE, Revolut, Sage and delivery companies like Deliveroo & Ocado are tech equivalents. Sure there could be more but given that the UK only recently came out of 14 years of being run by pro-capitalist, pro-privatization, small-government conservatives, I don't think it's 18 months of weak Labour rule that is the issue. Personally, from having spent half my life there working in tech, I think it's more a mix of culture and market size. I often hear "why are the big tech companies only in the US" but there are big tech companies all over the world that people haven't heard of because "we" have a US focused media. The big 7 do definitely dominate globally but I'd argue that this isn't actually a healthy situation or model that other countries should emulated. I suspect smaller, localized versions of US companies would probably have better consequences.

rorylawless 1y ago

It seems he graduated early this year so hasn't been in the market for too long. A few months out of work is a soul destroying experience, however, it can get worse, unfortunately.

visarga 1y ago

> Great article, well written. >> The question is no longer whether a model can cover the job that was going to exist anyway. The question is whether a human can justify their presence next to a stack of models. >> The central question for future labour markets is not whether you are clever or diligent in some absolute sense. It is whether what you do is ordinary enough for a model to learn or strange enough to fall through the gaps. Well written by GPT? Besides a few telltale signs, it has a very uniform structure and cadence that is not natural. Apparently AI is automating the AI automation cry as well. The article is well written. I think it is a LLM discussion with the author, where the author made his case, then rewritten as an article by the LLM and revised manually for signs of LLM

mizzao 1y ago
It didn't have LLM smell to me, at all. LLM-written essays are often very fluffy because expanding a prompt into more words often produces lots of air — but this one felt very "dense" with lots of ideas per capita.
- jfewhfuehg 1y ago
  You realise you can change the writing style and not rely on the default?
  - derwiki 1y ago
    Or give it samples of your writing
  - array_key_first 1y ago
    You realize that this argument can then be used to claim literally anything is AI generated? And, thereby, the criticism of AI-ness becomes worthless noise?
simianwords 1y ago
the awkward punctuation like using commas suggest that it wasn't LLM generated

ForHackernews 1y ago

It's hard to fault a young CS student for focusing on AI (that's where all the hype is) but there is a certain irony that he'd probably be more employable if he had some experience working on Boring Line of Business (BLOB) apps. The tech industry will probably always have orders of magnitude more "can you make this CSV/XML/JSON format slightly different" jobs than frontier AI gigs.

port11 1y ago

> The British economy is in the toilet at the moment. I had no idea, but is it much worse than everywhere else in Europe? I've spoken to a few recruiters and the main reason they're not posting job in Belgium is because they're offshoring to Poland, Serbia, and Bulgaria. That might be the issue in UK as well. It's especially bad for juniors.