9 ms·

This article is kind of playful, but I think there’s a serious point here that’s not discussed enough. We’re being asked to usher in huge productivity gains by

by cattown 4mo ago

This article is kind of playful, but I think there’s a serious point here that’s not discussed enough. We’re being asked to usher in huge productivity gains by introducing AI to our workflows, but we’re not asking how does it help us? Not a lot of us stand to directly gain from our employers becoming more productive. I know everybody is afraid of getting fired and replaced with AI or whatever right now. But we should be seriously asking in our next all hands meetings if 10x’ing our productivity can get us some days off. Or when our paycheck is going to be multiplied accordingly. So far we’re all kind of being chumps about this, bragging on Linkedin about all of our new found AI productivity while accepting less job security and no increase in comp.

calvinmorrison 4mo ago
well productivity gains are largely met with higher standard of living, quality of life and the upward movement of the lowest classes, for one.
- p-e-w 4mo ago
  That hasn’t been true for decades in the West, even though per-capita productivity has been steadily rising since WW2.
  - MichaelZuo 4mo ago
    Are you sure? From the data I’ve seen the bottom decile Americans consume significantly more per capita compared to even 2006. e.g. plane travel was completely absent amongst the bottom decile in 2006, like so close to zero mileage per capita per annum it was a rounding error.
    - p-e-w 4mo ago
      Plane travel is a very poor proxy for quality of life. Home ownership, high-quality food, working hours etc. seem far more relevant.
      - MichaelZuo 4mo ago
        Huh? People will, intentionally, work longer hours to afford more frequent plane travel. And to upgrade classes, perks, lounge access, etc… I’m pretty sure there are literally millions of people like that.
    - king_geedorah 4mo ago
      Is bottom decile consumption a good measure of economic health? In a way it seems it could signal the opposite, ie in the past the bottom decile was saving that money in an effort to change their economic conditions vs spending it now could indicate a lack of hope for upward mobility. To your example it seems worth noting that the quality of the air travel experience appears to decline over time as well.
      - MichaelZuo 4mo ago
        Bottom decile consumption is the best measure of economic health for the bottom decile… it clearly cannot be the best measure across the entirety of the population. Real physical consumption is by far the hardest metric to game or play tricks with. Yes technically, some probably are trading a bit of their future prospects for a nicer flight schedule, less red-eyes, etc… But I don’t see how that is relevant at all?
    - ux266478 4mo ago
      Yes actually, this is remarkably well studied: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-... I hate to imagine what this graph looks like today, given the massive amount of inflation that's happened in the last 6 years.
- passive 4mo ago
  That's not generally true in the US over the last 40 years, where the gains from productivity increases have been accumulated almost entirely by the top classes. Yes, lower classes have access to many more conveniences then they might have had in earlier decades, but they are working far more hours, and their expected lifespan has started decreasing.
  - calvinmorrison 4mo ago
    my dad grew up in a house without running water in a town where everyone worked in a mine and the lead was everywhere. he hitchiked to alaska for seasonal work in a fish cannery. Yeah I don't know... i think things are better than they were 40 years ago.
    - Sl1mb0 4mo ago
      There are still people in America who live without running water. There are still people who work on fishing boats in Alaska. There are still people who hitchhike. This is literally just an anecdote trying to deflect from contemporary problems. I don't see any value in this sort of discourse. Just because things may have been worse for specific individuals does *not* mean that current problems shouldn't be addressed.
      - calvinmorrison 4mo ago
        oh no an anecdote! run away!
        shimman 4mo ago
        You should, especially when said anecdote amounts to "shut the fuck up and be thankful to your corporate overlords peasant."
      - jmye 4mo ago
        > Just because things may have been worse for specific individuals does not mean that current problems shouldn't be addressed. Suggesting that things are better now than they were in 1986 for the overwhelming majority of people is not, in any way whatsoever, suggesting that "problems shouldn't be addressed". Come on. Y'all have got to start actually reading things before smashing that reply button.
chipsrafferty 4mo ago
Right. If I am producing 10x more output then I expect to be getting paid about 8x more or working 8x less.
- arjvik 4mo ago
  something something you're paid the amount the market values your work, which in today's job market is an order of magnitude less than the profit you bring the company
  - r-w 4mo ago
    Well then why make it easy for my work to get devalued? It's not like workers are sitting on the sidelines here, they (I'm aggregate, at least) hold all the power.
    - codebje 4mo ago
      Sounds like an argument for organised labour to me!
    - majormajor 4mo ago
      The US still largely believes everything that Reagan Republicans preached about the "evils" of taxation and regulation of oligarchy, despite the US economy overall (and the "average joe") doing quite well in the era that followed "soak the rich" taxes being passed. So many claims about how it would lead to far better lives for everyone, but the working conditions and general affordability have basically gone down for 40 years. Imagine bringing back the white collar work in the 80s, with a private office with a door, and people whose jobs were to help coordinate and schedule things even if you weren't an exec, instead of you just having a phone to answer all hours of the day.
  - rootusrootus 4mo ago
    > in today's job market is an order of magnitude less than the profit you bring the company Then why have we not all been fired already? Sounds like an instant win.
monkaiju 4mo ago
I mean productivity gains don't usually go towards making the workers life any better. Also I'm still less than convinced there are any net productivity gains from AI anyway.
- coro_1 4mo ago
  AI copy pasta misses beats. I've seen people forget to review their comms, and create a lot of confusion, wasting time actually.
Hamster7330 4mo ago
Wow. Yes.
BrenBarn 4mo ago
> We’re being asked to usher in huge productivity gains by introducing AI to our workflows, but we’re not asking how does it help us? More flour more water. More water more flour.
Cakez0r 4mo ago
The reality is that most people are paid for their time, not for their output. I think most contracts for salaried employees are along the lines of "work n hours a week". If you want to get paid for output, you can't be a salaried employee.
- kbar13 4mo ago
  is this not backwards? salaried employee means you get paid the same amount no matter how many hours you work.
  - hexis 4mo ago
    typically there is a floor, at least de facto.
    - Cakez0r 4mo ago
      The contracts I've seen have an explicit floor, not a de facto one. I.E. The contract says the minimum number of hours you need to work. Some countries also have overtime laws which create a ceiling. Either way it doesn't change that being paid for your output is the realm of entrepreneurship and submitting bids for project work.
      - gbear605 4mo ago
        At least for my software job in the US, and other salaried jobs I’ve seen, there are explicitly no hours listed, and it’s supposedly based only on your output. In practice though, if your butt isn’t in the seat 40 hours a week or so, and usually more, the boss will be mad.
      - dcrazy 4mo ago
        Employment contracts are virtually nonexistent here in the U.S. While the norm is “40 hours”, actual requirements vary by employer, may or may not be communicated in writing, and can change at the employer’s whim. If you make under $107,432 per year (which is around starting salary for fresh graduates at FAANG), you are entitled to overtime pay (minimum 1.5x) for hours worked beyond 40 in a week.
ux266478 4mo ago
> Or when our paycheck is going to be multiplied accordingly. That doesn't increase shareholder value, so it would be a violation of the c-suite's fiduciary responsibility. Sorry, the extra capital will instead be used on stock buybacks.
- rootusrootus 4mo ago
  <insert required disclaimer here that fiduciary duty does not require using every opportunity to increase shareholder value>
- twbarr 4mo ago
  Fiduciary responsibility also requires long-term thinking. If AI is writing the code, I need the smartest, most well-rested supervisors I can get.
- jmye 4mo ago
  > Sorry, the extra capital will instead be used on stock buybacks. Given how start-up (and thus equity) heavy this board is, that should also directly multiply total comp, even though it was meant as a vapid snipe and isn't actually vaguely valid outside of a handful of very large companies.
armada651 4mo ago
When your labor force makes gains in productivity you can choose to do one of two things: 1. Reduce working hours 2. Grow the economy Guess which option was last picked in 1868 and never again despite massive gains in productivity?
- majormajor 4mo ago
  Are we really so sure that reducing working hours can't, itself, lead to improved economic health? Such as by increasing distribution of income flows, and increasing time available for economic consumption? One of the greatest tricks of the modern era in the US has been to convince everyone that making the slice of pie bigger for the richest people is necessary to grow the economy.
  - Aurornis 4mo ago
    > and increasing time available for economic consumption? Where is that additional money going to come from? I think you’re missing some important factors in your analysis.
    - Timon3 4mo ago
      1. Not everyone is spending all their "spending money" every month, and 2. more free time allows people to get more value for their money (e.g. by comparing more alternative options).
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - danaris 4mo ago
    In fact, we now know, with a fairly high degree of certainty, that it can. There have been numerous experiments with four-day work weeks or six-hour work days that have almost uniformly shown increases in overall productivity. Not just productivity per hour at work. Overall productivity. The resistance to this is clearly not based in financial concerns, but rather in control, and classism.
whatshisface 4mo ago
Working out why the workweek is 5 days, non-negotiably, even if you'd be willing to be paid less in proportion, comes down to realizing that it's being maximized subject to the constraint that everybody would flip out if it was 6, and then working out why it's being maximized. What it's telling you is that a company would rather have 4 people working 5 days a week than 5 people working 4 days a week. The reason for that is, productivity drops a lot when it's spread out over multiple people. The reason behind that is communication overhead - the more context an individual carries in their heads, the less likely their role will exist on an hourly basis in the industry. So, if anyone wants AI to give us another day off, we need to think about how it can reduce the cost of "context switching" a whole person on and off a task, without simultaneously formalizing our roles so much that it gives us all five. ;-)
- majormajor 4mo ago
  > Working out why the workweek is 5 days, non-negotiably, even if you'd be willing to be paid less in proportion, comes down to realizing that it's being maximized subject to the constraint that everybody would flip out if it was 6, and then working out why it's being maximized. This ignores a lot of historical fighting (sometimes literally!) to get it down to 5 in the first place. If everyone sufficiently "flips out" about it being 5 then the problem of "reduce the context switching problem" is something the owner can try to figure out. Cause otherwise, you could find a perfect solution to that problem, and still not have leverage to make ownership actually change anything vs just raise expectations that much higher. (Meanwhile, some companies are trying to import 996 and push it past 5 for white-collar work anyway, so any sort of non-political, non-disruptive action seems doomed to fail since the status quo is moving the wrong direction.)
  - whatshisface 4mo ago
    The "flipping out" aspect is something that does not seem to have a lot to do with technology at this time or in the past.
    - majormajor 4mo ago
apt-apt-apt-apt 4mo ago
Same answer as for most hope-filled employee questions sadly: You get to keep your job. You agreed to accept X pay for 40 hours, do it or we'll find someone else who will.
- bruhFaaahNo 4mo ago
  Except all the people who drilled such mandates into our heads are dying off. These things persist over time only so long as we keep discussing them. We're really failing to meet the moment before us by merely repeating the propaganda of elders that glaze over on live TV trying to act authoritative and useful to humanity. Exploitation of youth is no less ageist than telling gramps look in the mirror.
- slg 4mo ago
  That's why it has to be collective. That's why OP mentioned saying it in an all hands. That's why there's always discussion of tech worker unions despite our high pay. Any one of us try to push too hard on this sort of thing on our own and they'll "just find someone else" who would happily take our place.
  - ipaddr 4mo ago
    [flagged]
    - slg 4mo ago
      Classic American politics right there: Person 1: "We need class solidarity against the billionaires." Person 2: "No, it's the immigrants' fault."
      - deleted 4mo ago
        [deleted]
      - petersellers 4mo ago
        So true. Pick your boogeyman (Muslims/Immigrants/Antifa/Trans/"Marxists"), pump the attack propaganda through all available media channels and hope no one mentions the billionaires. It's been awhile since 9/11 and we've got pretty short memories, so we'll probably cycle back to Muslims soon.
giancarlostoro 4mo ago
Meanwhile my employer still has not given us any AI tooling. I build more things for personal use and for niche hobbies that are more refined, polished and documented than most employers have ever given me in terms of project requirements. Everyone keeps saying the bottleneck was not how fast you can write the code. I believe the bottleneck is two-fold: coding without architecting and no solid business requirements. I do agree though, give me AI tooling, and I will build you cities, but pay me to match it.
trinsic2 4mo ago
I think people should use AI to start their own business instead of working for someone else's vision. I mean if you're working for someone else your choices are limited. And I'm not saying that you should be mistreated. I'm just saying you have more control of your life when you're working for yourself.
11101010010001 4mo ago
just don't call it organized labor.
winterbourne 4mo ago
It's a modern version of: "we're firing you, but your last task will be to train your lower-cost replacement".
vanuatu 4mo ago
I think equity compensation should be normalized (or ideally allow employees to choose the % of their compensation is equity vs. cash) so every employee can partake in the upside of the company.
pseudosavant 4mo ago
While I agree with the playful sentiment of the post, this isn't what happened for factory workers as their work has been augmented by automation. Ford makes twice as many vehicles per worker in 2025 than they did in 1960. Did the auto workers get 20-hour work weeks? Nope. I have to ask myself why we think us white collar knowledge workers are so special? Even if I do dream of a time where automation leads all of us to a 3-4 day work week.
ikjasdlk2234 4mo ago
I think the feeling is if we want to even keep our current footing in the market we have to increase productivity by 10x because everyone else is as well. And if everyone else is, the productivity floor is raised but every other competitor has done the same so we don't have 10x the economic output, maybe only a marginal increase. If that is true, then there will be no days off because we have just reset the status quo. edit: spelling
- paulhebert 4mo ago
  Exactly. All the employers are still sharing the same sized market. There’s not more money going around for them to earn. But they’re also paying hefty AI bills so there’s less money for salaries. The AI companies just swoop in and take some of the money that was going to the working man
- xena 4mo ago
  Chinese youth have a term for this, neijuan: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=neijuan https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=neijuan
  - colordrops 4mo ago
    Isn't that just the same as "Red Queen's Race" or "tragedy of the commons"?
moduspol 4mo ago
Computers and the Internet ushered in huge productivity gains. Despite many people losing their jobs as a result, it's tough to argue society isn't better off. I think that's the key difference with AI, though. It's not like I'm losing my job, but at least I have a robot at home that cleans the house and does my laundry. People are having their livelihoods threatened while their utility bills go up because of datacenters, and the only substantive impact in their personal lives is that now they have to deal with chatbots and low effort automated customer service agents even more. I'm OK with accepting a job that pays 10x less if the efficiencies from AI mean we're all living in abundance and life is >10x cheaper. But it's unclear if/when we'll move beyond marginal business impact, aside from in software development, I suppose.
- Ancalagon 4mo ago
  Is society better off? Honest question, you used to be able to support a family of four with a single 9-5.
  - fyrn_ 4mo ago
    Shareholders = society. The rest of us are just the help
  - bwhiting2356 4mo ago
    More household work was done in this era, before grocery stores sold prepared food, before washing machines. And more people lived in less square footage, with grandparents living in the home, less privacy and autonomy. I don't know if we've made the right trade, but it's not the case that a single worker's income was paying for the kind of lifestyle a family of four now has.
    - esikich 4mo ago
      How is this relevant? The houses built in the 60s aren't affordable either. Look at median income and median home prices. You're telling on yourself. Average families aren't buying prepared food and they have a washing machine from the 90s they bought on craigslist. There's a 90% chance if you are on this site, you are not average. You are a part of the haves and you need to consider that you are living a very different life from the average American, which all this productivity should be helping but fucking clearly isn't.
codex_dev_33352 4mo ago
[flagged]
codex_dev_33352 4mo ago
[flagged]
aaron695 4mo ago
[dead]
stego-tech 4mo ago
If workers got time off relative to the productivity gains achieved of the past fifty years and considering the comparatively stagnant wages over that time period, we’d only be working 2 to 3 days a week, tops. The author might be being playful, but an increasing amount of folks at or past their breaking points definitely aren’t.
denkmoon 4mo ago
Tech workers _are_ a bunch of chumps. Temporarily embarrassed billionaire startup founders. The vehicle for this is a union, and tech workers abjectly refuse to unionise.
paulhebert 4mo ago
Right, the AI companies don’t even try to pretend it’s good for the average person. The message could be “we’ll all do more by working less.” Instead it’s, “some people will lose their jobs while everyone else works the same amount or more”
- arkh 4mo ago
  What's crazy is the glee when saying that. It's like "fuck those uppity low class people who managed to move up socially thanks to an in-demand job requiring some skill". Now we're back to only who you know, skills are for the AI.
- Nasrudith 4mo ago
  To play devil's advocate: Why exactly would you expect to get paid more just because there was a big investment in more expensive tools? You're not working any harder, the machine is. Getting paid more is always nice of course. Any pay rises have been more of a side effect in the past of complexity and therefore needing more skilled labor to say operate a bulldozer or backhoe than it does for any individual with a shovel. Productivity may boost the economic ceiling of 'how much they can pay before they literally start losing money' but more assembly lines didn't mean big pay raises. A backhoe didn't mean that ditch diggers suddenly got paid 50 to 100 times what they were previously from other's expenditures because they could dig that much more. And that is before the back-and-forth of induced demand and supply vs demand causing the price of the labor to drop with more efficiency. AI's whole thing is to provide for easier operation and trying to deskill the operations. (Key word: trying, currently knowing what the hell you are doing is essential for filtering good outputs from bad).
  - account42 4mo ago
    We expect that because the company is only allowed to exist at the will of society at large.
  - ElevenLathe 4mo ago
    A social system that looks at a technology like LLMs and decides to use it to increase "output" in some abstract way while reducing the median standard of living is a system that will have a hard time maintaining popular (non-elite) legitimacy. That doesn't mean it will evaporate over night -- plenty of ghastly social systems have survived centuries with very little non-elite legitimacy. It remains to be seen if LLMs will be used in this way, but the messaging so far (including your post, the one I'm replying to) suggests that the elites' inclination is exactly that: more profit, more control, more power now for elites, temporary (possibly years, maybe as long a generation or three) but real suffering for many of the rest, and a steady state at the end of the transition where they are still in charge, much richer, and maybe also everyone else is better off (if they can't capture the gains completely for themselves).
JimDabell 4mo ago
> We’re being asked to usher in huge productivity gains by introducing AI to our workflows, but we’re not asking how does it help us? Not a lot of us stand to directly gain from our employers becoming more productive. How much money do you think the average developer would be making if we all were using punchcards instead of typing? Inputting machine code instead of using a compiler? Every time we increase our productivity, we can build bigger and better things for the same amount of effort. This makes us more valuable than before. Our output grows and the world’s appetite for software grows with it. This has been true for the entire history of the software industry and it’s the reason why developers are very well paid. You may not see it at the individual level, but we are reaping the rewards of increased productivity at the macro level.
theptip 4mo ago
I think it’s pretty naive to ask your employer for a day off. As experienced by companies, the market is more competitive than ever. Whoever slows down will get eaten by some hungry upstart that is willing to work 996 to eat the incumbent’s lunch. It’s a Prisoner’s Dilemma. The only way to get this outcome is to coordinate at a level higher than individual market participants. In other words, get your government to implement UBI - tax all companies (or if AI really takes off, just compute) and redistribute to the people.
- lazide 4mo ago
  lol, this government is going to just throw anyone trying into the meat grinder. The only way to do this is to bypass the authorities.
  - ixtli 4mo ago
    Few willing to discuss this!
  - Griffinsauce 4mo ago
    Or change them.
- mastazi 4mo ago
  > I think it’s pretty naive to ask your employer for a day off. Someone said the same before 1938, probably [1] I think it's possible that AI will bring as much of a shift to our lives as the industrial revolution did, so it might be necessary to make some adjustments, just like we did back then. [1] https://www.history.com/articles/five-day-work-week-labor-movement https://www.history.com/articles/five-day-work-week-labor-mo...
  - UncleOxidant 4mo ago
    yep. The Progressive Era (with it's 5 day work week women's suffrage ) came after, and was a backlash to The Gilded Age. Now we're in Gilded Age II (Gilded Age on Steroids). Hopefully we'll see history repeat itself and we get Progressive Era II. But keep in mind that the Progressive Era only lasted about 20 years, if that long.
ipaddr 4mo ago
You are not the 10x factor and can't use it to increase your wage. If you leave the next person is a 10x factor because of ai. Now if AI providers all increased prices they could get a raise.
jrflowers 4mo ago
Benefits from productivity gains only go to shareholders gp, it’s the foundational principle that underpins the whole world economy :-D
bix6 4mo ago
I will be automating the things that annoy me so I can spend time on the things I like.
thewebguyd 4mo ago
> Or when our paycheck is going to be multiplied accordingly. And when/if it doesn't, unionize. I know the HN crowd historically hasn't looked favorably on Unions, but times are changing. It's long past time for unions in tech. We've fared well individually for a long time, but that time is coming to an end.
Eridrus 4mo ago
I think it's a fair question to ask ourselves. But it's worth noting how leisure hours have been allocated after the invention of the 5 hour work week: we've reduced working hours at the end of life (longer retirements), start of life (longer education), and some amount of people simply do not work. There hasn't been a reduction in hours during peak earning potential because many jobs are competitive, because firms are in competition with each other. Maybe some companies will start doing 4 day work weeks because they find that productivity doesn't actually increase from 4 to 5 days and then start outcompeting other companies for talent. But unless 5 days is actually not more productive than 4 days, we're going to have the most competitive organizations continue to be 5 days a week.
- omnimus 4mo ago
  It's strange to put it like “we invented 40hour workweek”. It was extremely hard fight won by cooperation of many levels of the working class. The business owners absolutely didn't want it. This would have to happen again. But there is none of that worker unity so it's unlikely to happen. The productivity gains will go solely to the bussiness owners.
  - Eridrus 4mo ago
    While unions did fight for the 40 hour work week and crystalized that specific number, their actual causal impact (on hours worked, not law) is contested since hours were already falling well before unions were organizing for the 40 hour work week.
Buttons840 4mo ago
One possibility is once AI becomes profitable and wildly successful, and we all lose our jobs, we vote to nationalize the AI companies, and send some good vibes (but no money) to the VCs who paid for it, and remember that the AI was only built by breaking copyright law at an industrial scale and so it's fair to nationalize it.
- radu_floricica 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  - knappe 4mo ago
    Right. Those productive companies that totally didn't just steal the entirety of humanities production to build their product.
    - radu_floricica 4mo ago
      [flagged]
  - colordrops 4mo ago
    That analogy only works if the gold being laid by the goose caused all other geese to eventually cease to exist or at least be sent into the countryside infertile while the golden goose continues to live in a walled castle surrounded by golden military robots.
  - niels_bom 4mo ago
    Nothing bad has ever happened from privatizing well running government orgs either.
- Aurornis 4mo ago
  Good thing all of the AI companies in the world operate only inside one country. I'm sure all of the other technology companies, AI ventures, and investors will continue putting their headquarters in a country that did this and gave the investors $0. Nothing bad would happen, of course.
sharts 4mo ago
10x productivity with layoffs to compensate. throw in more AI slop causing more outages and you’re working more than before
dolebirchwood 4mo ago
> 10x’ing our productivity Normalizing this "10x" language (well before AI) is a factor in this problem. It's been so loosely and casually thrown about in this industry. 10x engineer... 10x mindset... 10x growth... 10x this... 10x that... All paraded around by people who fancied themselves to be their own version of 10x whatever. Well, keep parroting this long enough, and it's just a matter of time before people not only believe it to be commonplace, but they start to expect and demand it. So now we have AI as the next thing foisted upon us to force everyone to be 10x or die trying. Should've just settled for being 3.14x engineers like reasonable people.
Rekindle8090 4mo ago
[dead]
win311fwg 4mo ago
> productivity can get us some days off. Days off might be a challenging ask as the AI needs feedback more often than that. Working sporadically throughout the day, able to do what you please between the AI asking questions, is realistic. We're already there, frankly.
resonious 4mo ago
It won't get you days off because you (rather, your employer) will fall behind those who didn't opt to take days off. You'd only get days off if it was only you who got a 10x increase. But it's everybody. So it's status quo: technology advances, and you have to keep up if you want to stay in the industry.
- dd8601fn 4mo ago
  > It won't get you days off because you (rather, your employer) will fall behind those who didn't opt to take days off. I don’t believe this is true. Or that more hours worked reliably translates to serious competitive advantage, in general. But your point stands, because many (or most) employers think it does, and employees are usually incentivized to support that notion.
- tumdum_ 4mo ago
  40 hours work week wasn’t always the case and yet here we are.
palmotea 4mo ago
> This article is kind of playful, but I think there’s a serious point here that’s not discussed enough. We’re being asked to usher in huge productivity gains by introducing AI to our workflows, but we’re not asking how does it help us? Not a lot of us stand to directly gain from our employers becoming more productive. And we shouldn't. Workers should only get the wages they can command in the marketplace and not a penny more, and the smaller the better. > I know everybody is afraid of getting fired and replaced with AI or whatever right now. But we should be seriously asking in our next all hands meetings if 10x’ing our productivity can get us some days off. Or when our paycheck is going to be multiplied accordingly. Morally, all benefits of any technology or productivity gain must flow up to the owners, who deserve it all. But this should be comforting to all of you. I'm sure everyone here owns at least a few thousand dollars in shares. You'll get some dividends and/or capital gains!
mathattack 4mo ago
The question is are we more like farm workers who will be unemployed because of the farm or accountants who become much more valuable and high paid because of the spreadsheet? And I am grateful for not working on a farm, it’s hard work!
throw262672 4mo ago
You got into a contract. This contract specified what you will do and usually for how long. Unless this contract specified you need to get X done, I don’t see any way you can argue for this in any way that makes sense. _Nothing_ I do that benefits my employer directly benefits me. AI or not. That was the whole idea of the relationship: I show up, perform some type of labor and am shielded from the bullshit of doing business (to some tolerable extend). The employer in turn forks over hard cash. The exact, same F amount every month and on time, no discussions about it. If your actions directly or indirectly caused a loss to the business do you give up free days or pay? I don’t think you should. This works both ways. However, that’s on the level of the individual. If you’re saying we should unionize, then, hell yes.
- jessetemp 4mo ago
  Creating a throwaway for this comment is telling
  - throw23232 4mo ago
    It's actually rather boring: I forget/don't care about my account.
xnx 4mo ago
> But we should be seriously asking in our next all hands meetings if 10x’ing our productivity can get us some days off. Pretty sure if you ask this that they'll give you all your days off.
- bbor 4mo ago
  Standing up for yourself and your peers is a virtue, not a weakness. Yes, it’s easy to crack down on individual dissent — but only if you stay quiet.
  - Melatonic 4mo ago
    Union!
  - diordiderot 4mo ago
    You know who will shut up and do as their told, the H1B replacing you this fall
    - kakacik 4mo ago
      Nothing like self-imposed anticipatory pressure ruining one's life. Maybe you are right, maybe not, nobody knows. What everybody knows is that life is happening now and its extremely short even in best scenario, yet few act accordingly.
  - keybored 4mo ago
    This is HN, where labor unions are considered nice-in-theory-evil-in-practice while we with eyes with open resign ourselves to doing nothing. Your livelihood has a price (duh, your wage). But making cynical remarks about how stupid it is to want things to improve? Priceless.
    - pjmlp 4mo ago
      Only from the US HNers for the most part, I enjoy the benefits unions have brought to my work life. Kind of ironic, given the way unions came to be in US during the 1930's.
danaris 4mo ago
This is why we need to be unionizing en masse. There have been movements toward this in the US, but particularly in the tech sector, far too many people are still stuffed full of decades of anti-union propaganda (like the idea that the union is a "third party" rather than being the workers themselves, or that it would bring down their salary because they're such a special awesome 10x developer and 10x negotiator). The executive class has taken roughly all the productivity increases since 1980 and slid them straight into their bulging pockets, at our expense. The only way we get any of that back, or prevent them from taking this new increase from us too, is to stand together against them.
throwaway63467 4mo ago
It’s been like that for a while, economic gains went to a small fraction of people, before software developers were among those that were on the winning side, now they’re on the losing side. Think about how much the US economy is growing right now and who really profits from that growth. My guess is that 90 % of the growth goes to 10 % of people, with AI maybe 99 % might go to the 1 %. Or who do you think will gain from the tokenization of development? You’re just supposed to be more productive and the gains the company achieves will just go to the owners as they are in a great position right now and developers are scared shitless to get fired, so no one is increasing salaries or time off, instead most companies hang the threat of layoffs over people’s head to keep them in line. And the funny thing is we developers did this to ourselves, by doing free open source work for the greater good, which now feeds AI models that are replacing many of us. But I guess most people didn’t care as they made good money while it lasted.
- abletonlive 4mo ago
  > before software developers were among those that were on the winning side, now they’re on the losing side. are you sure about that? i'm a software engineer and i feel like i'm on the wining side now, even more than before. I'm considering quitting my 500K a year job to go compete against the employers. they seem like dinosaurs to me.
  - forcedtolinux 4mo ago
    you personally are winning, but 500k comp is an outlier and not the norm, especially now
    - abletonlive 4mo ago
      You don't understand what I'm saying. I'm saying the 500K comp is not worth it and i want to quit to go compete against all the employers that are offering such comp. I am positioning myself to do it this year. Software engineers have more leverage than ever.
      - 4mo ago
dannersy 4mo ago
It is honestly offensive to me that this isn't plainly obvious to everyone. AI has never, ever, and never will be, about making life better for the average human. It has always been, and always will be, about wealth consolidation and control. Does anyone think it is coincidence that now local models are more useful the market has suddenly made it massively more expensive to buy your own hardware? Companies are just giving up making consumer hardware because they can can just focus on hyper-scalers. They want to control compute as well, there is no liberating aspect to any of this. Businesses, especially tech ones, are not altruistic. The idea that tech companies are out to make anyone's life better is a joke and a sentiment that should have died decades ago. The evidence is of predatory business practices and leveraging the worst aspects of our brain chemistry to keep us hooked on apps that make us less happy, keep us stupid and less informed, and buying more. Even more confusing are the people who are welcoming AI with open arms as just another skill to learn, _surely_ they'll be the ones who come out on top, right? It has all the stink of the countless Americans believing they too will become billionaires and everyone else are just suckers as they are all one healthcare problem away from bankruptcy. We don't learn.
- munksbeer 4mo ago
  >AI has never, ever, and never will be, about making life better for the average human. You don't know that. And this same line could be said about any technology that results in accruing of capital, but actually does end up making life better for the average human. What if AI at AlphaFold finds a cure for Alzheimer's disease? What if it finds a way to actually perfect fusion? You can't tell me we don't live better lives than people 100 years ago right now, and that is because of technology.
  - dannersy 4mo ago
    I am okay with Alzheimer's not being cured if it means we are not bending over backwards to welcome a billionaire overlord class. I don't think Altman or Amodei give a fuck about Alzheimer's unless a cure gives them a reason to obtain more investments. You could say that is the system working, but as a member of said system, it feels pretty shit.
Cthulhu_ 4mo ago
The only ones getting a paycheck off of this is those that work for the hardware manufacturers, unfortunately. Mainly because in software development (at least for what I do), productivity does not translate into significant company gains. I work for an energy company, nothing is super revolutionary, and a new feature or capability takes a long time to translate into measurable revenue, if at all. The energy crisis had a much bigger (positive) impact on the numbers than AI or anything I personally did. (although I have to add, they also did a major re-architecture of their back-end after the '22 energy crisis and did some smart buy-in, so as the other energy companies' websites struggled, ours churned along just fine and we got a lot of new customers/contracts)
keybored 4mo ago
The top comment explains the point of the article in plain terms. I’m not sure how many levels of jokes we are on.
LoveMortuus 4mo ago
>I know everybody is afraid of getting fired and replaced with AI or whatever right now. I've lost my job in February... Still trying to find a new job... any job...
itsdavesanders 4mo ago
This is exactly why unions are needed. To negotiate for extra benefits and share of the effort for their labor.
bitwize 4mo ago
> We’re being asked to usher in huge productivity gains by introducing AI to our workflows, but we’re not asking how does it help us? Remember the banner hanging over Initech offices with their internal motto: "Is this good for the COMPANY?" Ultimately, that is the question that matters.
Arthurian 4mo ago
A thought I’ve been chewing on regarding this…. What if “what do we get out of this?” was built into the tool that we use? Something like a personal agent that you carry with you from job to job and that accumulates capabilities along with you? Getting exposure to more and different work could become something that you get a real, tangible benefit from.
- packetlost 4mo ago
  That would require technology that hasn't yet been created to be created. Tbh I'm happy with just having enough token spend to use on side projects for now.
freeopinion 4mo ago
If you take a 1x dev and a 2x dev and apply an AI force multiplier, do you get a 10x dev and a 20x dev? Or do you get two 10x devs? If a human element is required to get value from AI, but any human will do, then devs should get minimum wage. If different humans have a different multiplier when you apply them to AI, they should be compensated accordingly. So if the 1x dev can get 5x out of AI, and the 2x dev can get 2x out of AI, you can fire the 2x2 dev, double the salary of the 1x5 dev, and be more productive for less money[1]. Or you can keep both devs, but pay the 1x5 dev slightly better than the 2x2 dev. This is all assuming you have some valid way of measuring 1x, 2x, 1x5, and 2x2. [1] Double salary doesn't have to include double insurance, vacation, etc. But there is also the cost of the AI, so... Edit: markup
Scroll_Swe 4mo ago
I have 25 vacation days per year and so does everyone else in Sweden. And we all use them for real it is not like your PTOs. During summer, we make it work but it is a clear standby mode. The upside is we have to staff up too, with regulars and interns. This is not a tech problem. This is a you problem. *Yes salary is way way way way lower. BUT where in the USA could I take a 10min bus (normal people take the bus here not bums) or walk 30-40min to work feeling totally safe even at night? Nevermind I spent 0 on my education in terms of tuition. And live in a city centre, walking to a grocery store with a 60k studio condo? With high speed 5g and fibre. And I hear in the US you have to worry about water or power cuts? Not here lmao. I mean that simply you make society what you make it. Over and out, o7, waiting for [flagged]

by cattown 4mo ago

calvinmorrison 4mo ago

well productivity gains are largely met with higher standard of living, quality of life and the upward movement of the lowest classes, for one.

p-e-w 4mo ago
That hasn’t been true for decades in the West, even though per-capita productivity has been steadily rising since WW2.
- MichaelZuo 4mo ago
  Are you sure? From the data I’ve seen the bottom decile Americans consume significantly more per capita compared to even 2006. e.g. plane travel was completely absent amongst the bottom decile in 2006, like so close to zero mileage per capita per annum it was a rounding error.
  - p-e-w 4mo ago
    Plane travel is a very poor proxy for quality of life. Home ownership, high-quality food, working hours etc. seem far more relevant.
    - MichaelZuo 4mo ago
      Huh? People will, intentionally, work longer hours to afford more frequent plane travel. And to upgrade classes, perks, lounge access, etc… I’m pretty sure there are literally millions of people like that.
  - king_geedorah 4mo ago
    Is bottom decile consumption a good measure of economic health? In a way it seems it could signal the opposite, ie in the past the bottom decile was saving that money in an effort to change their economic conditions vs spending it now could indicate a lack of hope for upward mobility. To your example it seems worth noting that the quality of the air travel experience appears to decline over time as well.
    - MichaelZuo 4mo ago
      Bottom decile consumption is the best measure of economic health for the bottom decile… it clearly cannot be the best measure across the entirety of the population. Real physical consumption is by far the hardest metric to game or play tricks with. Yes technically, some probably are trading a bit of their future prospects for a nicer flight schedule, less red-eyes, etc… But I don’t see how that is relevant at all?
  - ux266478 4mo ago
    Yes actually, this is remarkably well studied: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-... I hate to imagine what this graph looks like today, given the massive amount of inflation that's happened in the last 6 years.
passive 4mo ago
That's not generally true in the US over the last 40 years, where the gains from productivity increases have been accumulated almost entirely by the top classes. Yes, lower classes have access to many more conveniences then they might have had in earlier decades, but they are working far more hours, and their expected lifespan has started decreasing.
- calvinmorrison 4mo ago
  my dad grew up in a house without running water in a town where everyone worked in a mine and the lead was everywhere. he hitchiked to alaska for seasonal work in a fish cannery. Yeah I don't know... i think things are better than they were 40 years ago.
  - Sl1mb0 4mo ago
    There are still people in America who live without running water. There are still people who work on fishing boats in Alaska. There are still people who hitchhike. This is literally just an anecdote trying to deflect from contemporary problems. I don't see any value in this sort of discourse. Just because things may have been worse for specific individuals does *not* mean that current problems shouldn't be addressed.
    - calvinmorrison 4mo ago
      oh no an anecdote! run away!
      - shimman 4mo ago
        You should, especially when said anecdote amounts to "shut the fuck up and be thankful to your corporate overlords peasant."
    - jmye 4mo ago
      > Just because things may have been worse for specific individuals does not mean that current problems shouldn't be addressed. Suggesting that things are better now than they were in 1986 for the overwhelming majority of people is not, in any way whatsoever, suggesting that "problems shouldn't be addressed". Come on. Y'all have got to start actually reading things before smashing that reply button.

chipsrafferty 4mo ago

Right. If I am producing 10x more output then I expect to be getting paid about 8x more or working 8x less.

arjvik 4mo ago
something something you're paid the amount the market values your work, which in today's job market is an order of magnitude less than the profit you bring the company
- r-w 4mo ago
  Well then why make it easy for my work to get devalued? It's not like workers are sitting on the sidelines here, they (I'm aggregate, at least) hold all the power.
  - codebje 4mo ago
    Sounds like an argument for organised labour to me!
  - majormajor 4mo ago
    The US still largely believes everything that Reagan Republicans preached about the "evils" of taxation and regulation of oligarchy, despite the US economy overall (and the "average joe") doing quite well in the era that followed "soak the rich" taxes being passed. So many claims about how it would lead to far better lives for everyone, but the working conditions and general affordability have basically gone down for 40 years. Imagine bringing back the white collar work in the 80s, with a private office with a door, and people whose jobs were to help coordinate and schedule things even if you weren't an exec, instead of you just having a phone to answer all hours of the day.
- rootusrootus 4mo ago
  > in today's job market is an order of magnitude less than the profit you bring the company Then why have we not all been fired already? Sounds like an instant win.

monkaiju 4mo ago

I mean productivity gains don't usually go towards making the workers life any better. Also I'm still less than convinced there are any net productivity gains from AI anyway.

coro_1 4mo ago
AI copy pasta misses beats. I've seen people forget to review their comms, and create a lot of confusion, wasting time actually.

Hamster7330 4mo ago

Wow. Yes.

BrenBarn 4mo ago

> We’re being asked to usher in huge productivity gains by introducing AI to our workflows, but we’re not asking how does it help us? More flour more water. More water more flour.

Cakez0r 4mo ago

The reality is that most people are paid for their time, not for their output. I think most contracts for salaried employees are along the lines of "work n hours a week". If you want to get paid for output, you can't be a salaried employee.

kbar13 4mo ago
is this not backwards? salaried employee means you get paid the same amount no matter how many hours you work.
- hexis 4mo ago
  typically there is a floor, at least de facto.
  - Cakez0r 4mo ago
    The contracts I've seen have an explicit floor, not a de facto one. I.E. The contract says the minimum number of hours you need to work. Some countries also have overtime laws which create a ceiling. Either way it doesn't change that being paid for your output is the realm of entrepreneurship and submitting bids for project work.
    - gbear605 4mo ago
      At least for my software job in the US, and other salaried jobs I’ve seen, there are explicitly no hours listed, and it’s supposedly based only on your output. In practice though, if your butt isn’t in the seat 40 hours a week or so, and usually more, the boss will be mad.
    - dcrazy 4mo ago
      Employment contracts are virtually nonexistent here in the U.S. While the norm is “40 hours”, actual requirements vary by employer, may or may not be communicated in writing, and can change at the employer’s whim. If you make under $107,432 per year (which is around starting salary for fresh graduates at FAANG), you are entitled to overtime pay (minimum 1.5x) for hours worked beyond 40 in a week.

ux266478 4mo ago

> Or when our paycheck is going to be multiplied accordingly. That doesn't increase shareholder value, so it would be a violation of the c-suite's fiduciary responsibility. Sorry, the extra capital will instead be used on stock buybacks.

rootusrootus 4mo ago
<insert required disclaimer here that fiduciary duty does not require using every opportunity to increase shareholder value>
twbarr 4mo ago
Fiduciary responsibility also requires long-term thinking. If AI is writing the code, I need the smartest, most well-rested supervisors I can get.
jmye 4mo ago
> Sorry, the extra capital will instead be used on stock buybacks. Given how start-up (and thus equity) heavy this board is, that should also directly multiply total comp, even though it was meant as a vapid snipe and isn't actually vaguely valid outside of a handful of very large companies.

armada651 4mo ago

When your labor force makes gains in productivity you can choose to do one of two things: 1. Reduce working hours 2. Grow the economy Guess which option was last picked in 1868 and never again despite massive gains in productivity?

majormajor 4mo ago
Are we really so sure that reducing working hours can't, itself, lead to improved economic health? Such as by increasing distribution of income flows, and increasing time available for economic consumption? One of the greatest tricks of the modern era in the US has been to convince everyone that making the slice of pie bigger for the richest people is necessary to grow the economy.
- Aurornis 4mo ago
  > and increasing time available for economic consumption? Where is that additional money going to come from? I think you’re missing some important factors in your analysis.
  - Timon3 4mo ago
    1. Not everyone is spending all their "spending money" every month, and 2. more free time allows people to get more value for their money (e.g. by comparing more alternative options).
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- danaris 4mo ago
  In fact, we now know, with a fairly high degree of certainty, that it can. There have been numerous experiments with four-day work weeks or six-hour work days that have almost uniformly shown increases in overall productivity. Not just productivity per hour at work. Overall productivity. The resistance to this is clearly not based in financial concerns, but rather in control, and classism.

whatshisface 4mo ago

Working out why the workweek is 5 days, non-negotiably, even if you'd be willing to be paid less in proportion, comes down to realizing that it's being maximized subject to the constraint that everybody would flip out if it was 6, and then working out why it's being maximized. What it's telling you is that a company would rather have 4 people working 5 days a week than 5 people working 4 days a week. The reason for that is, productivity drops a lot when it's spread out over multiple people. The reason behind that is communication overhead - the more context an individual carries in their heads, the less likely their role will exist on an hourly basis in the industry. So, if anyone wants AI to give us another day off, we need to think about how it can reduce the cost of "context switching" a whole person on and off a task, without simultaneously formalizing our roles so much that it gives us all five. ;-)

majormajor 4mo ago
> Working out why the workweek is 5 days, non-negotiably, even if you'd be willing to be paid less in proportion, comes down to realizing that it's being maximized subject to the constraint that everybody would flip out if it was 6, and then working out why it's being maximized. This ignores a lot of historical fighting (sometimes literally!) to get it down to 5 in the first place. If everyone sufficiently "flips out" about it being 5 then the problem of "reduce the context switching problem" is something the owner can try to figure out. Cause otherwise, you could find a perfect solution to that problem, and still not have leverage to make ownership actually change anything vs just raise expectations that much higher. (Meanwhile, some companies are trying to import 996 and push it past 5 for white-collar work anyway, so any sort of non-political, non-disruptive action seems doomed to fail since the status quo is moving the wrong direction.)
- whatshisface 4mo ago
  The "flipping out" aspect is something that does not seem to have a lot to do with technology at this time or in the past.
  - majormajor 4mo ago

apt-apt-apt-apt 4mo ago

Same answer as for most hope-filled employee questions sadly: You get to keep your job. You agreed to accept X pay for 40 hours, do it or we'll find someone else who will.

bruhFaaahNo 4mo ago
Except all the people who drilled such mandates into our heads are dying off. These things persist over time only so long as we keep discussing them. We're really failing to meet the moment before us by merely repeating the propaganda of elders that glaze over on live TV trying to act authoritative and useful to humanity. Exploitation of youth is no less ageist than telling gramps look in the mirror.
slg 4mo ago
That's why it has to be collective. That's why OP mentioned saying it in an all hands. That's why there's always discussion of tech worker unions despite our high pay. Any one of us try to push too hard on this sort of thing on our own and they'll "just find someone else" who would happily take our place.
- ipaddr 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  - slg 4mo ago
    Classic American politics right there: Person 1: "We need class solidarity against the billionaires." Person 2: "No, it's the immigrants' fault."
    - deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
    - petersellers 4mo ago
      So true. Pick your boogeyman (Muslims/Immigrants/Antifa/Trans/"Marxists"), pump the attack propaganda through all available media channels and hope no one mentions the billionaires. It's been awhile since 9/11 and we've got pretty short memories, so we'll probably cycle back to Muslims soon.

giancarlostoro 4mo ago

Meanwhile my employer still has not given us any AI tooling. I build more things for personal use and for niche hobbies that are more refined, polished and documented than most employers have ever given me in terms of project requirements. Everyone keeps saying the bottleneck was not how fast you can write the code. I believe the bottleneck is two-fold: coding without architecting and no solid business requirements. I do agree though, give me AI tooling, and I will build you cities, but pay me to match it.

trinsic2 4mo ago

I think people should use AI to start their own business instead of working for someone else's vision. I mean if you're working for someone else your choices are limited. And I'm not saying that you should be mistreated. I'm just saying you have more control of your life when you're working for yourself.

11101010010001 4mo ago

just don't call it organized labor.

winterbourne 4mo ago

It's a modern version of: "we're firing you, but your last task will be to train your lower-cost replacement".

vanuatu 4mo ago

I think equity compensation should be normalized (or ideally allow employees to choose the % of their compensation is equity vs. cash) so every employee can partake in the upside of the company.

pseudosavant 4mo ago

While I agree with the playful sentiment of the post, this isn't what happened for factory workers as their work has been augmented by automation. Ford makes twice as many vehicles per worker in 2025 than they did in 1960. Did the auto workers get 20-hour work weeks? Nope. I have to ask myself why we think us white collar knowledge workers are so special? Even if I do dream of a time where automation leads all of us to a 3-4 day work week.

ikjasdlk2234 4mo ago

I think the feeling is if we want to even keep our current footing in the market we have to increase productivity by 10x because everyone else is as well. And if everyone else is, the productivity floor is raised but every other competitor has done the same so we don't have 10x the economic output, maybe only a marginal increase. If that is true, then there will be no days off because we have just reset the status quo. edit: spelling

paulhebert 4mo ago
Exactly. All the employers are still sharing the same sized market. There’s not more money going around for them to earn. But they’re also paying hefty AI bills so there’s less money for salaries. The AI companies just swoop in and take some of the money that was going to the working man
xena 4mo ago
Chinese youth have a term for this, neijuan: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=neijuan https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=neijuan
- colordrops 4mo ago
  Isn't that just the same as "Red Queen's Race" or "tragedy of the commons"?

moduspol 4mo ago

Computers and the Internet ushered in huge productivity gains. Despite many people losing their jobs as a result, it's tough to argue society isn't better off. I think that's the key difference with AI, though. It's not like I'm losing my job, but at least I have a robot at home that cleans the house and does my laundry. People are having their livelihoods threatened while their utility bills go up because of datacenters, and the only substantive impact in their personal lives is that now they have to deal with chatbots and low effort automated customer service agents even more. I'm OK with accepting a job that pays 10x less if the efficiencies from AI mean we're all living in abundance and life is >10x cheaper. But it's unclear if/when we'll move beyond marginal business impact, aside from in software development, I suppose.

Ancalagon 4mo ago
Is society better off? Honest question, you used to be able to support a family of four with a single 9-5.
- fyrn_ 4mo ago
  Shareholders = society. The rest of us are just the help
- bwhiting2356 4mo ago
  More household work was done in this era, before grocery stores sold prepared food, before washing machines. And more people lived in less square footage, with grandparents living in the home, less privacy and autonomy. I don't know if we've made the right trade, but it's not the case that a single worker's income was paying for the kind of lifestyle a family of four now has.
  - esikich 4mo ago
    How is this relevant? The houses built in the 60s aren't affordable either. Look at median income and median home prices. You're telling on yourself. Average families aren't buying prepared food and they have a washing machine from the 90s they bought on craigslist. There's a 90% chance if you are on this site, you are not average. You are a part of the haves and you need to consider that you are living a very different life from the average American, which all this productivity should be helping but fucking clearly isn't.

codex_dev_33352 4mo ago

[flagged]

codex_dev_33352 4mo ago

[flagged]

aaron695 4mo ago

[dead]

stego-tech 4mo ago

If workers got time off relative to the productivity gains achieved of the past fifty years and considering the comparatively stagnant wages over that time period, we’d only be working 2 to 3 days a week, tops. The author might be being playful, but an increasing amount of folks at or past their breaking points definitely aren’t.

denkmoon 4mo ago

Tech workers _are_ a bunch of chumps. Temporarily embarrassed billionaire startup founders. The vehicle for this is a union, and tech workers abjectly refuse to unionise.

paulhebert 4mo ago

Right, the AI companies don’t even try to pretend it’s good for the average person. The message could be “we’ll all do more by working less.” Instead it’s, “some people will lose their jobs while everyone else works the same amount or more”

arkh 4mo ago
What's crazy is the glee when saying that. It's like "fuck those uppity low class people who managed to move up socially thanks to an in-demand job requiring some skill". Now we're back to only who you know, skills are for the AI.
Nasrudith 4mo ago
To play devil's advocate: Why exactly would you expect to get paid more just because there was a big investment in more expensive tools? You're not working any harder, the machine is. Getting paid more is always nice of course. Any pay rises have been more of a side effect in the past of complexity and therefore needing more skilled labor to say operate a bulldozer or backhoe than it does for any individual with a shovel. Productivity may boost the economic ceiling of 'how much they can pay before they literally start losing money' but more assembly lines didn't mean big pay raises. A backhoe didn't mean that ditch diggers suddenly got paid 50 to 100 times what they were previously from other's expenditures because they could dig that much more. And that is before the back-and-forth of induced demand and supply vs demand causing the price of the labor to drop with more efficiency. AI's whole thing is to provide for easier operation and trying to deskill the operations. (Key word: trying, currently knowing what the hell you are doing is essential for filtering good outputs from bad).
- account42 4mo ago
  We expect that because the company is only allowed to exist at the will of society at large.
- ElevenLathe 4mo ago
  A social system that looks at a technology like LLMs and decides to use it to increase "output" in some abstract way while reducing the median standard of living is a system that will have a hard time maintaining popular (non-elite) legitimacy. That doesn't mean it will evaporate over night -- plenty of ghastly social systems have survived centuries with very little non-elite legitimacy. It remains to be seen if LLMs will be used in this way, but the messaging so far (including your post, the one I'm replying to) suggests that the elites' inclination is exactly that: more profit, more control, more power now for elites, temporary (possibly years, maybe as long a generation or three) but real suffering for many of the rest, and a steady state at the end of the transition where they are still in charge, much richer, and maybe also everyone else is better off (if they can't capture the gains completely for themselves).

JimDabell 4mo ago

> We’re being asked to usher in huge productivity gains by introducing AI to our workflows, but we’re not asking how does it help us? Not a lot of us stand to directly gain from our employers becoming more productive. How much money do you think the average developer would be making if we all were using punchcards instead of typing? Inputting machine code instead of using a compiler? Every time we increase our productivity, we can build bigger and better things for the same amount of effort. This makes us more valuable than before. Our output grows and the world’s appetite for software grows with it. This has been true for the entire history of the software industry and it’s the reason why developers are very well paid. You may not see it at the individual level, but we are reaping the rewards of increased productivity at the macro level.

theptip 4mo ago

I think it’s pretty naive to ask your employer for a day off. As experienced by companies, the market is more competitive than ever. Whoever slows down will get eaten by some hungry upstart that is willing to work 996 to eat the incumbent’s lunch. It’s a Prisoner’s Dilemma. The only way to get this outcome is to coordinate at a level higher than individual market participants. In other words, get your government to implement UBI - tax all companies (or if AI really takes off, just compute) and redistribute to the people.

lazide 4mo ago
lol, this government is going to just throw anyone trying into the meat grinder. The only way to do this is to bypass the authorities.
- ixtli 4mo ago
  Few willing to discuss this!
- Griffinsauce 4mo ago
  Or change them.
mastazi 4mo ago
> I think it’s pretty naive to ask your employer for a day off. Someone said the same before 1938, probably [1] I think it's possible that AI will bring as much of a shift to our lives as the industrial revolution did, so it might be necessary to make some adjustments, just like we did back then. [1] https://www.history.com/articles/five-day-work-week-labor-movement https://www.history.com/articles/five-day-work-week-labor-mo...
- UncleOxidant 4mo ago
  yep. The Progressive Era (with it's 5 day work week women's suffrage ) came after, and was a backlash to The Gilded Age. Now we're in Gilded Age II (Gilded Age on Steroids). Hopefully we'll see history repeat itself and we get Progressive Era II. But keep in mind that the Progressive Era only lasted about 20 years, if that long.

ipaddr 4mo ago

You are not the 10x factor and can't use it to increase your wage. If you leave the next person is a 10x factor because of ai. Now if AI providers all increased prices they could get a raise.

jrflowers 4mo ago

Benefits from productivity gains only go to shareholders gp, it’s the foundational principle that underpins the whole world economy :-D

bix6 4mo ago

I will be automating the things that annoy me so I can spend time on the things I like.

thewebguyd 4mo ago

> Or when our paycheck is going to be multiplied accordingly. And when/if it doesn't, unionize. I know the HN crowd historically hasn't looked favorably on Unions, but times are changing. It's long past time for unions in tech. We've fared well individually for a long time, but that time is coming to an end.

Eridrus 4mo ago

I think it's a fair question to ask ourselves. But it's worth noting how leisure hours have been allocated after the invention of the 5 hour work week: we've reduced working hours at the end of life (longer retirements), start of life (longer education), and some amount of people simply do not work. There hasn't been a reduction in hours during peak earning potential because many jobs are competitive, because firms are in competition with each other. Maybe some companies will start doing 4 day work weeks because they find that productivity doesn't actually increase from 4 to 5 days and then start outcompeting other companies for talent. But unless 5 days is actually not more productive than 4 days, we're going to have the most competitive organizations continue to be 5 days a week.

omnimus 4mo ago
It's strange to put it like “we invented 40hour workweek”. It was extremely hard fight won by cooperation of many levels of the working class. The business owners absolutely didn't want it. This would have to happen again. But there is none of that worker unity so it's unlikely to happen. The productivity gains will go solely to the bussiness owners.
- Eridrus 4mo ago
  While unions did fight for the 40 hour work week and crystalized that specific number, their actual causal impact (on hours worked, not law) is contested since hours were already falling well before unions were organizing for the 40 hour work week.

Buttons840 4mo ago

One possibility is once AI becomes profitable and wildly successful, and we all lose our jobs, we vote to nationalize the AI companies, and send some good vibes (but no money) to the VCs who paid for it, and remember that the AI was only built by breaking copyright law at an industrial scale and so it's fair to nationalize it.

radu_floricica 4mo ago
[flagged]
- knappe 4mo ago
  Right. Those productive companies that totally didn't just steal the entirety of humanities production to build their product.
  - radu_floricica 4mo ago
    [flagged]
- colordrops 4mo ago
  That analogy only works if the gold being laid by the goose caused all other geese to eventually cease to exist or at least be sent into the countryside infertile while the golden goose continues to live in a walled castle surrounded by golden military robots.
- niels_bom 4mo ago
  Nothing bad has ever happened from privatizing well running government orgs either.
Aurornis 4mo ago
Good thing all of the AI companies in the world operate only inside one country. I'm sure all of the other technology companies, AI ventures, and investors will continue putting their headquarters in a country that did this and gave the investors $0. Nothing bad would happen, of course.

sharts 4mo ago

10x productivity with layoffs to compensate. throw in more AI slop causing more outages and you’re working more than before

dolebirchwood 4mo ago

> 10x’ing our productivity Normalizing this "10x" language (well before AI) is a factor in this problem. It's been so loosely and casually thrown about in this industry. 10x engineer... 10x mindset... 10x growth... 10x this... 10x that... All paraded around by people who fancied themselves to be their own version of 10x whatever. Well, keep parroting this long enough, and it's just a matter of time before people not only believe it to be commonplace, but they start to expect and demand it. So now we have AI as the next thing foisted upon us to force everyone to be 10x or die trying. Should've just settled for being 3.14x engineers like reasonable people.

Rekindle8090 4mo ago

[dead]

win311fwg 4mo ago

> productivity can get us some days off. Days off might be a challenging ask as the AI needs feedback more often than that. Working sporadically throughout the day, able to do what you please between the AI asking questions, is realistic. We're already there, frankly.

resonious 4mo ago

It won't get you days off because you (rather, your employer) will fall behind those who didn't opt to take days off. You'd only get days off if it was only you who got a 10x increase. But it's everybody. So it's status quo: technology advances, and you have to keep up if you want to stay in the industry.

dd8601fn 4mo ago
> It won't get you days off because you (rather, your employer) will fall behind those who didn't opt to take days off. I don’t believe this is true. Or that more hours worked reliably translates to serious competitive advantage, in general. But your point stands, because many (or most) employers think it does, and employees are usually incentivized to support that notion.
tumdum_ 4mo ago
40 hours work week wasn’t always the case and yet here we are.

palmotea 4mo ago

> This article is kind of playful, but I think there’s a serious point here that’s not discussed enough. We’re being asked to usher in huge productivity gains by introducing AI to our workflows, but we’re not asking how does it help us? Not a lot of us stand to directly gain from our employers becoming more productive. And we shouldn't. Workers should only get the wages they can command in the marketplace and not a penny more, and the smaller the better. > I know everybody is afraid of getting fired and replaced with AI or whatever right now. But we should be seriously asking in our next all hands meetings if 10x’ing our productivity can get us some days off. Or when our paycheck is going to be multiplied accordingly. Morally, all benefits of any technology or productivity gain must flow up to the owners, who deserve it all. But this should be comforting to all of you. I'm sure everyone here owns at least a few thousand dollars in shares. You'll get some dividends and/or capital gains!

mathattack 4mo ago

The question is are we more like farm workers who will be unemployed because of the farm or accountants who become much more valuable and high paid because of the spreadsheet? And I am grateful for not working on a farm, it’s hard work!

throw262672 4mo ago

You got into a contract. This contract specified what you will do and usually for how long. Unless this contract specified you need to get X done, I don’t see any way you can argue for this in any way that makes sense. _Nothing_ I do that benefits my employer directly benefits me. AI or not. That was the whole idea of the relationship: I show up, perform some type of labor and am shielded from the bullshit of doing business (to some tolerable extend). The employer in turn forks over hard cash. The exact, same F amount every month and on time, no discussions about it. If your actions directly or indirectly caused a loss to the business do you give up free days or pay? I don’t think you should. This works both ways. However, that’s on the level of the individual. If you’re saying we should unionize, then, hell yes.

jessetemp 4mo ago
Creating a throwaway for this comment is telling
- throw23232 4mo ago
  It's actually rather boring: I forget/don't care about my account.

xnx 4mo ago

> But we should be seriously asking in our next all hands meetings if 10x’ing our productivity can get us some days off. Pretty sure if you ask this that they'll give you all your days off.

bbor 4mo ago
Standing up for yourself and your peers is a virtue, not a weakness. Yes, it’s easy to crack down on individual dissent — but only if you stay quiet.
- Melatonic 4mo ago
  Union!
- diordiderot 4mo ago
  You know who will shut up and do as their told, the H1B replacing you this fall
  - kakacik 4mo ago
    Nothing like self-imposed anticipatory pressure ruining one's life. Maybe you are right, maybe not, nobody knows. What everybody knows is that life is happening now and its extremely short even in best scenario, yet few act accordingly.
- keybored 4mo ago
  This is HN, where labor unions are considered nice-in-theory-evil-in-practice while we with eyes with open resign ourselves to doing nothing. Your livelihood has a price (duh, your wage). But making cynical remarks about how stupid it is to want things to improve? Priceless.
  - pjmlp 4mo ago
    Only from the US HNers for the most part, I enjoy the benefits unions have brought to my work life. Kind of ironic, given the way unions came to be in US during the 1930's.

danaris 4mo ago

This is why we need to be unionizing en masse. There have been movements toward this in the US, but particularly in the tech sector, far too many people are still stuffed full of decades of anti-union propaganda (like the idea that the union is a "third party" rather than being the workers themselves, or that it would bring down their salary because they're such a special awesome 10x developer and 10x negotiator). The executive class has taken roughly all the productivity increases since 1980 and slid them straight into their bulging pockets, at our expense. The only way we get any of that back, or prevent them from taking this new increase from us too, is to stand together against them.

throwaway63467 4mo ago

It’s been like that for a while, economic gains went to a small fraction of people, before software developers were among those that were on the winning side, now they’re on the losing side. Think about how much the US economy is growing right now and who really profits from that growth. My guess is that 90 % of the growth goes to 10 % of people, with AI maybe 99 % might go to the 1 %. Or who do you think will gain from the tokenization of development? You’re just supposed to be more productive and the gains the company achieves will just go to the owners as they are in a great position right now and developers are scared shitless to get fired, so no one is increasing salaries or time off, instead most companies hang the threat of layoffs over people’s head to keep them in line. And the funny thing is we developers did this to ourselves, by doing free open source work for the greater good, which now feeds AI models that are replacing many of us. But I guess most people didn’t care as they made good money while it lasted.

abletonlive 4mo ago
> before software developers were among those that were on the winning side, now they’re on the losing side. are you sure about that? i'm a software engineer and i feel like i'm on the wining side now, even more than before. I'm considering quitting my 500K a year job to go compete against the employers. they seem like dinosaurs to me.
- forcedtolinux 4mo ago
  you personally are winning, but 500k comp is an outlier and not the norm, especially now
  - abletonlive 4mo ago
    You don't understand what I'm saying. I'm saying the 500K comp is not worth it and i want to quit to go compete against all the employers that are offering such comp. I am positioning myself to do it this year. Software engineers have more leverage than ever.
    - 4mo ago

dannersy 4mo ago

It is honestly offensive to me that this isn't plainly obvious to everyone. AI has never, ever, and never will be, about making life better for the average human. It has always been, and always will be, about wealth consolidation and control. Does anyone think it is coincidence that now local models are more useful the market has suddenly made it massively more expensive to buy your own hardware? Companies are just giving up making consumer hardware because they can can just focus on hyper-scalers. They want to control compute as well, there is no liberating aspect to any of this. Businesses, especially tech ones, are not altruistic. The idea that tech companies are out to make anyone's life better is a joke and a sentiment that should have died decades ago. The evidence is of predatory business practices and leveraging the worst aspects of our brain chemistry to keep us hooked on apps that make us less happy, keep us stupid and less informed, and buying more. Even more confusing are the people who are welcoming AI with open arms as just another skill to learn, _surely_ they'll be the ones who come out on top, right? It has all the stink of the countless Americans believing they too will become billionaires and everyone else are just suckers as they are all one healthcare problem away from bankruptcy. We don't learn.

munksbeer 4mo ago
>AI has never, ever, and never will be, about making life better for the average human. You don't know that. And this same line could be said about any technology that results in accruing of capital, but actually does end up making life better for the average human. What if AI at AlphaFold finds a cure for Alzheimer's disease? What if it finds a way to actually perfect fusion? You can't tell me we don't live better lives than people 100 years ago right now, and that is because of technology.
- dannersy 4mo ago
  I am okay with Alzheimer's not being cured if it means we are not bending over backwards to welcome a billionaire overlord class. I don't think Altman or Amodei give a fuck about Alzheimer's unless a cure gives them a reason to obtain more investments. You could say that is the system working, but as a member of said system, it feels pretty shit.

Cthulhu_ 4mo ago

The only ones getting a paycheck off of this is those that work for the hardware manufacturers, unfortunately. Mainly because in software development (at least for what I do), productivity does not translate into significant company gains. I work for an energy company, nothing is super revolutionary, and a new feature or capability takes a long time to translate into measurable revenue, if at all. The energy crisis had a much bigger (positive) impact on the numbers than AI or anything I personally did. (although I have to add, they also did a major re-architecture of their back-end after the '22 energy crisis and did some smart buy-in, so as the other energy companies' websites struggled, ours churned along just fine and we got a lot of new customers/contracts)

keybored 4mo ago

The top comment explains the point of the article in plain terms. I’m not sure how many levels of jokes we are on.

LoveMortuus 4mo ago

>I know everybody is afraid of getting fired and replaced with AI or whatever right now. I've lost my job in February... Still trying to find a new job... any job...

itsdavesanders 4mo ago

This is exactly why unions are needed. To negotiate for extra benefits and share of the effort for their labor.

bitwize 4mo ago

> We’re being asked to usher in huge productivity gains by introducing AI to our workflows, but we’re not asking how does it help us? Remember the banner hanging over Initech offices with their internal motto: "Is this good for the COMPANY?" Ultimately, that is the question that matters.

Arthurian 4mo ago

A thought I’ve been chewing on regarding this…. What if “what do we get out of this?” was built into the tool that we use? Something like a personal agent that you carry with you from job to job and that accumulates capabilities along with you? Getting exposure to more and different work could become something that you get a real, tangible benefit from.

packetlost 4mo ago
That would require technology that hasn't yet been created to be created. Tbh I'm happy with just having enough token spend to use on side projects for now.

freeopinion 4mo ago

If you take a 1x dev and a 2x dev and apply an AI force multiplier, do you get a 10x dev and a 20x dev? Or do you get two 10x devs? If a human element is required to get value from AI, but any human will do, then devs should get minimum wage. If different humans have a different multiplier when you apply them to AI, they should be compensated accordingly. So if the 1x dev can get 5x out of AI, and the 2x dev can get 2x out of AI, you can fire the 2x2 dev, double the salary of the 1x5 dev, and be more productive for less money[1]. Or you can keep both devs, but pay the 1x5 dev slightly better than the 2x2 dev. This is all assuming you have some valid way of measuring 1x, 2x, 1x5, and 2x2. [1] Double salary doesn't have to include double insurance, vacation, etc. But there is also the cost of the AI, so... Edit: markup

Scroll_Swe 4mo ago

I have 25 vacation days per year and so does everyone else in Sweden. And we all use them for real it is not like your PTOs. During summer, we make it work but it is a clear standby mode. The upside is we have to staff up too, with regulars and interns. This is not a tech problem. This is a you problem. *Yes salary is way way way way lower. BUT where in the USA could I take a 10min bus (normal people take the bus here not bums) or walk 30-40min to work feeling totally safe even at night? Nevermind I spent 0 on my education in terms of tuition. And live in a city centre, walking to a grocery store with a 60k studio condo? With high speed 5g and fibre. And I hear in the US you have to worry about water or power cuts? Not here lmao. I mean that simply you make society what you make it. Over and out, o7, waiting for [flagged]