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I wish there were studies on when this situation will normalize. Will the lost jobs ever come back? Or not?

• nemomarx 1mo ago
  What kind of study could predict the future like this? Every technological change is different each time, I think. For example - at first ATMs created more jobs in banking because employees could move to more complex services. But banks are back to downsizing after further advancements streamlined those services too, aiui.
• vineyardmike 1mo ago
  Those jobs aren’t coming back as-is, because AI isn’t going anywhere. Job markets change over time. I’ve just started transitioning my career closer to management, so I develop/manage roughly 50/50. At this point, if I had to manage a tight budget, I’d rather have an entry level salary as tokens for a senior engineer. We’ll need a way, as a society, to help new adults transitions from education to productive employee. But individual companies don’t have aligned incentives.
  • bcjdjsndon 1mo ago
    > But individual companies don’t have aligned incentives. Be realistic. Would you start a business and risk it's viability giving away free training to the public? No, and neither would anyone else.
  • dominotw 1mo ago
    are you incharge of making those decisions at work? maybe govt can tax ai companies and use that money to prearm juniors with tokens that only they can use.
  • whatshisface 1mo ago
    Masters degrees are a way for people to spend longer in the education-costs-more-than-the-value-to-the-educator phase of their career.
  • Marsymars 1mo ago
    > I’ve just started transitioning my career closer to management, so I develop/manage roughly 50/50. At this point, if I had to manage a tight budget, I’d rather have an entry level salary as tokens for a senior engineer. A high-potential junior you can at least justify as an investment in the future. The other people who are going to get squeezed are the later-career developers who are below-average in ability. (I'm not using "below average" here pejoratively - just noting that by definition, half of developers are below-average.) Outside of big tech, there are piles of organizations with devs who don't make big-tech salary and who are only marginally productive for what they're getting paid. If you're an organization that only has the budget to pay non-junior devs $80k... you can see the implications of having the option to spend your dev budget on seniors + tokens instead.
    • whatshisface 1mo ago
      I'm not seeing the reason why typical engineers can't vibecode. Non-coders can vibecode. I have read hundreds of posts claiming that senior engineers can vibecode but not a single one saying that juniors cannot.
      • Marsymars 1mo ago
        I'm not saying they can't, but rather that with the time seniors then spend cleaning up their tricky bugs, architectural problems, etc. the seniors could have just done the work themselves.
        • whatshisface 1mo ago
          In a cost sensitive business, nobody cleans up the architectural problems today - no change for vibe coders except upward.
  • smcg 1mo ago
    Hmm, maybe we should tax these corporations and use the money for free education. Crazy idea but it might work.
    • vineyardmike 1mo ago
      It won’t work. I have nothing against taxation and funding education but the issue isn’t that type of education. If you work in the industry in a well funded company (the ones who’d be paying these taxes), then you probably have more college-grad applicants than can hire. Probably more than you can hire from “good” schools, some with masters degrees, etc. Maybe education should be subsidized, but theres no lack of volume of people with the formal education today. Top schools (Berkeley, MIT, etc) today are reporting growing unemployment rates among their CS grads. We have more than enough students. But that formal education isn’t the necessary skill missing. It’s understanding how to structure your work. Learning how to understand the complexity of a problem and estimate how long it’ll take. Learning how to spot future issues during code review (not just bugs and not just optimizations, but “one way doors”, future migration headaches etc). Learning architectural patterns and common prior-art. Even learning to show up on time, be polite in meetings, and navigate office politics. There are just skills you need to see and practice to understand - you can’t teach them in a classroom. That’s why electricians have apprenticeship and doctors have residency, lawyers clerk and programmers had internships. The difference is that before AI, a young grad with an internship learned enough to answer basic bugs and learn on the job. But now that AI can fix bugs and small tasks faster than a person, the minimum skill threshold has exceeded the on-job training standards.
• augment_me 1mo ago
  You have market theory saying that at some point, you will not have enough seniors because no juniors were trained. So seniors will become more and more expensive due to lack of supply. At some point, it will be cheaper to take the risk and train the junior entry person again, and things will stabilize out. The sad part is that there will be a generation of 10 years or so of lost juniors while seniors are abundant.
  • FpUser 1mo ago
    >"At some point, it will be cheaper to take the risk and train the junior entry person again" I think they will have big problem finding people who will actually train those juniors by then.
  • RivieraKid 1mo ago
    At that point AI will be significantly more advanced than today.
    • augment_me 1mo ago
      Sure but we can't work on hypotheticals. Otherwise we can also say that information work is 90% automated, society has 50% unemployment of white-collar workers and capitalism is over because there is no purchasing power. There is enough incentives from people in power to keep status quo(bread and circuses) that if we are trying to answer the question using another framework than the current one we are just speculating
  • seahawks78 1mo ago
    2022-30 will be known as the lost generation in tech. I think the situation will improve in 2030s and AI/coding will become hot again. Or may be perhaps as soon as Feds start to open their purse to print money again aka QE.
• bcjdjsndon 1mo ago
  Did horse and cart operators ever get their jobs back?
  • boshalfoshal 1mo ago
    This is unironically the best comparison. maybe they became taxi drivers. But that too will be gone soon. Can't beat capitalism + technological innovation.
  • da_chicken 1mo ago
    I mean... yes. Blacksmiths, wheelwrights, and wainwrights transitioned to auto mechanic or carpentry work. Not all of them, but for most the skills were portable. Several of the carriage-making businesses transitioned to automobiles. Studebaker and Oakland (which became Pontiac), for example. I'm sure the most experienced people lost big, of course, and we shouldn't minimize the damage done to people's livlihoods. Unless you mean taxicab drivers, which was the term for them before the automobile. Taxicab = taximeter cabriolet, and a cabriolet is a style of horse-drawn carriage. It really was the horse people that lost out the most. That's why the idiomatic reference is for buggy whips, not so much for buggies themselves.
    • AnimalMuppet 1mo ago
      You're right. And yet, just last week I met a farrier - a guy who shoes horses. He's young, too. Went to a horseshoeing school in Cheyenne. I mentioned it to my daughter. She said, "Rich people are going to keep having horses." I'm pretty sure she's not wrong. But there's still a lot fewer farriers than there used to be...
      • bcjdjsndon 1mo ago
        Horses as a pet obviously weren't affected by the internal combustion engine lol you can't swap out a two stroke for old long features
    • bcjdjsndon 1mo ago
      > Blacksmiths, wheelwrights, and wainwrights transitioned to auto mechanic or carpentry work. Not the same as the horse and cart operator, for various reasons... Maybe the wheelwright? But even that seems like a specialism of carpentry > It really was the horse people that lost out the most. That's why the idiomatic reference is for buggy whips, not so much for buggies themselves. .... Had you forgotten what I'd wrote by the time you got to this point?
• drop_star 1mo ago
  Ask the people that worked on printing presses
• pianopatrick 1mo ago
  I would plan based on the lost jobs not coming back. I would also plan that the trend of AI getting better and taking more jobs will continue. Plan for the worst, hope for the best. A lot of people may have to transition to careers that people do not want to have AI do, like nursing. The earlier you start such a transition the easier it is because you still have resources to make moves.
  • FpUser 1mo ago
    >"A lot of people may have to transition to careers that people do not want to have AI do, like nursing." Becoming bum or going off the grid would be way more attractive to me than working my ass of in stressful conditions for meager pay so some motherfuckers can buy yet another yacht
    • pianopatrick 1mo ago
      Suit yourself, I won't get in your way.
      • FpUser 1mo ago
        >"I won't get in your way." Smart choice
• commandlinefan 1mo ago
  And if they don't, what then? What does a post-job society look like? I'm skeptical of communism, but I'm skeptical because it doesn't work in a society where some people need to do something (like raise crops) but aren't incentivized to do so. But if there's actually nothing humans need to do? The question is, will we reach logical conclusions peacefully or violently?
• chessucation 1mo ago
  it seems that the shift is different in kind from previous ones (but then again, perhaps people thought that about previous labor disruptions as well) take ATMs. they automated the task but the rung above it remained human. someone to handle exceptions, sell the mortgage, etc. running a branch actually became cheaper. cheaper branches meant more branches, so teller headcount went up for two decades. what seems different now isn't that the models are better at tasks. it's that the rung above is being climbed at the same time. the coordination layer is getting absorbed concurrently rather than a generation later. that doesn't mean no new work appears but every historical instance seems to have some kind of "escape route" which i'm not sure exists this time around.