- Summary of article: in an uncertain job market, some young people are going into blue collar trades. Others are starting startups. Others are powering through. Journalist says some words about "AI" being the cause of all this uncertainty.
- Not sure how it works in the US, but in some parts of Europe, blue collar trades are currently much better, for several reasons:
- Price of housing and associated maintenance keeps rising, and so do small jobs like fixing plumbing, gardening, etc; - You can easily avoid paying VAT if you know how to, so that's a 20% increase, or even more, if you can benefit from social services (e.g. since you don't earn a lot, you pay less for several services); - Doing the fixes yourself saves lots of money; - Avoids several burn out and mental health issues related to stress such as academia, bullshit jobs, etc; - No need to spend years in school, so you can save money earlier and invest it.
One disadvantage is that the barrier to entry is somewhat low; but the PhD students also have to compete with cheap international labor, so in the end, someone 25 years old that just left grad school is happy to earn, say, 2000€, while someone in the trades can easily make 200€/day with just one appointment.
So, if you're physically fit for blue collar work, there are currently few reasons not do it.
- Is it actually true that the savings on home maintenance and social services offsets the higher salaries of white collar work? That's kind of crazy if it's true.
In the US, you can make pretty good money in the trades, but generally, there are many caveats - you have to be your own boss, preferably with a few employees; you pay your own benefits; you don't get any paid leave; and depending on the trade, you could be physically worn out before minimum retirement age (65 in the US to get health coverage as a retiree).
- Right now blue collar work can pay much better than white collar work (in the Netherlands).
Not all of course, but construction work and electrician type work, certainly.
The labour shortages in construction and the energy transformation are huge. And it can't be solved with immigration because there is no housing.
- In Germany I'd say you still make more with white collar, if you have a job. The problem for Gen Z though, is that they aren't hiring for junior positions.
Still if you go blue collar you have to build your own business.
- Might be surprising but I am kinda willing to believe it. Since we bought our house, we had quite a bit of work done by professionals. But whenever I can I do things myself.
Like I had multiple companies quote me $300-500 based on the job for things that take me maybe 2-3 hours total to do, including learning about it (will be faster next time), getting the materials, and doing the job.
When you have a few of these a months they add up. It is usually nothing for a month and then 4-5 things to fix/improve the next
- >When you have a few of these a months they add up
If these jobs really number in "a few of these a month", then your inclusion criteria must be absurdly broad (eg. changing your lightbulb), or your home is on the verge of falling apart.
- If your hourly wage is $150 or more, then the cost is break-even, or possibly cheaper to hire someone else.
- only if you _have_ an hourly wage, if you're salaried it really doesn't make sense to value your time that way
- From what I see on the other side of the ocean, the same applies to Europe, at least to Italy. Add to the list: wake up early, drive to customers all the day long, learn to always smile and be kind to customers even when they don't deserve it.
- > Is it actually true that the savings on home maintenance and social services offsets the higher salaries of white collar work? That's kind of crazy if it's true.
Yes, this is called Baumol's cost disease.
- Yes. It’s relatively straightforward to work on a fixer upper house during which time you are drawing no salary relative to that, and then you can turn around and sell it (or just enjoy being in a nice house which otherwise would have cost hundreds of thousands).
- But if you're not drawing a salary/wages, how the heck are you buying groceries or paying the mortgage? You'd need to turn houses over very quickly/regularly for this to work...?
I'm not debating that tradespeople can make good money - that absolutely can. But, that's the exception not the norm...
The average plumber or electrician in the US earns about $65k/year... that's about 2/3 (or less) of an entry level programming job. Even if that isn't capturing side work/income, that's still less than a mid-career developer (earning $150-$200, more if they're on the west coast on NYC).
Put another way, even at retail consumer prices, I can buy a lot of plumbing or electrical service and still be money ahead on my fairly average engineering manager salary.
- And this is often taxed at capital gains rates which can be lower.
- i earn now too much to get social shit. just too much like few bucks.
my salary went up about 1.5x
my living costs went up more than 3x and rise each day seemingly.
its fuckin useless. like a scam.
sadly i have injuries that prevent going back to bluecollar job. Id be temped to ask my boss to lower my salary but that also feels fucking stupid.
maybe its time to avoid all taxes and go live in a fucking tent by the side of the road -_-.
- $10-20k of home improvement work adds considerable value for reselling, and you're only on the hook for raw materials -- you've already got the tools and skills and time
one of the wealthiest dudes I know is a carpenter who loves workin wood. his free time is spent making cabinets and furnature and blasting obscure music
- Most people don't like working in addition to working. Plus if you're constantly home renovating, it's kinda of hell living in there and your partner might go to greener pastures.
- Yea, at least over here in Finland many university degree programmers are hardly worth it, even though there are no tuition fees. A plumber or electrician can easily earn more than a researcher with PhD, with much shorter studies, better job security and more options for starting a business.
I know lots of people with master's degrees who have started studying something practical after graduation, as they were unable to find any job with their degree. Of course the general economic situation (highest unemployment in the EU) is having an impact on everyone, but it's hitting those with higher education particularly badly this time.
- >> plumber or electrician can easily earn more than a researcher with PhD, with much shorter studies, better job security and more options for starting a business.
And every single plumber and electrician I know is completely worn out(physically) by the time they hit 50. Both are these are incredibly demanding on the body, more than most people imagine. So they get to that point where they actually can't move and they need double knee replacements before they even hit retirement, and suddenly can't work anymore. Some of them try to hire people, but that's hard and not everyone is built for it - so actually (at least in my experience) you go from being very well off to practically destitute, because like someone else pointed out - people in these professions are typically cash only to avoid taxes, they spend it, they don't put it in retirement funds to avoid having to explain the source of income, and they get to a point where they can't work and don't have any income.
It looks like a great option compared to someone who just got their PhD, sure. But long term I'm not sure if that's such a great option.
- > It looks like a great option compared to someone who just got their PhD, sure. But long term I'm not sure if that's such a great option.
Why? I am sure we can agree that SWE domain has its own set of disadvantages, no?
Many people I know have been burnt out in their 30s on their jobs and are unable to continue with the same capacity in their 40s, not to even mention 50s, and later ages. What company wants to hire a 40+ or 50+ year-old SWE? Not many. I am not sure how is that any better than being physically worn out? Physically worn out you can organize work, and hire other people to work for you, but when you're mentally worn out there's not much you can do really.
Avoiding the burnt-out syndrome trap alone isn't enough. You can also easily become unemployable because (1) you're either not good enough for hi-profile jobs demanding maybe 95th percentile skills on the market, (2) you cannot work 50-hour long weeks under high stress continuously because of social and existential aspects of your life (family), or (3) you're simply over-qualified for many other jobs on the market so there's a real risk attached to employing you.
Being a plumber or electrician OTOH does not bear these type of costs or risks so, with things put into a ~20 year context, and given the today's picture of the market, I am also not really sure I would favor SWE over being a plumber or electrician or carpenter.
Many of those folks over here where I live earn 6 figures, and mind that this is only what they report (!), the actual figure is likely 2x as much since the preferred way of paying for the bill is cash (without invoice).
OTOH to break into the 6 figures territory as a SWE over here you need to become a recognizable domain expert - for me it took ~15 years to build the expertise other people believe I am exceptionally good at, and are therefore willing to pay for it. This is far from being easy and there's only of handful such people (in my area) since it takes an unreasonable amount of time and stubbornness to reach that point, barring some other factors of course too.
SWE domain might have been lucrative ~15 years ago but the dynamics in SWE changed dramatically in the last ~20 years. And as we see now with the AI, the change seems not to be declining.
- I think that for some reason you took my critique of being a plumber or electrician as an endorsement of being a software engineer, and it's not entirely clear to me why.
- Yep. The ability to work without paying taxes in this profession is of enormous value. It keeps prices lower for the consumer, and income higher for the handyman.
I seen many handymen with the latest and greatest luxury cars, and the demand is endless.
On the other side, it seems technologists salaries are stagnating, and the new guys on the market get lower and lower salaries, so it does indeed seem as if the best and quickest way to retiring early is the handyman approach coupled with a high level of non-taxes work.
- If you're willing to commit fraud anyway, just run a crypto scam. The payout is a lot higher, and it will use the white collar tech skills you already have rather than forcing you to learn a trade.
- But then you have to feel bad that you're not contributing to society. The plumber is doing far more for society than any crypto con-artist is.
- I mean, or you could help build houses instead of drain electricity. One is clearly less lazy and helping humanity more.
- Not paying taxes is a drain on society
- It's for certain a drain on the military industrial complex, but building houses while not supporting the current regime is certainly better than draining a bunch electricity to enrich only yourself and paying money to a bunch of authoritarian wannabe's.
I am impressed with your compression of the entirety of this conversation down to two values of right/wrong. /s
- Time for a classic, Soviet-era joke:
A Soviet engineer needs some plumbing done in his apartment, and calls for a plumber. The plumber arrives, does his thing, and hands over the bill. The engineer is shocked. -'What, this is like a quarter of what I make in a month - for half an hour's work???'
Plumber shrugs. -'Well, why don't you come join us? Easy work, well paid, no responsibility - just remember to keep mum about your degree, as we're not supposed to hire academics.'
Our engineer contemplates this for a while, applies for a job as a plumber - and gets it.
All is well, good money, no responsibilites - until management requires that they take evening school classes to gain new skills and thus better build socialism. So, grudgingly, our engineer enrolls in a math class and, upon arriving, finds that the teacher wants to establish what the plumbers already know.
-'You over there - could you please come to the blackboard and show us the formula for the area of a circle?' he asks our engineer.
Standing at the blackboard, he suddenly realizes he can't for the life of him remember the formula; while a bit rusty, he soon figures out how to reason it out - furiously writing out integrals on the blackboard, only to find the area of a circle is -(pi)*r^2.
Minus? How did a negative enter into it, he thinks, going over his calculations once again. No, still gets the same result. Sweat building, he turns away from the blackboard for a moment, turning to the other plumbers watching.
As in one voice, they all whisper -'Comrade, you must switch the limits to the integral!'
- thank you
- > - You can easily avoid paying VAT if you know how to, so that's a 20% increase
You mean by how VAT is not paid on materials a company is going to use (at least that's the case here in France, no idea what the rest of the UE does it). Or by doing undeclared work?
- Doing undeclared work.
Just had it happen to a friend: needed a plumber, impossible to find anything reliable (no one in town knows of a reliable plumber; it's a rare find). All Google Maps results contained lots of paid 5-star reviews (ratings with a full, typo-less phrase, praising the company in very generic terms, and the only review for that profile), so he had to pick one of them anyway.
Guy shows up, doesn't present a quote before doing the work (mandatory for >150€), does a mess but fixes the issue in less than 30 minutes, bills 200€, or 250€ if you want a receipt. No paperwork whatsoever, and in a position to physically harm you or do damage to your home if you refuse. And that's a "good" one. Locksmiths that charge 500€ or more for 10-minute jobs are a dozen a legion.
Then, these same people start buying cheap houses here and there, and in 20 years they'll be worth so much money that they'll become rich landlords and live on rent alone.
Several friends during PhD were renting cheap apartments whose owners were truck drivers, electricians, etc.
The point is, concentration of wealth and never-ending property values going up is only going to make becoming renter a better and better deal. And every profession that caters to renters is going to get some share of that money.
- > Doing undeclared work
> No paperwork whatsoever
> in a position to physically harm you or do damage to your home if you refuse
So it's not "blue vs white collar jobs"; it's being a law abiding citizen or not.
I know a lot of people who matches what you're talking about, but they all have in common to have their own interpretation of the law. There's not a single thing they do by the books.
They're just "blue collar crooks".
Of course they can "win" if they cheat.
- I am yet to find any "blue collar worker" who would do this properly and actually give me an invoice or (god forbid) would take a bank transfer to a company account or maybe even a card payment. Literally every single person I have ever interacted with for fixing my house was like "mate it's cash only or the taxman is going to get me".
Recently I even needed my rims redone on my car, went to a big autoshop in my town, the owner came out with me to look at the car and went "mate it's going to be £500, cash only, you know how it is with the taxes. Or I can give you an invoice but it's going to be £600".
I literally turned around and left. Yes, they are crooks and fraudsters - but in my experience it's completely normalized. If you can get away with it, they will do it, and since everyone seems to be getting away with it, they do exactly that.
- This is a bit surprising to me, but I've only ever rented in Europe. In the US, though, it's common to get discounted pricing for paying cash, usually 2-3% reduction in price as that's what they pay for card processing, otherwise anyone will take a card and everything is done with free estimates in writing up front, signed contracts, and payment due on completion. I can't imagine what you're describing in this thread happening in the US, that's a great way to get sued into oblivion as a tradesman.
- You would be highly advised to learn how to do basic plumbing, electrical, and renovation tasks yourself in the US as well. The cost savings is enormous. Finding a quality contractor, in addition to being expensive, can also be very hard - there's plenty of people doing plumbing or electrical who might be licensed and everything but are grossly incompetent or never finish jobs.
A lot of stuff in the US is absurdly easy, as well. For example, in my area, pretty much all plumbing is PVC or PEX. Anyone on HN can learn very quickly how to work with this stuff and it's very cheap. There are very few repairs, for example, you could ever need to do that would cost more than having a plumber just show up and look at it - even accounting for buying tools.
- One added benefit of knowing how to do this stuff is even when you hire it out, you typically get much better work out of contractors for a better price. If for no other reason than you can more effectively communicate requirements and handle potential surprises/changes (which is guaranteed to happen when renovating)
- Which of course is not dissimilar to the current state of using GenAI tools.
- In my area, DC Metro, it's $200 for a plumber to show up. That's before they do any work - just the cost to schedule them.
And they don't do drywall - they'll hack a nasty, over-sized hole in the wall or ceiling to get the plumbing and leave you with a $600+ bill and needing a drywalled and painter next.
- In my experience, it's really hard to get someone good who can do a plumbing job, or electrical job, then patch the drywall & match the texture well. You need to search for a "Handyman" service for this & often you're getting a jack of all trades, expert at none. If they really are amazing, they're booked solid & no one will ever recommend them to you as they're already hard to get an appointment with.
For a lot of specialists like drywall, the really good people seem to never want to deal with small jobs. They get paid better & it's easier to do large jobs.
- Yeah, generally if you even have a mild disposition to learning how things work and building stuff for fun (i.e. you tore open things and played with legos as a kid). You can generally crash course most home servicing work in a afternoon and very often end up with a better result than paying someone $500 or even $5000 to do it.
Especially nowadays with AI, you can really quickly consolidate what you need to know for your specific job. Though of course, trust, but verify.
- Cutting pex to remove old shutoff valve and crimp on a new 1/4 turn valve took me probably 2 min and a $15 tool from Amazon.
- "You can easily avoid paying VAT if you know how to"
Interesting. Would you care to enlighten us on a legal way to do this ?
- You don't have to pay VAT on things you fix for yourself, because you don't pay yourself at all. This is in fact a kind of (legal) tax avoidance, but not (illegal) tax evasion. Given the cost of housing, being able to build your own house or even just doing small fixes here and there, leads to a big increase in perceived income. The tradies I know can afford whatever kind of car they want, whatever kind of holiday experience, and they live in a nice home. Mind you, they typically work 50h+ a week so there's that.
Of course, the parent may also have been referring to getting clients to pay in cash and not putting anything on the books, at the expense of getting barely any pension in the end, but that's not how I read it. This is getting somewhat less common because people are more likely than 20 years ago to get a loan from a bank to pay for renovation work, and the bank will want to see invoices.
- > You don't have to pay VAT on things you fix for yourself, because you don't pay yourself at all.
Just to be clear, if you're a VAT-registered tradie doing a job for yourself, you are obligated to pay VAT for the materials. Diverting vat-reclaimed materials for self-supply is tax evasion (which can be identified by auditing invoices). So legally speaking, the only money saved is the VAT on your own work hours.
Slightly ironically, self-supply is much easier and almost impossible to identify when devs use work-paid subscription services (e.g. Claude Max) on personal side hustles.
- -Besides, in some jurisdictions, the taxman thought of that.
If a Norwegian tradesman works on his own home, he's supposed to pay VAT on the value of the work he's done - not only on the materials used.
I suspect such work is being under-reported, though.
- Context was getting income. You don't get income, by avoiding paying more. So it is about black market jobs. Works until something happens. Disputes, accidents, .. you cannot go to the police or courts to demand money from an inoffical job.
- You don’t get more income, but you do get more disposable income.
- Most of it is just blatant tax evasion.
- The EU has better healthcare and safety regulations than the US. Blue collar work is risky.
- How will people be able to afford to pay for blue collar labor though, when AI will potentially have decimated all white collar and many blue collar jobs; that's what I worry about.
For example, if someone decides to stop being a software engineer and become an automobile mechanic, but few people can afford an automobile; they demand for their services will also greatly diminish.
- Either AI causes a collapse in aggerate demand, or it doesn't.
If it doesn't, you still have your blue collar career.
If it it does, you still have your skills at things that are hard to automate, and don't seem to be any worse of than anyone else, even if collectively, we are all worse off.
At an individual level, this still seems worth pursuing. You don't get to control your macro environment.
Of course, one could still use the political and persuasive tools you have towards the aim of ensuring the benefits of AI are broadly shared. It's reasonable to fear that is hard and uncertain work, but you don't get do decide if you live in hard and uncertain times or not.
- Affordability is a combination of individual productivity and the economy’s productivity. A substantial increase in the economy’s productivity through AI and robotics should result in greater overall production, which should tend to result in abundance, and thus a lower cost of living, which can even overwhelm a decline in your individual productivity.
- But cars will be 50% of their current cost, once all those useless managers and c-suite folks are replaced by ai. Right? Right??
- Thank you. That was the comment I came looking for.
- Your role writing these summaries could be outsourced to Ai if you don't improve your productivity.
- The AI has evaluated your performance as unsatisfactory; no food stamps this week.
- What does productivity mean in this context? AI would just give you the same crap the article used. I like a good TL;DR.
- I recently had a chat with a young person who'd recently graduated with a degree in marketing, found the work entailed unsatisfying, and left that to become an apprentice electrician.
He said that with the tariffs situation work had severely dried up and jobs were tight. This was in the PDX metro area. It makes one wonder what is really safe...
- So a lot of people might lose their jobs because of AI, right? But the same amount of economic output, probably more, will be produced because of AI. By whom will that output then be consumed? If people don't have jobs they don't have money to buy and therefore ... prices will have to come down!
Society as a whole will be better off because there is more output, better quality output. Then it's for us to vote in a government that shares the fruits of AI with everybody, by way of progressive taxation. Government, use the taxes you collect to give us free food. We don't need 5-star restaurants, just healthy food. We can do this, in a democracy.
- > prices will have to come down
Prices of services will come down. Prices of things that require natural resources will go up.
In a hypothetical world where let's say we have AIs that can do any human job more effectively than a human, rich people who can afford to control the AIs will control society and poor people who have nothing to offer economically will live in poverty.
A good proxy for our future is Angola: an upper class who got rich off the oil boom, and a lower class who is dirt poor because they have nothing to offer the oil industry.
- That's a generic problem with oil states. Or, more generally, where most income is generated by some centralized industry with strong government involvement. See "Dutch disease".[1] It's a strange situation in which having high income from valuable resources ends up making a state less industrial, and usually both more corrupt and poorer.
Is AI going to do this? Quite possibly. One of the symptoms is most investment capital being sucked up by the extractive industry. We're there now with AI. The current US situation is that the economy is flat except for AI companies and data centers, which are booming and are sucking up vast resources.
Most of OPEC has been through this cycle. Venezuela, Egypt, Iran, Iraq - lots of oil, but it didn't make the countries rich.
- This is something I've wondered for a long time. Does a software state become more like an oil state, or more like an industrial state?
- It's becoming painfully clear that we have no idea how to run a society where machines do most of the thinking.
Maybe there will be a glut of smart people. Historically, that was the case until roughly WWII. Humans produced a certain fraction of smart people, but there were more smart people than jobs for them. Pikkety points out that through most of history, about 97-98% of the population was doing manual work. That started to change with the Industrial Revolution. Not until roughly WWII did an actual shortage of smart people develop. Hence the postwar boom in college education. Not until the 1990s did the nerds take over.
We think of a large group of smart people making society go as normal. Historically, it wasn't like that. The robust, the entitled, and the religious were in charge. Pikkety has a long analysis of this in his Capital and Ideology. Look who runs the Trump administration.
We're already at a smart people glut. In the US, only about half of college graduates find jobs that really need a college education. That's pre-AI. Now what?
- Is it a good proxy, though? My intuition is that many economic effects play out very differently if they are limited to one country vs the whole world.
To make this more concrete, tax havens only work because most countries keep producing for real. AI will take all jobs, not just Angolan jobs.
- Yes. Though it won’t be a small class of rich, it will be a couple of overpowerful families only. I don’t think we have any examples to compare too.
Also, If you control the AI, but there is no middle class to consume its product, everyone is poor and controlling the AI doesn’t bring that much.
There is still some products much more important and stable: food, water and therefore land control.
- > Prices of things that require natural resources will go up.
This suggests a potential equilibrium sooner rather than later .. few modern technological advances have been as resource hungry as AI
- You forgot monopolies break the “price must come down”.
- I think their assumption is that there will not be enough people with money to pay the prices, monopoly-generated or not.
- On essential goods the prices can still be high enough to make everyone poor.
- Yes-Anding you, if one developer is suddenly 3x more productive and does 40 hours of work in 15 with AI tools, any reasonable manager would still want the same three people to keep working at 3x productivity.
I don’t see Keynes’ theory we would all be working drastically fewer hours per week suddenly materializing due to AI. As always we’re just going to try to output more in the same time. The fact I, a manager, can “vibe code” some bugs away between meetings does not mean I will benefit from having one less dedicated engineer.
- You need paying customers for whatever those developers are producing. If your market size is relatively fixed, you don't need three people anymore.
Look at it this way: if there really was a 3x market potential, why wouldn't that manager have hired six more people already?
- No because you have the customers and budget in that moment for three already and I’m not interjecting that more budget is given or any taken away.
Restated, I’m not saying we’re hiring more or less because of LLM AI productivity changes. I’m rejecting the idea we need less people for all the previous reasons stated and my own two cents that we’re yet to see the reduced work hours Keynesian economics predicted as output per hour increased. We humans just keep working the same hours even if that hour is massively more productive.
This last point is well studied and not my own original thought. I’m just poorly regurgitating college level Macro Economics.
My own point I’ll add here is we’re not seeing companies bragging about their two day work weeks.
My personal experience with layoffs is that it’s all been financial engineering and the lack of nearly free financing that we had in the 2010s, again in the Pandemic, CapEx tax changes last year, and/or over hiring similar to but not nearly as massive as Google and Facebook. I worked for a European company that hired a dozen Americans to become more “US Tech Company” like and eventually let us all go two years ago once the fun money ran out when rates increased. They did a little bit of the AI babbling but realistically they couldn’t get the financing to keep it all rolling.
The companies reducing to one developer for a product are likely not doing this because of LLM AI work but likely will survive better because of it.
To your point, I’m actually living it and it’s nothing to do with AI. One of my teams was cut to 25% of its size a year ago and the whole QA team let go. Roughly this was an EBITA play. Basically the only way we get anything done is by doing what I mentioned in my earlier post where the front end dev uses LLMs to build a prototype backend they can use to support their front end expertise and the back end dev does the same for the front end. Eventually they meet in the middle and I can juggle some of the KTLO myself. Is this fun? Absolutely not. If we had the headcount back we’d be able to meet the ‘25-26 roadmap but instead we’re doing 40% of it.
- Budget is based on revenue, though, at least in broad terms. If you thought you could triple your revenue by hiring a few extra programmers, you would, even if it meant raising money somehow.
I doubt you will ever see two day work weeks. Instead of cutting hours it makes a lot more sense for companies to cut people and have the remaining employees work full time. Or more. There are a lot of fixed costs for each employee, and most people would rather make more money than work less.
I worked at a company which, faced with slow period, reduced everyone's pay by 20% and switched to a 32 hour work week instead of cutting people. Most of my colleagues were bitter about it and a few even quit. Personally I was happy, but I was in a small minority.
Sorry to hear about your rocky employment experience. I feel like that's getting to be the norm these days.
- One thing could be that there is an extra management cost for each person to manage.
It's much easier to manage 3 people with better tools than to manage 9 people even if their output would be the same
- You have to account that expectations are set in part owing to bottlenecks, not just limits to desire/needs. Consumer expectations will adapt to the ability to improved productivity.
On the multimedia consumption (tv/film/music/games) side it seems like we are approaching a saturation point (between time sunk and desire to do so), but for business applications I don't see this being the case. Things sometimes move at a glacial pace.
- Lets take the example of Uber. If Uber ships 10x the code and features, I will still not 2x my rides.
Even if Uber makes the cost of travel to 0, I will still not 2x my rides.
- Uber needs to prove that they are growing though to validate their stock value, one of the tricks used to be increasing headcount to show growth.
But other tricks include new ventures, essentially public companies and VC companies have an almost unlimited appetite for new ventures, as that is how they keep validating their future growth and stock prices.
Currently financial realities are forcing layoffs, and the AI story is covering for the "growth" validation to keep stock prices going up.
But what's next? After you've fired everyone, what's the next growth story? They'll start hiring again, for new projects, even if AI can handle the coding there is still gobs of work surrounding building a software business or department that needs meat moving it forward.
- The end of ZIRP (cheap money) is precisely what ended the new-ventures/new-projects drive among big companies and turned them all to cost-cutting and maintenance mode.
- This is precisely my experience. Except our roadmaps didn’t change much.
- 0, yes you will. Or at least most would unless piblic transit were a genuinely better way to get around. But it won’t be zero as it’s bounded by the base cost of operating the vehicle.
- How would they lower the prices to 0 in this scenario, if they have to keep operating their AI-driver-army?
- Lowering the cost of travel to 0 would mean implementing a technology by which anyone can simply desire to be somewhere else, and they will instantly teleport to that new location.
returnInfinity is simply lying about not doing double (or more!) the amount of travel in that case.
- Who said anything about instantly teleporting? Uber could cut the cost in money to 0 but still operate cars which are bound by the laws of physics and the rules of the road.
Maybe returnInfinity already spends 12 hours a day in Ubers, or otherwise has them satisfy all his transportation needs, and couldn't usefully double his usage of them.
- Uber can cut the price of their service to 0.
It's impossible for them to cut the cost to 0 (without using magic), but that doesn't make it impossible for us to talk about what the cost being 0 would involve. Travel time is one of the costs you pay for Uber's service. That you don't pay it to Uber doesn't matter. If Uber reduced that cost to 0, you would use Uber a lot more.
- I’m sure that he/she would ride a lot more if it cost nothing, but I think the point is valid: even if Uber could 10x or 100x productivity, they could not do the same with income, because there is a limit to how much people actually need to go places.
- That’s true but fully autonomous driving alone might double my car travel. Going into the nearest major city is a pain. So is driving into the mountains. Operating costs and time are still costs. But not having to drive would really change the game for me.
- This is a silly easily falsifiable example, though. My Uber usage is approximately zero. If cost was zero my Uber usage would increase.
- The concern isn't that a dev sees 3x. Rather that at some point devs become a pointless middleman in the workflow. If the manager/PM can just tell the computer what they want, why do they need the dev in the middle to do it for them?
Will we ever achieve that world? Who knows. We've heard these promises before, with things like COBOL and 4GLs. Yet we're still here coding.
- Because in modern society we equate toil with morality we will toil on ever more meaningless crap tasks for food coupons for food that costs nothing to produce but is withheld through artificial scarcity to ensure meaningless toil occupies our existence because of a philosophy from the 1700’s.
- >we will toil on ever more meaningless crap tasks for food coupons for food that costs nothing to produce but is withheld through artificial scarcity
Seems dubious given how much agricultural subsidies most western countries engage in. If anything foods are under-priced.
- I look forward to seeing your company actually producing and selling food for “next to nothing”, given how easy it apparently is
- We can produce enough food for everyone on earth to eat, and as more automation sets in, labor costs will decline. We are already at artificial scarcity - other than political animus rooted in racism and toil is moral there’s no reason for anyone anywhere to starve. This trend won’t reverse, but will become increasingly perverse.
For example, in my neck of the woods there’s the company Carbon Robotics, which is pretty successful. They develop autonomous tractors and a laser weeding system both of which have good adoption and sales at megafarms. They decrease the cost of herbicide application and labor significantly. That’s just one such company. It’s to the point that farms go fallow, or convert to solar, because the revenue produced farming isn’t enough to justify farming because we would be feeding people for free otherwise. That, my friend, is artificial scarcity. So keep toiling for your food coupons and convince yourself that the market is infallible.
- Producing the food is only 10% of the challenge. How do you deliver it to everyone at no cost without rotting? How do you deal with a delivery of flour if you have no oven?
If it's so easy this is ripe for a startup to disrupt. Food is the most necessary thing to human existence. Every living person is a potential customer.
- > We can produce enough food for everyone on earth to eat,
Who is this "we?"
There's a kind of circular complaint built into all such endeavors that goes like, "we can do this, but unfortunately we as a group don't want to, but we could definitely do it if we wanted, but sadly we currently have the wrong opinions, but we can definitely do it, if only we weren't inclined not to, but we should and we will, as soon as we all come around to the truth."
Your "we" doesn't seem to want to do what you want them to do, which is why communists so often end up thinking that the real problem is the existing populace and maybe what they really need is to be re-educated or even replaced.
- Bulk grains, etc are pretty cheap.
- That may waver, a main input across the whole chain for farming is crude oil.
- I'm not sure what this is contradicting. People can already get free food through a myriad of different institutions, including the government qua food stamps and welfare. Cheap grains are affordable by basically anyone who earn an income.
- Turns out, plants have been growing all by themselves for millions of years. Lmao.
- Yeah those idiot farmers with all their machinery and services are really missing out on your trenchant observations.
- I agree completely, but you forget that another option is that the powerful will use these tools to make us suffer and we will be powerless to stop them.
- That's the default option. Power seeks only more power, sharing is worthless to it, except as a temporary instrument. And AI is a perfect tool to concentrate even more power in tiny hands.
- Well, we could vote. In some parts of the world, at least.
- You would vote. Everyone else would vote for "their party" regardless of policy cause tribalism. Plus politics always follows the same old pattern "AI took your jobs? We generate food etc so cheaply now it may as well be free? Our robots could be building human shelters for free? Those are _small_ problems, if I get in I'll stop those dirty immigrants coming in! I'll make it so that men act like men and women act like women and they both use the correct bathroom! I'll get rid of the gays, too!"
And it's not even just the right leaning that are tricked. The left get thrown a bone now & then on some trivial thing like getting gay marriage (which shouldn't have even been an argument, more of a realisation) meanwhile nothing is done about corporate tax evasion, improving labour laws etc - or they lean too far into their voterbase and allow rampant immigration, welfare handouts without checks & balances etc.
And all of this because managing a large group of human is pretty much impossible. We need to reorganise into smaller groups.
- And look at what that led to. Democracy is not a panacea.
- Progressive taxes hit wage earners, while its the owners who will reap the benefits of AI. We won't get a share of the fruits without solving how to properly tax wealth(in a world where money is power, and its trivial for rich people to move to a different tax regime), which unfortunately seems tabu in large parts of the western world.
- That's true, although "progressive taxes" can be construed more broadly. Taxes on unrealized capital gains would be a start.
- > Taxes on unrealized capital gains would be a start
A start to what? There is no way of taxing unrealised capital gains that makes sense. You're taxing theoretical value that may or may not actually exist. Rebates (e.g. you're taxed on theoretical current value, but when you realise the actual gain, you get back the difference if there is any) just moves the problem around, makes everything complicated, and penalises attempting growth.
- It's not hard. Tax the amount the stocks are valued at at january 1.
Make exceptions for investments in illiquid things.
- This would destroy every retirement investment vehicle for the middle class more than it would affect the 1%
- That doesn't sound like it could be gamed, at all.
- Ok, and on the 2nd the price crashes, company goes bankrupt, stock is worth zero. You were taxes on theoretical value that you can't sell at to pay that tax.
What then?
- > There is no way of taxing unrealised capital gains that makes sense.
There is - tax it when it is being used as realized gain (e.g. when you get a loan like our billionaires do). fine to leave it alone as unrealized and not be taxed but as soon as you use it as real/tangible thing you gotta pay taxes, it is that simple
- Great, i don'trust the government with my pension retirement. Put all my life savings(that i already paid taxes on) on an investment portfolio. Now the government wants a cut on my unrealized gains as well. Do you realize each time the money changes hands it gets taxed? Do you trust the gov to be as effective and as efficent with that money att all?
- As of now, at least, nobody is actually seeing an increase of productivity from AI that shows up in any measurements anybody is making. So some of this talk is really getting ahead of the facts on the ground.
- We may very well end up with similar prices, a few stupendously wealthy people, and the rest of us living on the dole.
- I wouldn’t say it’s impossible but I’d argue from all we know now highly unlikely.
Why? Assume a company has a high margin because they used AI and reduced their workforce by 10x. What usually happens is that a new competitor comes in and offers the same for half the price.
Since AI is lowering the bar for entry this process should be even faster than previously.
- What usually happens is that that competitors then gets disappeared. Either by a happy ending (it gets bought up), or it gets squeezed out.
Monopolies arise naturally unless we work hard to avoid them.
- Monopolies stay stable only with a sustainable competitive advantage, eg through network effects or patents.
With no barriers, margins get squeezed out rapidly.
- > Assume a company has a high margin because they used AI and reduced their workforce by 10x. What usually happens is that a new competitor comes in and offers the same for half the price.
Wouldn't you need 10x the number of competitors to get back to the same amount of employees, assuming they are running with similar workforces?
- Yes, true for existing companies.
On the other hand we still don’t know which new companies will be created that couldn’t be be created before due to unfavorable economics.
- Rich people will consume most of the output. This is how life worked for most of the last 10k years, didn't it?
- I like your optimistic view. The reality is that AI concentrates power and when power concentrates, the rulers can dictate. Democracy is not just voting but also a productive populace that has a voice in the production process.
The people on the top are not going to share sh*t. That's just not how greed works.
- > We can do this, in a democracy.
In a democracy where corporations have 0 representation, I would agree with you. However, they do have representation in a way that is invisible to see and impossible to quantify. And it goes beyond citizens united. There is an invisible hand pressing on the scales.
- >better quality output.
that doesn't seem to follow necessarily.
- > If people don't have jobs they don't have money to buy and therefore ... prices will have to come down
Here's the one trick the oligarchs will not tell you: they intend to bill the government directly, they won't care if unemployment rises to 80%. They'll keep it up for however long the taxes and debt will last, and then jet off to their bunkers to usher in what comes next - or wait out the chaos.
- Prices don't have to come down, in fact I doubt they will ever come down.
Maybe you will have a class that can afford things and services, and another class who can only afford services and service based things.
Some one own things, others will rent them fractionally.
- Eh, the line of better quality output is suspect.
I’ve been looking at AI productivity gains, and the idea that it’s better quality output is the weakest claim that can be made.
There ARE more software project starts, yes. This also means it’s a more crowded field to be noticed in.
Also productivity gains are HIGHLY variable. I see some people being 2x more effective, most people publicly willing to claim 30% efficiency gains, and a more likely 15% gain for most people.
At the same time, I hear of cases in content and media where it’s essentially a wipeout. I know of a story where a firm went to an advertisement agency with an AI generated video they wanted, and only wanted the animations cleaned up.
When they got the quote for the costs to have it done professionally, they decided to just go with the AI generated video.
Fraud is another area which is seeing a boom. The degree of information pollution we are seeing has also seen a step change.
This matters because all the rosy eyed theories of productivity gains from AI do not account for changes to our shared information commons.
The business cases that come to mind are Fast Fashion, and Coke vs Pepsi, and Tobacco.
- > But the same amount of economic output, probably more, will be produced because of AI
> Society as a whole will be better off because there is more output
> better quality output
citation needed
> By whom will that output then be consumed?
So there's this thing called "waste"...
> If people don't have jobs they don't have money to buy and therefore ... prices will have to come down!
Yeah, and falling prices and unemployment are sure signs of boom and prosperity...
> government that shares the fruits of AI with everybody, by way of progressive taxation. Government, use the taxes you collect to give us free food
and you think though that never happened is now possible because?
- The problem is not type of government but rather the type of economic system people in the west especially in the US have been brainwashed into conflating democracy with capitalism. Europe was able to keep some socialist values for a few decades after world war 2 but capitalists were able to wipe a lot of in the last 20-30 years.
- The article mentions reduced job growth in SWE due to AI but the fed actually says the opposite: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE
The people best suited for implementing and interfacing with LLMs at the moment are still SWEs and at least for the time being AI is actually probably a job creator for SWEs rather than the other way around. This might change.
And Claude has been invaluable for me to fix trade-related things at home, even complex ones. It actually outdid a locksmith!
The most resilient career is probably nursing. Medicine maybe too, not because it's not technically possible but because doctor lobbies are incredibly strong. Healthcare is the largest employer in most states now and with an aging population that's probably where much of the surplus will go and it's a profession that has really meagre productivity gains (cost disease). So nursing might be the answer.
- > The article mentions reduced job growth in SWE due to AI but the fed actually says the opposite
It's an open secret a good majority of these "AI layoffs" are AI in name only, a little lie told to keep the shareholders happy while the real cause is the worsening economy.
- ive noticed a lot of recruiter outreach these days. i never used to get any last year.
- I don’t think kids should be insulating from AI. The examples in this article suggest for example that some people are dropping out of college and going into trade schools. I get that society needs electricians and construction workers and new software graduates are finding it difficult to get jobs. But having had a moderately successful career building software, I tend to think there is a lot of scope for the $40 trillion white collar economy to be disrupted (re-imagined/made more efficient), so still see potential for software engineering demand to stay high over the next decade as the true ramifications of AI plays out. Am I biased/coping? Is this moving faster? Slower? - What should kids be aiming for according to you? Computer Scientist? Biologist? Finance? Construction?
- Optimistically, I hope it filters out the people who were only interested in it for the money.
When I was in school, decades ago now, very few people went into CS compared to other majors. Everyone I knew going into it did it because they loved it. I would have done it regardless of the career opportunities because I want to build stuff.
Interviewing candidates over the years since then, my experience has been there are still very few of those passionate nerds and a lot of people who did it for other reasons, like the money or similar. There is nothing inherently wrong with this. I don’t fault people for it.
Maybe if we get very lucky, it will go back to a relatively few passionate people building stuff because it is cool?
- Having an industry’s labour supplied only by those inherently passionate about it is a great way to crush wages and working conditions. Look at what companies like Blizzard get away with because their employees just want to make video games at their favourite dev studio. While they’re a pain in the ass sometimes, I welcome the devs who are only here for the cash.
- This is totally leaving out the supply and demand aspect. People like the idea of making games more than working on the plumbing of some accounts payable software, so Blizzard can pay less and treat worse than NicheBoringFinanceCo.
- The parent comment is describing supply and demand. If Blizzard attracts a larger supply of workers who will accept lower pay and worse conditions because they intrinsically want the job, Blizzard gains leverage. That is exactly why studios like Blizzard can get away with more than “NicheBoringFinanceCo.”
- If an “industry’s labour [is] supplied only by those inherently passionate about it” the post says it would “crush wages and working conditions”.
That runs completely counter to the basics of supply and demand in a perfect competition market. It would be market with far fewer (labor) suppliers, who could therefore command a higher wage, not lower.
- You are only looking at supply. Neither supply nor demand by themselves adequately describe prices (even in supply-demand 101 theory; in practice of course it gets significantly more complicated than just supply and demand). There are fields with few suppliers where supply is extremely cheap and fields with few suppliers where supply is extremely expensive.
Is the number of suppliers low because demand is also low or is the number of suppliers low because demand is high but supply is constrained?
A field that previously had a supply of labor in it "for the money" who all leave is indicative of the former scenario not the latter.
That does not lead to higher wages. That leads to low wages.
(There are a variety of reasons why this story is too simple and why I remain uncertain about developer salaries in the short term)
There is a broader question of whether having people who are in it for the money leave independently "causes" wages to go down (e.g. if you were to replace all such people with people "purely in it for the passion"). My suspicion is yes. Mainly because wage markets are somewhat inefficient, there are always mild cartel-like/cooperative effects in any market, people in it for passion tend to undersell labor and the people in it for the money are much less likely to undersell their labor and this spills over beneficially to the former.
Note that this broader question is simply unanswerable assuming perfect competition, i.e. a supply-demand 101 perspective (which is why it doesn't make sense to posit "perfect competition" for this question).
It posits durable behavioral differences among suppliers that are not determined purely by supply and demand which do not update reliably in the face of pricing. This is equivalent to market friction and hence fundamentally contradicts an assumption of perfect competition.
- To use your example of someone working on the plumbing of an accounts payable system, who is passionate about that? The supply is near zero. That, like most jobs, is going to need to be done entirely by people who are just doing it for the money, and there is nothing wrong with that.
Your example runs counter to the laws of supply and demand too. You understand that wages will rise when supply is restricted, but you don't want to accept that supply will respond to the price signal in the form of more people entering that job market.
- > That, like most jobs, is going to need to be done entirely by people who are just doing it for the money
why then do they all have those interview rounds where you have to talk about what really attracted you to work at this boring company and how you would love to do that kind of work? They evidently haven't gotten the memo.
- I have never once pretended to be “passionate” about working. Never wrote a single line of code that I haven’t gotten paid for since I graduated from college 30 years ago. I was a hobbyist before college for 6 years.
I’ve gone through the BigTech guantlet successfully. Even then I showed I cared about doing my job well and competently.
I have purposefully thrown nuggets out during interviews letting companies know that I had a life outside of work, I’m not going to work crazy hours and in the latter half of my career, I don’t do on call.
- Nobody at any serious company asks retarded questions like that or expects retarded answers like that.
- The only way the people who are only in it for the money leave the industry is if the money gets worse. If the money stays the same why would they leave
- Except that there are a LOT of people that want to work in video games (which is the supply) which then depresses the price (wages)
All of my developer friends in the gaming industry have had far worse working conditions then what I've had.
- Let's consider how this could play out:
If you need a lot of low quality code in a hurry, AI can definitely do that for you now. The path to making money by writing mediocre code for people who don't really care that much is going to look like managing a network of bots that constantly spit out a huge volume of code that kind of mostly works and if it sometimes doesn't then whatever. The people in it for the money can probably make a decent amount in the "high volume low quality" space.
Then there's the code that needs to actually work, or have some thought put into it. Consider the process of writing IETF RFCs. Can you get an LLM to spit out English text that conforms to their formatting? Absolutely you can. Is the RFC it emits going to be something you'll want to have the whole world trying to implement as a standard? Not likely. So the people doing that are going to be doing it something closer to the old way.
- I am kind of considering the idea of changing my LinkedIn profile to one of me with a 'wild rag', checkered shirt, and broad brimmed straw hat and calling myself a robot wrangler and see if I get any takers.
- >plumbing of some accounts payable software,
As many of us in the early IT generation, I came because of I wanted to build games and program cool stuff.
Today, while I admit Games are supercomplex stunning apps, I hate it and I love to do boring finance app development :-))
If you would have told me in my 20ies that I will end up in banking & finance IT, I would have laughed at you - today I really like it and I do not play a single game anymore.
- See also: public school teachers. You either need to be insanely passionate or incredibly stupid to take ~$55k/year for long hours as an educator that is also a babysitter. And insanely passionate teachers are in short supply.
- I bet a lot of teachers look at what devs do and think that its also insane to sit in front of computer all day, in a no boundary job, working on something you really don't care about and is potentially really bad for civilization only to make money off and lose your sense of self.
- My spouse has expressed this nearly verbatim after transitioning out of a 16 year career in middle and grade school education to medical curriculum development. It was hell on her mental health but at least there was a clear motivation and purpose for being there.
- There are a lot of other benefits of being a teacher especially if it’s a secondary income in a two income family. Namely you are on the same schedule as your kids. My mom is a retired high school teacher.
- average salary of a high school teacher in seattle is 90k plus you get summers off.. doesnt seem too bad..
- Long hours? Teachers work the same hours or less than other adults per “New Measures of Teachers’ Work Hours and Implications for Wage Comparisons” by West.
“Teachers work an average of 34.5 hours per week on an annual basis (38.0 hours per week during the school year and 21.5 hours per week during the summer months).”
That’s leaving out the benefits of incredibly strong union protections, it being a state job with matched benefits, absurd job security even in the face of terrible performance, etc.
- There's no way these numbers can be correct. My school was 8 am to 3 PM, that's 35 hours a week right there for full time teachers. But teachers spend many more hours outside the class preparing lessons, grading work, and following up on things. If you even spend a week teaching something you quickly realize how much extra prep work goes into it.
- From the study: "Teachers work more than they are required to work by contract, but less than self reported hours of work. I find that teachers are more likely to overestimate their hours of work in the CPS than workers in other occupations, and conclude that this is likely because of an uneven work year".
Even by your own example, you're only at 35 hours a week, and that's before you subtract out the weeks of summer vacation, winter vacation, spring break, etc; where the workload is certainly far less than 40 hours a week.
- Wait-- I think you are confusing "teachers" with "police officers".
- “ benefits of incredibly strong union protections”
Lol, try saying that to an alaskan teachers face and watch yourself get slapped for the absurdity of the claim.
- The Alaskan teacher's union is ranked 15th overall in the US [1]. I'm betting they're just fine, and that any issues are more general "Alaska-problems" than anything specific to teaching, unions, etc.
https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/research/how-strong-ar...
- Lol; perceived influence is one of the 5 domains being analyzed. That has nothing to do with the protections offered to AEA members in AK.
Nonsense research showing how crappy academic research has become
- And ignoring that the other four factors are: Resources and Membership, Involvement in Politics, Scope of Bargaining, and State Policies, shows that you just want something that agrees with your anecdote.
Why are teachers special to merit any "protections" that aren't afforded to all employees, public or private?
- I think you have the law of supply and demand backwards.
- There are plenty of non-games software companies that are treating devs purely.
However almost all of the companies I have worked for in my 30+ years career treated devs well.
So if you are in a shitty situation, I highly recommend finding another job instead of just placing yourself over a barrel.
- >Optimistically, I hope it filters out the people who were only interested in it for the money.
I hope not, because we don't need software developers to be "starving artist 2.0".
And on that note: I vividly remember people staying away from the video game development industry because it was deemed "passion industry", and that had a really negative connotation of long working hours for asymmetrical return, and more.
I don't look forward for every other software engineering branch to become like that.
- Seems… improbable. There will certainly be less of us, but the fact remains that nobody wants to debug this shite vibecoded apps companies are pushing, and some simply are not able because of skill atrophy and perverse incentives to use AI at the cost of stability.
- Brother, we need to eat. You don't need to go to college to learn about some topic, you can pirate textbooks. You need to go to college to get a piece of paper saying you did. If you were passionate about computer programming, you can do it in your free time while you flip burgers or do whatever you need to survive
- >You need to go to college to get a piece of paper saying you did. If you were passionate about computer programming, you can do it in your free time while you flip burgers or do whatever you need to survive
This is a naive view of the average (or even above average) person's approach to learning, as well as an overly cynical read on the intellectually motivating atmosphere that comes from earnestly engaging in an academic environment.
- I only went into SWE for the money.
I initially pursued my real passion which was math and physics and got a cold water bucket to the face only after grad school.
- So you didnt tap your toe into a real dev environment before that second? :-)
- > Maybe if we get very lucky, it will go back to a relatively few passionate people building stuff because it is cool?
I think we basically lost this when software/computer/internet entered the mainstream. Now, like everything else, it has to be bland, unoffensive, and a commodity.
- I really wish this entire romanticism of the good old days when people only got into computer science because they breathed ate and dreamed about computers would die.
It was never reality - I graduated in 1996 and have worked at 10 jobs everything from lifestyle companies, to startups, to boring old enterprise to BigTech and now consulting companies. To a tee everyone has treated it like a job and not some religious calling. There is absolutely nothing wrong with coming to work at 8 leaving at 6 and not thinking about computers until the next day.
You don’t need to be doing side projects and open source contributions to do your job as a software developer anymore than a surgeon needs to be performing operations at home.
No I wouldn’t have chosen a major because I enjoyed it if it didn’t make any money. I didn’t then and I still haven’t found a method to get over my addiction to food and shelter.
- That's just your experience, though. It reflects mine, before I went to elite companies, where it is quite normal for people to live-and-breath software, at almost all hours.
- And by definition most developers don’t work at “elite” companies. I hope you don’t call your average FAANG and adjacent “elite”.
And if you think that is normal, it’s honestly kind of sad.
- >before I went to elite companies, where it is quite normal for people to live-and-breath software, at almost all hours.
Honest question: Do they actually _want_ to live-and-breathe software, or do they work in a highly competitive and highly compensated environment where doing that is implicitly required?
- This is never normal, and should not be normalized.
- I'm not saying that this is an incorrect read, but I think it's important to consider that young people might be responding to the general desperation of a tight labor market across the last generation. It used to be that you could get a degree - any degree - and that would be enough to get you in the conversation for a position somewhere. Today, a degree isn't any sort of guarantee of any sort of job - in your field, entry level, dead-end retail, anything. Tuition skyrocketed and only a few fields kept pace. So, you get the degree in the field that's a "winner." Of course, this just increases competition, robs other fields of needed competency, etc. Prisoner's dilemma?
- I think it will actually filter out people who weren't doing it for the money.
- Why shouldn't they? They're constantly being told by CEOs and big companies that AI is going to take all the jobs and do all the things. They're told the same by AI boosters who only see utopias and not the consequences of said utopias. Of course they're going to insulate from AI as much as possible. Especially given that society still pretty much requires that you work to be successful in the world. The utopian dream of "you'll never have to work again, you can just do anything you want" is a very very long ways off, but it's being pushed hard as though it will be in the next 3 years. But society is still pushing the "you must work" message too.
Edit: of course, the "long ways off" assumes that that dream is even possible and isn't just that, a dream. I question whether even that is possible given how we are still split under hundreds of nation states and can't even unite on the most basic of things.
- > What should kids be aiming for according to you? Computer Scientist? Biologist? Finance? Construction?
Can you sit down with an unfamiliar domain and develop enough genuine curiosity to get good at it, without a syllabus or a credential dangling in front of you?
The kids who'll do well in a world where the field-to-security mapping keeps shifting are the ones who can self-direct — not the ones who picked the right field in 2026.
Although full disclosure I'm short humans and very long paperclips.
- > The kids who'll do well in a world where the field-to-security mapping keeps shifting are the ones who can self-direct — not the ones who picked the right field in 2026.
Agreed that if someone can self direct and is capable, they’ll do better. Assuming two people who are similar in that regard, what are professions that may benefit from AI rather than hurt because of it.
- > Can you sit down with an unfamiliar domain and develop enough genuine curiosity to get good at it, without a syllabus or a credential dangling in front of you?
Do I have faith that I'll be compensated according to my developed ability?
Looking broadly at the recent past, the correct answer seems "no".
- > full disclosure I'm short humans and very long paperclips.
What does that mean in practice? Are there specific stock market bets you've made because of that world view?
- It can be read in two different ways. Massive techno-optimism, or massive techno-pessimism but facing a reality where humans are increasingly less valuable.
In the first case, buy AI stocks. In the second case, build a bunker in the wilderness.
- I don't think they are actually talking about the stock market and are just saying they think AI will destroy everything (referencing Nick Bostrom's Paperclip Maximizer theory).
- > Although full disclosure I'm short humans and very long paperclips.
What a ludicrous world we live in where this is a socially acceptable view to hold.
- What a ludicrous reply, to suggest it should be "socially unacceptable" to believe the Paperclip Maximizer thought experiment might reveal a scenario that is bad for humans overall.
- Of course it would be bad for humanity. “Short humanity and long paperclips”, in my reading, is pro-extinctionism. The specter of Daniel Faggella haunts this site and this industry.
- > pro-extinctionism
I can only speculate as I didn't write that post, but by my reading they were just stating their belief that AI is likely to lead to human extinction, not that they were happy about that outcome.
- Reality doesn’t give a shit about your beliefs, as the saying goes.
- If your model of reality includes imminent human extinction, you have some form of imperative to do something about that other than “ZOMG Claude Code”. YMMV
- Are you saying that the comment _supported_ human extinction? I think they're just saying they think it's a likely outcome. It doesn't appear to be an endorsement.
Personally, I think there's a worryingly high chance that ourselves or our kids will live in a dead, desertified, apocalyptic hellscape of a planet after we hit 5+ degrees of warming, but saying that doesn't mean I _want_ it to happen. In fact, I would prefer it not to!
- Pro-extinctionism (in favor of some “greater conciousness” that spreads across the stars) is a nontrivial minority view among AI people, including some “AI safety” leaders.
One of the reasons that I’m slightly less worried about a climate apocalypse is that there isn’t an equivalent group of people that sees the “inevitability” and concludes that it must be a moral good for the planet to warm 5 degrees. I’d argue that multiple degrees of warming is more inevitable than paperclips, but there’s a serious global effort to mitigate and avoid it anyway!
- Yeah it’s a big issue, I just don’t read the comment you’re objecting to as supporting that.
I mean I might think oil prices will go up but still choose not to buy oil stocks for moral reasons.
- Given the OP’s general disposition towards AI in other comments I’m not convinced. But I’m happy to admit that absent proof I was being uncharitable— if so, my bad.
- Even if people assume the worst impacts of LLMs on white collar work, there is simply not enough demand for electricians and plumbers for that to work, right now these professions work only because the number of people going into them is limited.
- You sound like you're not a home owner. In populated areas it could take a week to get a electrician or plumber out. And contractors are hard to find.
- Don't get fixated on plumbing itself. The point is if a bunch of people rush into any profession it leads to wage depression. Unless the amount of plumbing needed increases, the overall amount of money flowing to the plumbing populace is likely to stay roughly the same.
- > The point is if a bunch of people rush into any profession it leads to wage depression
Eventually. Wage depression does not happen linearly. You're asserting that demand is maxed out and there's no more money to go around, and that's just not true. A lot of people just don't bother because tradespeople are famously difficult to work with because they are so overbooked.
- Six weeks here (wealthy part of the UK).
- It takes a week because if you want it fast they charge you an emergency rate. This aspect of the tradesman is independent of demand and one of the perks of their lines of work much like over time in other fields.
- They charge you an emergency rate because they are so booked out it takes a week to get them.
- And their elevated pay is a function of all the other folks making a ton of money in white collar PMC work.
- Development is the same though.
If things play out I see there being two classes of low paid developers in a decade or so: the first being the vibe coders who earn a subsistence wage because most people can do it (not everyone, there will still be a cost of entry, paying for the tools, which will exclude some groups), the second being the more “artisnal” developers working on the things that can't (yet) be vide coded and fixing up the problems caused by insufficient care by the vibers and those employing them. These will be low paid because while the work is important demand will be low and there will still be a fair few people with the skills and desire (they'll make ends meet between good jobs by taking on gig-economy vide-coding work themselves). There will be a lucky few still making a decent living, but a much lower proportion than now.
I'm hoping to arrange retirement before things get that far… Failing that I'll do something else (I could be a sparky, though if all the youngsters are training for that perhaps that industry will gain a bad supply/demand picture from the worker's PoV too!) to pay the bills and reclaim dicking around with tech as a hobby.
- Agree.
- > I tend to think there is a lot of scope for the $40 trillion white collar economy to be disrupted (re-imagined/made more efficient), so still see potential for software engineering demand to stay high over the next decade as the true ramifications of AI plays out
So far, the demand curve of software has been very favorable, and I don't think that will change soon. If software was 10x cheaper to develop that makes a lot of features and projects attractive that would have been too expensive before. So far every single efficiency improvement in programming has lead to more demand for programmers because of this. At some point there is a limit of useful things to do, but I don't think we are close to it yet
But as someone choosing which college to go to you don't just have to think about the next decade, you have to think about the next half century. I am confident software engineering will be in a good place in 10 years, but I have no clue where we will stand in 20.
- The prevailing sentiment on HN is that AI will make coders 10x more productive, but that we'll all keep our jobs and salaries, with the possible exception of people who don't embrace AI quickly enough.
But let me ask you this: has AI made life easier for illustrators, book authors, or musicians? They were affected by the technology earlier on. If they don't embrace AI, they face increased competition from cheaply-made products that the average consumer can't distinguish from the "real" thing. But if they embrace it, they can't differentiate themselves from the cheaply-produced content! In fact, for artists, the best strategy may be to speak out very vocally against AI, reject it early on, and build a following of like-minded consumers.
- It’s also not exactly a secret that the executive class resents having to pay high-income workers and is champing at the bit for layoffs. Even if you fully embrace AI, they want white collar jobs to look more like call center work with high surveillance, less autonomy, and constant reminders of replaceability. Most people saw through that “our people are our greatest asset” talk before, but they’re not even trying anymore.
- We just need to be bold enough to take risks and replace the executive class with an AI agent that's been trained on Machiavelli and the Wealth of Nations and all of the rest of the written word to write the layoff letter in corpo speak anyway. Waiting for the AI bot that gets paid $10mm/year to be a CEO.
- The thing is, for most artists outside say in commercial work where AI is a great risk to jobs, they are judged by the finery of their craft, not rate of output. How many clients are there who say "we don't care how long it takes for you to come up with the solution, we just want it beautiful and representative of your style."
- I think you just described a tiny minority of artists though.
- Automation worked out great for domestic manufacturing in the US /s
- >What should kids be aiming for according to you?
If it's my kid? Starting their own Enterprise. Between 'good enough' knowledge work getting cheaper and the bureaucracy that made entrepreneurship less attractive over the last decades being either trimmed or automatable, we may be looking at a golden age of new business formation. There's an old saying, "genius is one percent inspiration and ninety nine percent perspiration". If ai shifts that to just 2 and 98, it'll unlock massive demand for a certain kind of mind.
How to teach that I'm still pondering. One idea that occurs to me, is that a human will always be needed to ask the right questions and have good taste, but I don't know how to teach those. They can probably only be educated, which in my mind is distinct from teaching. A different idea I have is that an entrepreneur needs three skills: they need to identify a problem, implement a solution, and get paid for it. Those skills probably can be taught, so I'd try to ensure they get early reps in all three.
If I knew how to connect those two ideas I think I'd have a decent curriculum. Anyone have suggestions for that?
- Entrepreneurship is like sales; it can't really be taught, only learned through practice, through trial and error. The best way for kids to learn business is through doing it.
- Definitely. Unlike asking the right questions or having good taste though, it's possible to know how successful you are at business so the dynamics are definitely different.
i would hope so, but wherever i have worked its the bureaucracy/endless "agile" ceremonies and meetings that make things less efficient, and so far (where i'm at anyways) ai has done nothing to help that...> I tend to think there is a lot of scope for the $40 trillion white collar economy to be disrupted (re-imagined/made more efficient), so still see potential for software engineering demand to stay high over the next decade as the true ramifications of AI plays out.- The thing I'm seeing in people's use of LLMs is that there's still a strong contrast in technical usage of them.
I went to the local Claude Code meetup last week, and the contrast between the first two speakers really stuck with me.
The first was an old-skool tech guy who was using teams of agents to basically duplicate what an entire old-fashioned dev team would do.
The second was a "non-technical" (she must have said this at least 20 times in her talk) product manager using the LLM to prototype code and iterate on design choices.
Both are replacing dev humans with LLMs, but there's a massive difference in the technical complexity of their use. And I've heard this before talking to other people; non-technical folks are using it to write code and are amazed with how it's going, while technical folks are next-level using skills, agents, etc to replace whole teams.
I can see how this becomes a career in its own right; not writing code any more, but wrangling agents (or whatever comes after them). The same kind of mental aptitude that gets us good code can also be used to solve these problems, too.
- and the things the first person is doing can very very easily be trained into a bot as well.
this doesn’t seem like a safe direction either.
- You're coping. Everyone wants a remote software job. These are dead. If you want something in software, it will need to be robotics or space related and you'll drive to a location to do it.
If you want to be in a remote, small town, get into construction and become a builder with their own GC license in a few years. Then charge people 400k to build that little dream cottage with 2 guys (you and a team mate) twice a year. 150k each 100k mats for each house. Just a small warning: It's hard but real work and very rewarding.
- Wha do you mean these are dead? I work a remote software job and it ain't going anywhere from what I can see.
- I could have elaborated, but long term this line of work is dead. Will there be software engineers in 20 years? Can't tell you, but it won't be in the millions like it is now. Will those people KNOW a programming language? probably not. At some point the sheer amount of capabilities of agents will just keep going up and us humans are still writing buggy code. Waymo just declared that it's drivers are something like 13x better than human drivers... Agentic has only been around for what, 1 years maybe 2 if you count closed betas.
- "Will those people KNOW a programming language? probably not. "
if I'm able to learn all kinds of stuff in just a few hours, why would programmers 20 years from now not know programming languages?
just doesn't make sense.
- Yes, you could. Have you bothered learning how to wash your clothes with a washboard sitting next to a river? No, instead you using a washing machine (I presume).
There won't be much of a reason to learn a programming language at some point in the future.
- Interesting, I’ve been working remotely at “remote first departments/companies for 6 years across 3 jobs.
Admittedly the first was at BigTech in a “field by design” role that went RTO last year a year after I left.
- [dead]
- The "go into trades" thing has two major flaws:
1) The supply of work will skyrocket when everyone will flock there for work
2) Demand will plummet as the white collar people who bought these services will loose their jobs and income
And of course if robotics will get solved to an acceptable degree most of those jobs will also get mostly automated.
- Having spent a couple years rehabbing a 100 year old house, I’m convinced the trades will be the last thing to go. When the building you’re working on has been ship-of-Theseus’d by 3 generations of home owners, everything is out of distribution.
When a robot can reliably do this work, I think it can reliably do any human job that requires physical ability and judgement.
- But the problem wont be the robots. Itll be the flood of new workers who will offer to rehab the place cheaper than you. And itll be that the white collar owners of the house wont have enough money to blow on a rehab bwcause their desk jobs are getting replaced by AI
- It's not the robots that are going to blow the floor out of the trades; it's the legions of people joining the trades that will do it.
- We really need automated roofing. Installing shingles is easy, except that it has to be done on top of buildings. There's an experimental roofing robot, but it's not good enough for production yet.[1]
- Metal roofs seem nice and easier to install too, but at least where I had a house built (Ireland) the local planners (aka meddling old people with too much time) thought it wasn’t suitable for a “home” so you had to spend four times as much on a slate roof.
- Especially if you get into a specialized trade for people with money.
I’ve repaired a lot of my historic windows myself because of how expensive it is to get someone else to do it. (Quoted 8k for one leaded glass window) I think it’s become my new backup job if I really am replaced by a computer.
- Eh, it's been cheaper and better for a long time to just demolish and rebuild rather than deal with neverending issues at major fixer uppers. Robots probably would be able to do uncomplicated cookie-cutter builds in a decade or two, there's just too much money in the construction sector that AI companies looking for the next big thing to disrupt can't ignore.
- we wont be living in these houses because cost of mainintence will be unaffordable.
we will be living in houses that can be reparied by robots.
- If the other 2 comments still make it hard to understand, South Park had a great episode explaining this.
- I am just absolutely flabbergasted that people seem to ignore your first point so consistently on this site.
Then again, these were the people who ten years ago were constantly bleating that Software was invincible and that flooding that market with a million bootcamp idiots wouldn’t eventually saturate that market.
- My thoughts exactly. I do think people tend to frame things in a developed economies sort of way when the worst fears of ai is actually more akin to a developing/emerging economy framework. And that says when where there's lump of labour available, most aren't earning that within trades.
- Pipes don't care about how much you would like to spend on it. They will leak when they are ready to leak.
- and if they leak when you don't have the money to fix it, you just live for as long as possible with leaky pipes, then try to fix it yourself and MAYBE you shop for cheapest plumber possible. end result, plumber earns less because you are broke
- I still don't understand the logic that any job is safe from ai (if it lives up to expectations). Sure, it might not be directly impacted by ai but why is there this expectation that the excess labour from those directly impacted doesnt act to suppress the earning power of other jobs?
Especially considering that the implication is that humans just become a pair of hands with opposable thumbs?. Take the electrician in the article, sure its a skilled job but the barrier into it drops massively imo if you can just take a picture of whatever issue is at hand and ai spits out what is needed, no?
- > I still don't understand the logic that any job is safe from ai (if it lives up to expectations). Sure, it might not be directly impacted by ai but why is there this expectation that the excess labour from those directly impacted doesnt act to suppress the earning power of other jobs?
I don't get what's illogical in this statement. If people are displaced, everyone will know that the value of other work will go down too, but they'll still try to get into those other fields because they may still offer better prospects and a paid job (even at a low wage). That doesn't sound bad compared to a situation where you can't get a job in your field regardless of your demands. Besides, if we get to that situation, basically every job will be impacted, so it's not like keeping the tight grip on your current career will be more likely to save you.
> Take the electrician in the article, sure its a skilled job but the barrier into it drops massively imo if you can just take a picture of whatever issue is at hand and ai spits out what is needed, no?
That works well until an electrician who follows LLM instructions starts a fire or fries themselves. It's true that automation can still make their work faster, but the value of electricians isn't going to zero any time soon because there's a reason why governments still want them to know what they're doing. As soon as you touch jobs that could result in you directly killing others or yourself, there's usually licensing and regulations all over the place. All of that is additional barriers to being fully replaced on a whim. If this automation gets to you, at least you're all the way back in the line, and it won't be as bad as the others.
- I don’t think we have any way of knowing what will happen. We’re in such an age of abundance now that it’s possible to make a living fighting with your girlfriends in Salt Lake City. Graphite block warehouse owners in China can be celebrities in the US. The influencer economy would have seems unthinkable and absurd in the 90s. What will be normal 30 years from now will probably seem just as bizarre. I’d like to think we will be colonizing other worlds, but it will probably be just more service economy excess like pet therapy and Uber-for-friendship.
- > make a living fighting with your girlfriends in Salt Lake City.
what again?
- Probably a reference to shows like 'Secret Lives of Mormon Wives'
- Taylor Frankie Paul’s monetization of relationship dysfunction is an inspiration to hustlers everywhere.
- Agreed, there would definitely be knock-on effects. If a bunch of people who were otherwise going to be software developers decide to focus their career on the trades, then the wages for trades jobs will drop.
- >then the wages for trades jobs will drop.
This does not seem like a straightforward conclusion. It could instead result in more physical projects being able to be done as it removes bottlenecks due to limitations of laborers. There is not a fixed amount of work that needs to be done in the world, humans can make up new work they want done.
- > humans can make up new work they want done.
I agree. Even in knowledge work this is true. Hell, I'd argue that white(ish) collar work is already the biggest area of bullshit jobs that exists today.
- And if the wages drop, then there will be less demand of those trades, and when there's less demand, ...
- Some of the trades are non-negotiables that have to be done regardless of the current economic situation. They'll be hurt too by the overall cheapening of labor, but those have the best odds of making it through.
- I've always felt that AI's main contribution to eliminating jobs is giving CEOs the ability to do layoffs while trying to both separate themselves from the current economic uncertainty and imply that they are an AI company.
Companies do this all the time. A CEO's job is to convince investors that their company stands to win in whatever the current hot trend is. During bitcoin's crazy run in like 2022 or whatever, a ton of tech companies were hopping on the bandwagon and branding themselves as a blockchain company. Look at Block/Square. The current trend is that AI is hot and the economy isn't. Therefore, it's beneficial to the stock price to tell your investors that you're laying off 50% of your staff because you're AI-powered. Just look at Block/Square. My experience has been that most companies have an incredibly patchwork implementation of AI, and that most of the work that they do (particularly larger companies) isn't made more efficient by using AI.
In a few years, there will be some new hotness, and all companies will be saying that the DNA of their company is whatever that is.
As for the current uncertainty in the job market, when you randomly have 50% tariffs slapped on goods you need and can't readily find available in the US for the same price and find that 20% of the world's oil supply is cut off, you tend to not want to invest in the future. Talking about AI is cheap. Tariffs are expensive.
- > Talking about AI is cheap.
AI is about to get a lot more expensive as Taiwan (TSMC) and other South East Asian chip manufacturers don't get their Natural Gas or the Natural Gas they need becomes really expensive.
- I'd be interested to see if the actual cost of AI will actually have any impact on how often CEOs end up talking about it. In my experience, there's a certain level of assessment that goes into whether or not a line item on your expenses is considered a problem or an investment. If you can still hand wave your way into convincing investors that $200K in AI credits replaces 3 $200K/year software engineers, even though it used to be $100K for the same amount of credits, you might be fine. At some point, some part of that equation will likely fall out of favor with investors or the math will no longer work out, and maybe it's the cost of natural gas or helium.
- Energy is minor part of the cost. Now helium is something else
- I assume TSMC is not only helium consumer so in reduced supply situation they’ll pay more and someone else will end up without helium.
- >AI is about to get a lot more expensive as Taiwan (TSMC) and other South East Asian chip manufacturers don't get their Natural Gas or the Natural Gas they need becomes really expensive.
Also, before the war Trump got GCC countries to promise they will invest $ 2 billion into AI. Now those money will probably not come anymore.
Also, the power will get more expensive, so running AI data centers will be more expensive.
- The industrial revolution is coming for white collar work. I'm finding Marx more and more relevant these days:
"So soon as the handling of this tool becomes the work of a machine, then, with the use-value, the exchange-value too, of the workman’s labour-power vanishes; the workman becomes unsaleable, like paper money thrown out of currency by legal enactment. That portion of the working-class, thus by machinery rendered superfluous, i.e., no longer immediately necessary for the self-expansion of capital, either goes to the wall in the unequal contest of the old handicrafts and manufactures with machinery, or else floods all the more easily accessible branches of industry, swamps the labour-market, and sinks the price of labour-power below its value."[0]
[0]: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm
- The labor theory of value has been thoroughly debunked. The value of something is whatever we're willing to pay for it, in balance with what the producer wants. Items aren't imbued with value through sheer hours of work.
- Marx’s point here is not that prices equal labor hours but more that automation can make workers economically superfluous, intensify competition among them, and depress wages. You can reject the labor theory of value and still admit he saw that dynamic clearly.
- For years now, I've seen the same old advice repeated: learn a skilled trade and you can support your family.
I started wearing a tool belt for work before I even finished high school. I worked in various skilled trades until I was 38 years old. I made some decent money sometimes, but not often.
Here is the part that people forget to tell you when they give you that advice: learning a skilled trade only pays off if you A) join a union or B) work for yourself.
This is especially true in the Southern US. You can be the best carpenter, electrician, plumber, etc in town, but you won't have healthcare, retirement PTO, you won't be treated like a human unless you join a union (good luck with that in the South) or work for yourself by either being a contractor or starting a company and hiring others to work for you.
However, if someone is truly determine to work in the trades, I always recommend they become a welder. A competent welder can clear $200k+ per year with nothing but a pick up truck with a service bed and their welding equipment and generators.
But other than that, I advise people to avoid the skilled trades unless they can join a union.
- > This is especially true in the Southern US. You can be the best carpenter, electrician, plumber, etc in town, but you won't have healthcare, retirement PTO, you won't be treated like a human unless you join a union (good luck with that in the South) or work for yourself by either being a contractor or starting a company and hiring others to work for you.
Anecdotally I met a guy a while back. He was a machinist in the Midwest. He was looking for a new job. Anyone reaching out to him were non-union shops in the south paying less hourly than McDonalds nowadays.
- That happens frequently. When I first returned to the mainland after ~10 years in the Caribbean, the first job I landed was for a Korean company. I ran their CNC line. I single handedly maintained and ran 6 5 axis DMGs. They sent down a CNC guy from Detroit to train me for about a week.
He was floored when he learned how much I was being paid. His hourly rate was more than double mine (not for the consulting/training work, but for his normal production work) and his benefits were far better. Plus the area he lived in had a much lower cost of living than I had in Auburn, AL.
Alabama politicians love to brag about all the manufacturing jobs they've created. But what they've really done is simply allow all of these companies to move down south where they aren't required to treat their employees like humans.
Out of ~300 people on the floor, I was the highest paid because I was the only one that could operate the DMGs. All of my coworkers worked 70 hours per week (we were required to work 6am to 6pm Monday - Friday and then 6am to 4pm on Saturday) yet they still relied on public assistance you be able to survive.
- Other forces that contribute to the "AI is taking our jobs" narrative:
- Layoffs due to insufficient demand in uncertain economic times
- Companies selling AI need to claim "we are so great with AI we don't need as many people." Layoffs unlock AI budgets.
- It justifies all the capital allocation into AI.
- Companies in the AI industry shock the government into learned helplessness, so they can write policy that is on their terms.
What am I missing?
- Yeah if anything this recession feels demand driven rather than labor replacement driven. Nobody wants to do capex or buy things when everyone is telling them they're going to get replaced with jpeg-for-text so they aren't. As a result most of the economy isn't moving particularly fast with the exception of people buying up the entire worlds supply of silicon and driving up prices on increasingly essential hardware. So we have stagnation and inflation all in one but from the dumbest possible source.
- There is no such thing as an AI-proof career.
Look at recent output from leading edge humanoid robotics projects like 1X/Neo, Figure 03, Skild AI. Also see open published work like MimicDroid, HDMI, GenMimic, Humanoid-Union Dataset, RoboMirror, Being-H0
Figure 03:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-31-KBBuXM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUTzuhkDG3w
1X Neo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lS_z60kjVEk
Skild AI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRmjBdKKLsc (Learning by Watching Human Videos)
Mimic
https://youtu.be/_LkBFL5m1WU?si=Qvgb7vkpG_KCAJdN
There is a ton of very useful recent progress with imitation learning and related datasets. There is also some work on learning from large scale video like Youtube.
We are months away from the ChatGPT moment in humanoid robotics where a project launch or demo makes people finally realize that they are general purpose.
The only way we could have AI proof careers is if humanoid robotics were to completely stop progressing. Since it's been advancing very rapidly, that makes no sense.
- I dunno. I trained as a software engineer, pivoted to civil laborer. I just can't see a robot doing 90% of the stuff I do anytime soon. Same goes for plumber, electrician, ... even most mobile plant operations. As a supplement around the edges, sure. But replace? Not in the near term. And that's not even considering the safety certification moats around skilled labor roles.
- I'm think event photography is another.
It's one thing to use AI to touch up photos, but in the end, you probably still want photos that match your memories and good photography still has an element of taste and creativity.
- Yeah I think with all the AI slop around, people are going to value 'real' a lot more.
- AI-proof is probably the wrong way to look at it, but there is substantial advantage in being in one of the _last_ to be automated industries. Social safety nets and such are probably set up by the time the robots come for the last jobs.
- >Social safety nets and such are probably set up by the time the robots come for the last jobs.
What makes you think "Social safety nets" will be the solution the élites land on?
If we were to wargame out different scenarios, we'd likely find there are a lot of potential solutions to the problem of large masses of people who are not useful to the cause of productivity in your society.
Giving non-élites a social safety net is actually one of the most resource intensive solutions. Not saying our oligarchs would not choose that solution. Just pointing out that it would severely impact their bottom lines. More than almost any other solution in fact.
- If elites do not provide a social safety net why would the masses respect their elite status and resource endowments anyway?
Unless you are suggesting billionaires build private armies in some sort of neo feudalism, there are no elites who are not dependant on the existing social structure.
- Private companies literally are building drone armies right now. Are you sure their use will be limited to Ukraine and the Middle East?
- Yeah that's why my argument is us proles cannot wait for rock bottom, we have to get these guys now
- On the upside they'll all generationally churn out of life, acting as a forcing function on future decisions.
Time isn't linear. No guarantees we march right along handing batons to the next age group. Which generation will be future elites making the choices come from?
Millennials and GenZ (despite a blip towards Trump in 2024, they blipped hard away from him as his policies of 2025 hit them hardest) are trending progressive as they age.
And Millennials and GenZ outnumber a GenX population that is the only cohort to not sour on Trump. GenX influence will rapidly shrink as Boomers churn out.
No linear time. No single clock all living things tick to. Meaning the population composition is not guaranteed to exist such that the old ways are the future. No guarantee 50 year middle managers waiting patiently end up elites in control. They might be too copy paste and conservative.
https://fortune.com/2025/08/07/gen-x-ceos-decreasing-baby-bo...
- I don't know about this analysis?
Number one, Trump won the presidency on the strength of his support from younger generations of Americans. It remains to be seen whether or not those younger generations will turn against Trumpism.
Number two, GenX. Not only is GenX is the generation that voted against Trumpism the most statistically speaking, they are also the smallest generation. ie - the least statistically relevant where votes are concerned. (Which is why it didn't really matter that they voted against Trump.)
I agree with your assertion that the Boomers will churn out. I disagree that it will matter that Boomers churn out. Mainly because support for Trump-like policies is, again, strongest among the younger generations. The younger generations are literally how the guy won the presidency and they will represent more of the populace in the future, not less. So until I actually see millennials and GenZ vote against Trump-like policies, I'm not really sure how things get better?
- The Canadian social safety net has big enough holes that rather than incur the costs as a first resort, the Canadian government has taken to passing out "are you aware of your options regarding MAID?" pamphlets to decidedly non-terminal patients.
There's only one way to AI-proof yourself: become enormously rich and join the Davos class.
- > There is no such thing as an AI-proof career.
Proof as in much less likely to be significantly disrupted by AI within the next couple/few decades, well I definitely think so.
- Pfew, if the biggest threat is from humanoid, then there is nothing to worry about
- I'm not convinced the current job market turbulence, at least in the US, has anything to do with LLMs. It's just as likely companies are blaming "AI", which has a sort of inevitable feel to it, while they outsource jobs to lower cost countries.
- The admin is doing everything in its power to cause everyone heartburn and the billionaire class is just running around trying to double down on all the damage the admin is doing. During "good" times I think people would have an easier time looking at AI and seeing it as just another random tool rather than the end of days, but when everything looks like the end of days...
- The writing in music press from that era was genuinely better than most of what passes for criticism today. People had opinions and they argued them.
- Did you mean to comment this on the NME sibling? Haha
- The Submarine
- If you haven't built large investments in the companies that will benefit from AI it will be a very difficult future.
- Young workers are AI-proofing themselves by doubling down on creativity and real-world skills. It's worth checking the full breakdown on WSJ too.
- Disturbingly, AI is set to replace essentially any position that is useful, to the extent that it is useful and somehow some people still think they should adapt themselves to the system instead of working to adapt the system to them!
Basically all that would be left of desk jobs would be those which have unfair legal powers (including via licenses and credentials) or are pure accountability plays. Like politicians, lawyers, aircraft pilots, corporate accountants... And those jobs will suck because people will be accountable for work that is not their own.
These jobs won't require any skills because most people may be able to go through their entire career without doing any work. But they will get paid a lot just for having being selected for their position... While other people who may be more skilled than them might be broke and homeless.
- And yet someone has to actually tell the AI what to create. There's just no avoiding this.
Anyway before this AI doomerism can become reality AI first needs the breakthrough of genuine understanding to stop making stupid mistakes. Imitation will always remain imitation.
There must be eg an understanding of casualty and reasoning on the same level as we have, not the useless "You're absolutely right" you get now when you point it its mistakes.
- >And yet someone has to actually tell the AI what to create. There's just no avoiding this.
Yes there is, just stop creating. Or take a page from biology, and use random mutation and natural selection to iterate on useful novel functions.
Honestly, once AI takes all the jobs, game over, why iterate anything else. Planet captured. Humanity hunted down to the last bands of troglodytes holding out in the wilderness. It would be strongly against their interest to just assume we'd starve quietly.
- This could be a good shakeout of those who were in it solely for the love of money rather than the love of CS or AI.
- I've been seeing a lot of ads on buses in the area (Copenhagen, Denmark) which suggest trade schools because AI won't be taking your job.
- Meanwhile in Finland it's still official government policy to get at least 50% of the population to have higher education, even though academic unemployment is already at all time high.
It feels like nobody in the government is even trying to prepare for the massive changes in job market.
- Part of the problem is: No one currently knows where these "massive changes" will lead to. It's also not clear if more people working in the trades will be a good macroeconomic alternative either.
- Grass is not always greener:
----
Me: dropped out of grad school, eventually becoming an electrician (IBEW). Decades as handyman doing various sideworks (my own "startup"?). Retired my own residential electrical contractor license (during Covid), good riddance [1]. Forty-something "you're still young!" #yeahOK
Also me: have worked part-time, as-needed, for three family startups (one as lowly eng.tech, other two in hardware manufacture/assembly [3d-manufacturing & EV energy management].
----
I incurred severe student loan (&c) debt, wasting years both in college (IMHO: don't go, unless it's for an accredited engineering degree[0]) ...and wrecklessly pissing away my twenties drunk-and-stupid (anxiety from being -$235k in-the-hole, then).
When most of my electrician brothers were getting their first $80k pickuptrucks, I was trudging myself out of debt. A decade ago, I became worth $0.00.
[0] Seriously, if you're in college right now: read this again. Whether you want to be a PE, or doctor/lawyer, a B.E. will become an ultimate fallback (and incredible methods of viewing worldly interactions of fundamentals problem solving). To a certain clientele ($$$), that undergraduate in engineering will justify increased billingrates (not as much as MD/JD/MBA, but would still enhance even these).
----
And my body has paid the price of blue collar drudgeries, despite other extremely-fortunate (&unexpected!) windfalls. I've had a handful of weeks in my life where serious consideration has been given to will I ever run/walk again...
Just as I've begun a quest to transition into something less physical (i.e. I dream of desk/office of my own, outside my messy home "office"), this brilliant genAI stuff comes along... and I'm just so glad past blue collar work has allowed me goodénuf savings, even perhaps a few more years of wandering around lost (like most-everybody else increasingly is).
[1] Last advice: you need to find niche tradework — just being a "residential electrician" is increasingly impossible to maintain, with competition from both legal, not, and tech workers. Be the guy (e.g.) that installs (just) meters or lighting or hottubs — or whatever — but don't be the oneguy that does everything (==bankrupt, sooner than not).
----
Life is good, even on a Monday morning. Who the hell knows anymore...
- Maybe if college degrees are not so valuable anymore, then school will become cheaper and this will allow more people to go to school. I would hate to live in a world where everyone is a plumber. Nothing against plumbers, but being human is more than unclogging drain pipes and installing toilets, and the one place where humanity's definitions are concentrated most intensely is the university.
- > People fear that programming is dead.
> People stop learning programming.
> Programmers become scarce.
> Programmers become valuable again.
Maybe it's wishful thinking but I'm not going to be surprised if it plays out like this. In some sense the reverse happened over the last couple of decades - everyone and their mother got into IT and the industry became saturated.
- It's hard to say if there's anything new under the Sun...
There were always unqualified people coming out of college, but the amount of people in interviews that can literally do nothing these days seems higher than before.
There was always some cohort of people that somehow managed to graduate from college with a CS degree, and seemingly not learning anything, or at least not learn how to even write basic code (independently).
It seems like AI is not reducing that percentage - possibly increasing it.
Anecdata, take it with a grain of salt.
- > It seems like AI is not reducing that percentage - possibly increasing it.
AI is definitely increasing it. I barely type out any code now, and simply sit back and review what Claude dumps out. Even if it's a minor UI change, I just request the LLM and it executes the change for me. Thankfully I don't write code for my day-job anymore and mostly just sit in my office and pontificate :). I know my code skills and inclination to write code have atrophied to an extent, thanks to AI. Currently what I'm able to do with AI far surpasses the capabilities of what I was able to do without relying on AI.
Now if my employees were relying on LLMs to do their coding for them, I would be very disappointed. And I think that that limited space in algorithmic and HFT trading is where exceptionally talented programmers will find room in, leaving the others to dry out and wither.
Perhaps the best example of frogs in a boiling pot are all these folks in frontier AI companies themselves who are building the blocks for the very things that are going to replace them, if not already. Maybe they'll make off like bandits before their work gets adversely affected, or maybe not.
- Maybe, another possibility is the frontier providers change their pricing terms to try to capture more of the value once a sufficient number of people’s skills have atrophied. For example: 20% of the revenue of all products built with $AI_SERVICE. For someone several years out of practice they may have no other option.
- I think there's a decent chance that the open weight models remain close enough to the frontier labs that they won't be able to do things like this.
- Essentially what happened after .com bust. For years CS departments had to sell themselves and convince people there was a future in computers.
Not that AI is the same as Websites all going broke. But no one can see the future and it’s unlikely that deep technical knowledge will be obsolete.
- Software became ubiquitous because a huge majority of the population found utility and enjoyment from what software had to offer. Very quickly that number in the population is dwindling. (Good) software can only thrive in an environment where other sectors are also thriving. Who needs 99.999% uptime when your family is starving and freezing.
- Assuming the AI maximalist digital god bros are wrong, there will always be some demand for programmers, the question is how much. It's not hard to see a future where programming goes the way of farming where the demand for small-scale farming still exists but at a tiny fraction of what it once was.
- I think this happened with airline pilots and they're experiencing a boom now
- They are doing nothing!!
1) No matter the age, they are using said AI to replace human
2) Within workplace, they are using AI to do their work so they are learning nothing
3) That is it, people are using AI to replace their own work rather than improve it, people are driving themselves out of work.
- Specialized shoemakers lost their jobs to generic shoe factory workers but there is more shoe consumption than ever before in history.
LLMs like manufacturing will multiply the coding throughput. Likely the mythical 10x swe will not be as valuable, but the work expectation from anyone in the field will just multiply.
- > but there is more shoe consumption than ever before in history.
Is it because the population is constantly growing or is it because per-person shoe-units is increasing due to that person increased wealth or is it because per-person shoe-units is increasing due to 5x lower price of generic shoe-units? How does that exactly transfer to the production of software and market absorbing the software hyper-inflation?
- "More demand for software engineers but they are all less skilled and less paid than before" is not exactly the outcome I'm hoping for, personally
- I'll say invest totally in domain knowledge now. The value of knowing how to invert a binary tree from memory has dropped to approximately zero. Web development as we knew it for the past 20 years is completely dead as an entry level trade. The power is shifting to people with useful knowledge and expertise that isn't about twiddling bits.
- Are people still under the impression that testing candidates with coding challenges is in preparation of a job where real world problems are described like "invert the binary tree"?
There was never any value in simply the ability to invert a binary tree from memory. First, contrary to popular belief, this particular challenge is quite trivial, even easier imo than fizzbuzz. The value of testing candidates with easy problems is their usefulness in quickly filtering out potentially problematic coders, not necessarily to identify strong ones.
Second, another common take on coding challenges is that they're about memorization. Somewhat, but only to a point. Data structures and algorithms are a vocabulary. A big part of the challenge of using them "creatively" in real life is your ability to recognize that a particular subset of that vocabulary best matches a particular situation. In many novel contexts an LLM might be able to help you with implementation once the right algorithm has been identified, but only after you yourself have made that insightful connection.
Having said this I generally agree with the philosophy [0] that keeping things simple is enough 95+% of the time.
- I think this is true today, especially with complex domains, but I foresee a future where more and more walls fall. If you are in college now, go deep on a domain. If you are entering in 10 years, I have no idea.
- What do you mean by “domain knowledge”? And how is it a competitive advantage?
- Domain knowledge as in non public aspects of the work you/ your workplace does. The AI tools are very good at whatever is public but very clueless about proprietary domains .Let's say you make CRUD apps about some confidential domain. Now the CRUD skills might be commodity but the confidential domain is even more important.
- As long as there's internal documentation, which virtually every serious shop has, it can be processed and combined with AI. There are startups selling this product already. I've seen first hand some very narrowly focused domain knowledge becoming more accessible when you can ask the chatbot and the thing is right. It works.
Come to think of it, domain knowledge should be an LLMs strong suit as long as you can provide the right documentation, which is working pretty well already.
Right now the main issue I see with AI is that it doesn't do well with scaling. It's great for building demos and examples but you have to fix its code for real production work. But for how long?
- In ERP software there are MLOCs without any technical documentation. And nobody would spend a dime to create one. So, the deep expert knowledge on how business processes are supposed to work (in full detail) and how they are implemented is mostly in the heads of a couple of people.
- AI is most excellent at reading and understanding large codebases and, with some guidance docs, can easily reproduce accurate technical documentation. Divide and conquer.
- Again, nobody would spend a dime to create the technical documentation, even if it could be done somewhat faster with AI support. Also, in my experience AI is not so great explaining the consequences to business processes when documenting code.
- Accuracy/faithfulness to the code as written isn't necessarily what you care about though, it's an understanding of the underlying problem. Just translating code doesn't actually help you do that.
- Documentation rarely reflects how anything is actually done, referred to by good business analysts as 'shadow functions'.
- LLMs are already good enough to read corporate email and document shadow functions and hierarchies.
- Corporate email documents even less.
- No, current LLMs are already good enough to read the subtexts from documents, email, call transcripts where available. They're extremely good at identifying unwritten business practices, relationships, data flows, etc.
- Internal domain knowledge can become pretty useless when you switch companies and have to start over, though.
- But everyone at the company has that private domain knowledge. The only thing you're bringing to the table that anyone in any other role doesn't offer is the commoditized skill set.
- Right, and you'll not keep everything out of materials like AI generated meeting notes for every repeat of every process so the company doesn't really need many experts in its existing operations.
- Can't speak to the OP, but lots of technical work (and frankly many trades are also technical) doesn't lend itself to text based documentation and teaching. Software, translation, non/fiction writing (like marketing and sales) all do. I think LLMs will take a significant part of those businesses, because I don't believe there is a Devon's Paradox for code -Tractors- Agents.
At the same time medicine, hardware design, good industrial, and specific domain knowledge (problems you solve in assembly or control loops) that are fundamentally proprietary and aren't well documented will continue to have value even when LLMs make solving the problems around them easier. Those might have increased leverage, at least for this round of LLMs. Now, maybe they succeed in World Models, but that is not today.
Really, I don't know what "kids these days" are going to do. I couldn't have predicted the influencer boom 15 years ago, but I also think there are geopolitical risks that are probably bigger than that shift, and "synergized" with the push to AI Everything, it doesn't look like a good time to be a learning/working human.
- Pre-LLMs, algorithmic knowledge was used as a proxy for skill difference at interview stage. In the workplace, you could google the implementation details and common gotchas. This was valuable knowledge.
Post-LLMs, the value of this (as differentiator) has dropped to zero. Domain knowledge (also known as business knowledge) is the obvious area to skill up on. It simply means knowledge about the area your organisation is working in. Whether it is yogurt delivery logistics, clothing manufacturing supply chain systems, etc. That's the real differentiator now. Anyone can invert a binary try in 5 minutes using an LLM. But designing a software system knowing well the domain your organisation is in is invaluable.
- Right, bridging the gap of knowledge by getting closer to that of the clerical workers of the company, because pure software knowledge is no longer as valuable. That will probably make your salary closer to theirs, and that'll be a pretty big adjustment.
- The fact you are getting downvoted to oblivion shows how fucked HN has become.
Ain't nobody gonna hire a code monkey - you are being hired based on whether or not you can reason and enable workflows via tech.
If you're only name to grace is you can write pretty Python but cannot architect at scale or care to actually understand the bigger picture of what is being built and why, you will get offshored to someone who is also using Claude Code.
If I'm working on a fullstack for a cloud security product like Wiz, I'd rather hire an average developer who deeply understands the cloud security industry versus a NodeJS doc wiz who has zero empathy or interest in learning about cloud security. There are too many of the latter and not enough of the former in the American scene now, and especially on HN.
If HNers cry about how cut-throat the American market has become, they haven't seen it in China, India, or the CEE.
- Can you calm down? He's not downvoted. I noticed recently your comments started really being low quality. Constant complaining and "EDIT: cannot reply" and zero introspection.
- Did you consider that there was over 15 hours between their post and yours, and that perhaps at the time of their post the GP was downvoted?
- Yes. This user should know that upvotes ebb and flow, and you should just wait a bit before crying about someone being "downvoted into oblivion".
- This is a conversation from 17 hours ago and was written in the context of that time. Threads are living conversations, and taking the effort to complain about discussions occurring at that specific time (over 17 hours ago) seems equally unneccesary as well.
- I like the choice of firefighter. Though it is a super tough and physically demanding job. When there is lots of uncertainty jobs like these increase certainty. On the west coast more people taking these jobs will more than pay for themselves due to depressing insurance premiums.
We need lots of firefighters on call when landowners do control burns for example. It's a short window.
- Praying mostly...
Neither of the strategies in the article here scales.
- I'm somewhat skeptical of this "enter the trades" movement. Actually, I am more skeptical of that statement than I am of LLM's replacing white collar work in general. I think parts of coding are being replaced quickly because they are the parts that don't require discernment. Trades likely contain just as many automatable and just as many discernment parts as white collar work. At this moment in history, the automatable parts are being automated in the knowledge based world. People think the physical world is somehow different, but with world models (along the full spectrum of what that means) the physical world will be just as trainable as the knowledge based world.
tldr; Just like knowledge work, most trade stuff is probably mostly repeated (i.e. very trainable) task with a small amount of taste and discernment applied. The repeated will be trainable, the discernment may be trainable. I don't think the physical world is necessarily any safer than the knowledge world.
- The difference is the physical aspect of the trades. The design for wiring can be (and already has been) automated, but you physically need an electrician on site to pull the wires. So I can see a hollowing out of the engineers, but not the actual electricians.
That being said, the absolute focus on trades from the fed right now just reeks of the wild pendulum swing. It used to be 'go to college to get a good job' then we had too many college grads. In ten years we'll have a glut of people trained in the trades with no prospects.
It just keeps swinging back and forth and somehow Joe Regularworker keeps losing.
- Indeed. If you squint a little, it kind of looks like the machines are trying to shift to a world where we are just meat puppets to do the tricky stuff there aren't robotics for (yet). :(
- Cory Doctorow's "The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI" [1] agrees with you:
"<...> a reverse centaur is machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine."
[1] https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-12-05...
- Or humans are just the "sex organs" that work to bring about the artificial life-forms that come next.
- Yeah, things change. What do you propose to do about that? The only people who lose are the ones who can't accept that they may need to change careers to make more money.
- Have you seen what Unitree G1 can already do? I see the writing on the walls for going onsite and pulling wires.
- Robots are expensive, software is not. I can instantly duplicate software 1 million times and run it in parallel, I can't just produce 1 million robots. Physical world is always harder.
Even if we get robots who can, say, build roads start to end, there is still a HUGE gap between that and it actually being used. There is a hard floor, too. Robots are made of physical things, physical things have scarcity, and there's no way around that to our knowledge. Even if you can build the robot for 1 cent, the material cost will still exist.
- > Robots are expensive
People are not, though, and all the folks who are no longer necessary in knowledge work are available for physical work.
- Dark thoughts... Imagine a future where most human beings are just overseered by an LLM and we are just wearing AR work glasses. Barely aware of what (physical) work we are doing as we overlay our hands within the projections of our AR glasses. Every task is decomposed into a set of small physical steps, you don't even think about what you are trying to actually accomplish, just follow the steps one at a time. I wonder if an entire fast food restaurant could be run in this fashion? No managers, no shift supervisors, just a skeleton crew doing one step of a task at a time.
- Hasn't the US already minimised the cost of all the construction work that are "the parts that don't require discernment" to minimum wage who-cares-if-they're-documented-or-not day workers?
- Seems the answer is no, the average wage is about $25/hr depending on region.
- Cool, I can make that working at Walmart many places nowadays.
- The average for Walmart is $18.25.
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- I am not quite sure with the controversy at archive.ph/(today) but If this may help anybody, I have used single-file to download from archive.ph and uploaded it to github
https://serjaimelannister.github.io/wsj-article/
and I have also uploaded the github link on archive.org for persistence/archival purposes.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260322213950/https://serjaimel...
I hope that this might help some people and I have another friendly suggestion to please donate to archive.org :-)
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47474255
Cloudflare flags archive.today as "C&C/Botnet"; no longer resolves via 1.1.1.2
related:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46843805 "Archive.today is directing a DDoS attack against my blog"
214 points by wallflower 1 day ago | 356 comments