Something Alarming Is Happening to the Job Market

> Even if you are the biggest critic of AI, it's hard to deny that the frontier models are quite good at the sort of stuff that you learn in school. Write a binary tree in C? Check. Implement radix sort in Python? check. An A* implementation? check.

I don't feel this is a strong argument, since these are the sort of things that one could easily lookup on stackoverflow, github, and so on for a while now. What "AI" did was being a more convenient code search tool + text manipulation abilities.

But you still need to know the fundamentals, otherwise won't even know what to ask. I recently used GPT to get a quick code sample for a linear programming solution, and it saved me time looking up the API for scipy... but I knew what to ask for in the first place. I doubt GPT would suggest that as a solution if I described the problem in too high level.

You still have to understand what's happening and why I think.

I remember going to a cloud meetup in the early days of AWS. Somebody said "you won't need DBAs because the database is hosted in the cloud." Well, no. You need somebody with a thorough understanding of SQL in general and your specific database stack to successfully scale. They might not have the title "DBA," but you need that knowledge and experience to do things like design a schema, write performant queries, and review a query plan to figure out why something is slow.

I'm starting to understand that you can use a LLM to both do things and teach you. I say that as somebody who definitely has learned by struggling, but realizes that struggling is not the most efficient way to learn.

If I want to keep up, I have to adapt, not just by learning how to use tools that are powered by LLMs, but by changing how I learn, how I work, and how I view my role.

Calculators have been available forever, but have not eliminated math education. Even algebra systems that can solve equations, do integrals and derivations have been available forever, but people understand that if they don't learn how it actually works they are robbing themselves. By the same token, if you need to do this stuff professionally, you are relying on computers to do it for you.

> Write a binary tree in C? Check. Implement radix sort in Python? check. An A* implementation? check.

You can look up any of these and find dozens of implementations to crib from if that's what you want.

Computers can now do more, but I'm not (yet) sure it's all that different.

I'm seeing something similar. LLMs have helped me tremendously, especially in tasks like translating from one language to another.

But I've also witnessed interns using them as a crutch. They can churn out code faster that I did at an equivalent stage in my career but they really struggle debugging. Often, it seems like they just throw up their hands and pivot to something else (language, task, model) instead of troubleshooting. It almost seems like they are being conditioned to think implementation should always be easy. I often wonder if this is just "old curmudgeons" attitude or if it belies something more systemic about the craft.

>> [2] to the inevitable responses that say "well I actually learn things better now because the LLM explains it to me", that's great, but what's relevant here is that a large chunk of people learn by struggling <<

I'm using AI to explain things to me.

And I'm still struggling, I'm just struggling less.

That's progress I think.

Do you have some data to show that outsourcing is the culprit? It seems just as easy to blame "foreigners" as it is to blame "AI", especially considering your blanket followup statement about those foreigners always making "shittier" products.

It’s interesting, and completely in character, that for all the noise the GOP makes about America being for Americans(tm), they don’t care at all about American companies firing their American employees to exploit cheaper labor from outside the country.

> Why is everyone hell bent to say AI is killing jobs? I think its a because its a great scapegoat to blame a machine rather than foreigners and shithead management.

Why is everyone hell bent on blaming foreigners, rather than the management that actually makes these decisions, and domestic elected officials who actually are responsible for and make decisions that affect the economy.

One country has sent millions of its workers(and families) to the USA through the H1B Program. These workers are taking over entire IT Departments in many corporations (transportation being one of them). Everyone from the CIO down to the Junior Dev is from this country.

The interesting development now is that many companies are opening offices in said country and doing development there instead of bringing the workforce through the H1B program to the USA. These H1B workers have become too expensive, even though they are cheaper than American workers.

Unless the government completely overhauls the H1B Program and Tariff Services to protect American grads and white collar workers, we are all going to be working in factories making knick-knacks. College Grads don't stand a chance, and it isn't AI that is destroying their future.

Job market got issues way before tariffs, somewhere in the pandemic times.

I believe it's WFH. It taught companies remote work, and it's a small next step to offshore work.

Maybe - also to all the below comments - it's "overdetermined", ie., an "all of the above" situation, with AI some part of that mix.-

That would seem to at least have a major impact that needs to be accounted for. A couple more I'd add:

First, the Trump administration's economic impact is much more than tariffs - which are highly significant - but unprecedented interference in the free market and private business; destruction of the regulatory and other institutions that a stable economy depends on (e.g., democracy, the courts, the rule of law, bank regulation); disrupting the stability of international relations, possibly leading to highly destructive things like wars.

Also, the recent trend of business to switch from (broadly speaking) innovation and productivity to rent-seeking, epitomized by private equity: cut workforces, other investment, and product to the bone and squeeze as much as possible out of the asset - leaving a dead, dry carcass.

Was happening last year too for SWE.

Yeah I can only think of 3 ways AI is causing unemployment-

1) Hype, as you said, leading to delayed hiring.

2) Offshore workers using AI becoming more competitive.

3) Reallocation of capital to AI projects, which skews demand towards data scientists at the expense of, say, front-end devs (who ironically might have provided better return).

None of these are actually reducing the amount of human workers needed, but the social and economic impact is real.

"Journalism" is now often just a euphemism for shock porn and clickbait.

At the end of this Atlantic article, the author admits:

> Luckily for humans, though, skepticism of the strong interpretation is warranted. For one thing, supercharged productivity growth, which an intelligence explosion would likely produce, is hard to find in the data. For another, a New York Fed survey of firms released last year found that AI was having a negligible effect on hiring.

In other words: did we scare ya? Good, because it got you to read this far. Nothing to actually see here.

AI are lying machines, and also enable the lying that is convenient to executive management?

perhaps requiring university degrees that arent worth anything for jobs that dont need them is the problem?

I don't know?

Kind of sounds like the problem is more fundamental than that. It sounds like the job is not actually there in the first place. Doesn't matter how qualified you are if there's no money to pay you.