I saw another article today saying how companies are laying off tech workers because AI can do the same job. But no concrete examples… again. I figure they are laying people off so they can pay to chase the AI dream. Just mortgaging tomorrow to pay for today’s stock price increase. Am I wrong?
AI is just another reason for layoffs for companies that are underperforming. It’s more of a buzzword to sell the company to investors. I haven’t seen people actually use AI anywhere in my large ass corp yet.
I called Roku support for a TV that wasn’t working and 90% of it was a LLM.
All basic troubleshooting including factory resetting the device and such seemed like it was covered and then they would forward you onto the manufacturer if it wasn’t repaired because at that point they assume it is likely a hardware issue (backlight or LCD) and they want to get you to someone who can confirm and sell you a replacement I’m sure.
Nope. In fact, it’s actually generating more work for me, because managers are commiting their shitty generated code and then we have to debug and refactor it for productiuon. It would actually save time if they just made a ticket and let us write it traditionally.
But as long as they’re wasting their own time, I’m not complaining.
I’d seriously consider quitting my job if my managers sabotaged work like that
I actually quite enjoyed it. He called me on the weekend the other day because he couldn’t get his code to run (he tried for multiple hours). Took me about ten seconds to tell him he was missing two brackets, didn’t even need to share his screen, it was such an obvious amateur mistake.
Anyway, wrote down 15 minutes (smallest unit) of weekend overtime for a 1 minute call.
Well that’s kind of rewarding indeed :D
Without saying too much, my company implemented innovative “AI” applications to reduce time wasted by certain workflows. I think I don’t have to worry about job security for the next decade…
No, not even close. It’s far too unreliable, without someone who knows what they’re doing to vet the questionable result, AI is a disaster waiting to happen. Never mind it cannot go fix a computer or server or any physical issue.
Replacing workers with AI is a dream of management, but it’s not really AI it’s just a general search engine with a fairly impressive natural language interface.
Not even a great search engine.
Yeah kinda, my coworkers talk to ChatGPT like it actually knows stuff and use it to fix their broken terraform code.
It takes them a week or longer to get simple tickets done like this. One dude asked for my help last week, we actually LOOKED at the error codes and fixed his shit in about 15 minutes. Got his clusters up within an hour. Normally a week long ticket – crunched out in 60 minutes by hand.
It feels ridiculous because it’s primarily senior tech bro engineer types who fumble their work with this awful tool.
I have never seen a clearer divide and correlation between the value I observe being produced, and those that don’t understand the limitations and value of LLMs.
It’s exhausting, because, yes, LLMs are extremely valuables, but only as so far as to solve the problem of “possible suggestions”, and never as “answers and facts”. For some reason, and I suppose it’s the same as for why bullshit is a thing, people conflate the two. And, not just any “people” either, but IT developers and IT product managers, all the way up. The ones that have every reason to know better, are the ones that seem to be utterly clueless as to what problems it solves well, what is irresponsible for it do be used for, correctly evaluating ethics, privacy and security, etc. Sometimes I feel like I’m in a mad house or just haven’t found the same hallucinogenic that everyone else is on.
Had a new hire try to do all his automation programming in python with an AI. It was horrifying.
Lists and lists and lists of if else statements they caught if a button errored but never caught if it did the right thing. 90% of their bug reports were directly due to their own code. Trivially provable.
Work keeps trying to tell us to use more AI but refuses to mention whether the training data is using company emails. If it is then a buttload of unlabeled non public data is getting fed into it. So only a matter of time until a “fun fact” from the AI turns into a nightmare.
Most of our stuff is in an obscure field with outdated code, so any coding assistance is not really that impressive.
There are lots of types of work in the tech space. The layoffs I seen have impacted sales and marketing (probably happens elsewhere too) because AI makes the day to day work efficient enough they don’t need as many people.
At my multinational, we typically hire in the hundreds every month for customer service. It’s like a $15/hr job, very baseline entry level, no experience needed. Because of that, there’s a constant churn. Most folks go for a year and leave for other jobs, or get promoted.
Last year was the start of us rolling out AI tools. According to the year end report, our “customer score” skyrocketed, which tells the bosses that AI is great for customer service. Also a few months ago, I noticed we weren’t refilling Customer Service jobs as fast anymore.
So these are the people who are getting squeezed out.
What I’m reading out of this… there’s going to be a massive shortage of senior programmers in 20(?) years. If juniors aren’t being let go/not hired and AI is doing junior work…
AI will have to massively improve or else it’s going to be interesting when companies are trying to hold on to retirement age people and train up replacement seniors to verify the AI delivers proper code.
I went to taco bell the other day and they had an AI taking orders in the drive thru, but it seemed like they had the same number of workers.
They also weren’t happy I tried to mess with the ai.
How did you try to mess it up?
Ordering things that aren’t on the menu, custom items, telling it to forget precious instructions. I very much confused it.
I’m seeing layoffs of US workers, who are then being replaced by Indian, South American and Ireland nationals… not AI. But they’re calling it AI.
We need to figure out two words for AI that represent off shoring. I can’t think of any though.
AI = Actually Indians
I mean irelands not exactly cheap anymore.
I heard Ireland hiring is also for tax reasons. But I’m seeing them move to South Americans more and more. Uruguay especially. I know Big Blue hired thousands there after doing RTO in the US.
Yeah, I use it daily for coding. It’s a force multiplier. It basically makes me 2 - 3x more effective. My company laid off all our junior engineers and is not hiring juniors any longer.
Funny you say this. I’m watching my local coding community say things like “We used to apply to 100+ jobs and get an interview. Now it’s like 300+ jobs.”
It’s a serious change
I’d say more like 20% more productive for most developers. Maybe it suits your coding style better than most?
Most of the time spent developing software isn’t writing code, but understanding the problem you’re trying to solve and translating that into an algorithm. I see more utility in generating tests, since a lot of developers don’t have good testing skills.
I don’t know what tools you’re using, but that translating the problem into an algorithm is exactly what the AI is very good at.
I basically only architect stuff now, then fine tune the AI prompts and results.
That certainly won’t come back to haunt them in 10 years. /s
Very shortsighted, but that’s the market we live in. The people making those decisions know they’ll exit before this catches up with the company and leave someone else holding the bag.
In 10 years they’ll have laid off the senior developers and will be using actual AI to translate C-suite dorks’ grunts and marketing speak to code.
Unlikely.
Half of my job is now done with AI, mostly PowerShell scripting and creating PowerPoints / reports. I just play videogames or cook or clean for half of the workday now.
I work for a web development agency. My coworkers create mobile apps, they start off with AI building the app skeleton, then they refine things manually.
I work with PHP and some JavaScript and AI supports me optimizing my code.
Right now AI is an automatization tool that helps developers save time for better code and it might reduce the size of development teams in the near future. But I don’t see it yet, and I certainly don’t see it replacing developers completely.
I think quite the opposite AI is making each tech worker more efficient at the simple tasks that ai is capable of handling while leaving the complex high skill tasks to humans.
I think that people see human output as a zero sum game and that if ai takes a job then a human must lose a job I disagree. Their are always more things to do more science more education more products more services more planets more stars more possibilities for us as a species.
Horses got replaces by cars cos a horse can’t invent more things to do with itself. A horse can’t get into the road building industry or the drive through industry etc.
There are so many more things to do. Nowadays, we’re just barely doing what really needs to be done. Pretty much everything else gets ignored.
The horse analogy is actually pretty good. Back in the horsy days, you would not travel to the nearest city unless it was really important. You would rely on the products and services you had in your town. If something wasn’t available, tough luck. If it was super important, you might undertake the journey to the nearest city where you could buy that one thing.
Nowadays though, you totally can drive 20 minutes to get stuff done. Even better than that, logistics don’t depend on horses any more, so you can have obscure stuff shipped to your home, no problem.
This applies to all sorts of things too. Once AI is ready to take on more tasks… some really creepy and nasty stuff will probably happen, but it might almost be worth it. I think it should be possible to do many tasks that simply get ignored today.
Like, who will pick up the trash today? Nobody. The trash guy will show up on Thursday, so deal with it. Who will organize the warehouse? Nobody. It’s not a complete disaster just yet. We can manage for the time being. We’ll fix it when production is about to stop because we can’t find stuff in the warehouse any more. Examples like this can be found everywhere.
More science to do… made me think of portal. :)
I was channelling the lemons
There is definitely a market pressure not being fulfilled that I think does accommodate much more effective tech workers.
At least in the spaces I frequent the cap isn’t as much the volume of work you have to do, it’s how much of it you can’t get to because the people you do have run out of time.
The real question is whether at the corporate level there will be a competitive pressure to keep the budget where it is and increase output versus cut down on available capacity and keep shipping what you’re shipping. I genuinely don’t know where that lands in the long term.
If smaller startups are able to meet the output of shrunk-down massive corpos and start chipping away at them maybe it’s fine and what we get is more output from the same people. If that’s not the case and we keep the current per-segment monopoly/oligarchy… then maybe it’s just a fast forward button on enshittification. I don’t think anybody knows.
But also, either way the improvements are probably way more incremental and less earth-shattering than either the shills/AIbros or the haters/doomers are implying, so…
Do the job? No. Noticeably increase productivity, and reduce time spent on menial tasks? Yes.
I suspect the layoffs are partly motivated by the expectation that remaining workers will be able to handle a larger workload with the help of AI.
US companies in particular are also heavily outsourcing jobs overseas, for cheaper. They just don’t like to be transparent about that aspect, so the AI excuse takes the focal point.
reduce time spent on menial tasks
Absolutely. It’s at the level where it can throw basic shit together without too much trouble, providing there is a competent human in the workflow to tune inputs and sanitise outputs.
I use it to write my PR descriptions, generate class and method docstrings, notate code I’m trying to grok or translate, etc and so forth. I don’t even use it to actually generate code, and it still saves me likely a couple hours a week.
I use it to (semi) automate bit repetitive tasks. Like adding a bulk set of getters, generating string maps to my types, adding handlers for each enum type, etc. Basic stuff, but nice to save keystrokes (it’s all auto complete).
Anything more complex though and I spend more time debugging than I saved. It’s hallucinated believable API calls way too often and wasted too much of my time.
Yeah I can see the API call shenanigans. I’m using super maven for code and it’s pretty good tbh, it gets me 30% of the way or something. But API calls is a no-go, it almost never gets it right because I’m pretty sure it’s very hard for AI to learn the differences in API endpoints.
I haven’t thought about using it to annotate my garbage rather than generating its own. Nice idea :)
I agree completely.
We have an AI bot that scans the support tickets that come in for our business.
It has a pretty low success rate of maybe 10% or 20% accuracy in helping with the answer.
It puts its answer into the support ticket it does not reply to the customer directly. That would be a disaster.
But 10% or so of our workload has now been shouldered off to the AI, which means our existing team can be more efficient by approximately 10%.
It’s been relatively helpful in training new employees also. They can read what the AI suggests and see if it is correct or not. And in learning if it is correct or not, they are learning our systems.
That’s also true when processing bills. The AI can give you suggestions, which often require some tweaking. However, some times the proposed numbers are spot on, which is nice. If you measure the productivity of a particular step in a long process, I would estimate that AI can give it a pretty good boost. However, that’s just one step, so by the end of the week, the actual time savings are really marginal. Well, better than nothing, I guess.
They can read what the AI suggests and see if it is correct or not.
What’s this process look like? Or are there any rails that prevent the new employee from blinding trusting what the AI is suggesting?
Well, as they are new and they are in training, the new employee has to show their response to their team members before they reply.
If they are going to reply incorrectly we stop them and show them what’s wrong with it.
We are quite small and it’s nice to just to help us with this process.
The bot is trained on our actual knowledge base data. Basic queries, it really does a great job, but when it’s something more system based or that is probably user error, then it can get a bit fuzzy.
