Ask HN: Do the IT layoff and the AI rise correlate? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do the IT layoff and the AI rise correlate?

7 pointstapkolun18 comments

I'm quite terrified of what's happening with GPT. Management, junior coders, website developers, database architect, devops, who will be replaced in a couple of years by AI?

If GPT is already capable of performing as a "very eager junior programmer", in a few months who is going to hire any junior coder to perform task, if GPT is doing that for me? How many months are left before we will "open the benefits of programming to new audiences"?

I've invested my time and effort to gain a large quantity of knowledge that will be replaced by generated code. All my effort to create a career or my dreams of creating new technologies and services are fading since coding soon will no more be an ability but a matter of prompting to an AI.

I know that some of you are thinking that the AI will open so many possibilities of building, but for who? An AGI or an assistance is a way of centralizing information access, not expanding it. Users will access and perform things with the assistance and nothing else. So what are we going to build, plugins for the AI?

I've never felt such a low hope for the future of IT and for my future.

reference: - https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt-plugins

Big Tech was in trouble before the A.I. boom. In particular the idea that “I want to work for FAANG” has been Hacker News’s #1 delusion that really is more like “I want to get bit by an Alligator”

You certainly get paid well at those firms (except for one of the A’s) but you won’t learn anything transferable because those firms are profitable because of monopolies (F, G, and 1.5 A’s) or over capitalization (N, half an A, look at the case of Uber, it is easy to sell a lot of half price taxi rides but it doesn’t make money in the long term.)

The technology of LLMs may wind up less centralized than you think, the current networks are still pretty inefficient as people understand how they work they’ll get cheaper to build and run, On huggingface (which publishes numerous free models) they list 13 applications of transformers but y’all are hung up on just 1 of them. (Getting seduced by text-generation bullshitters)

As I see it there is a whole world opening wide and it is time to jump in. The danger is not that those chatbots replace coders it is that they replace the Donald Trumps and L. Ron Hubbard’s and Eliezer Yudkowskys.

> You certainly get paid well at those firms (except for one of the A’s) but you won’t learn anything transferable because those firms are profitable because of monopolies (F, G, and 1.5 A’s) or over capitalization (N, half an A, look at the case of Uber, it is easy to sell a lot of half price taxi rides but it doesn’t make money in the long term.)

this is 100% inaccurate and misleading. big tech pay has been 2-3x many other place. even with drop in equity, sr sde at company like amazon earning $400k-450k a year, principal engineer over $650k.

the one big benefit of big tech is ability to learn and grow. they literally incentivize building large scale system to get promoted, even if it mean we now have 2, 3, or 4 thing solve same problem and you new version inferior in some capability.

im big critic of big tech especially amazon me former employer. my post history should prove it. but this post off the mark.

you want to learn and make ton of money? yeah go to big tech. but do not delude youself about doing something positive for world, or that you company care about you, or whatever other fantasy people hold

I’ll keep repeating this: if you don’t have a career future you who are smart, engaged, knowledgeable and passionate, then no one does in any field. Personally, I believe this tech will change work, make it faster, let us get more done and remove our blockers faster. Like the introduction of the computer to the office, we will have to adapt and re-learn, but will also be more productive. You sound like a person to loves to learn and so would be at an advantage.

But if this really is going to destroy wide swaths of jobs, if it becomes a human-level AGI copilot that lets a CEO run a Fortune 500 with just a few dozen prompt engineers, then forget trying to become a plumber. We will have the most massive wave of unemployment in history and it will end either in basic income and quality of life for all or a butlerian jihad.

> then forget trying to become a plumber

I think the election of "plumber" is just a saying, but I expect plumbers to be one of the safest professions. You need to make a hole in the wall, avoid the electricity wires and structural columns. The pipes inside the wall sometimes are not like the pipes in the paper blueprint, in particular when the building is old and had some fixes before you. Identify the hole, decide what to change and solder the new parts. Now cover that, and make a bad looking repair of the wall. Did I miss something? It need a lot of advancement in robotic and image recognition and other non textual AI.

Yes, if 95% of white collar professionals are put out of work, there will be so much competition for the trades that their labor value will be destroyed as well.

Not to mention more people will just do it themselves like they do in poorer countries already.

> if it becomes a human-level AGI copilot that lets a CEO run a Fortune 500 with just a few dozen prompt engineers

if thats the case everyone in the world will want a piece of this easy pie, this results in competition, that results in needing more talent to compete.

and when (or better yet if) we ever get to AGI, then it will be the end of humanity anyway. we will have far more pressing problems than looking for a job

u forget that there are torches and angry mobs of people, right?

at some point a forceful redistribution of wealth will happen naturally, like it did in history many times before.

With enough progress in robotics, the redistribution will be preventable.

Not at all. At some point you have to have you money somewhere, and good luck if bank employees as well as people working as private security turn against you. These robots also have remote killswitches, and are prone to EMP.

There simply is no way to keep your wealth against the masses AND be able to exchange wealth for real physical goods and services

There hasn't been enough time for it to be integrated into most workflows yet enough to make much of a dent in employment, especially at larger companies.

At this point it's just another tool for people to learn and wrap their head around and figure out how to capitalize on, and if you've ever supported a product before, you'd know it can take a while for people to get the hang of those things.

I use it a bit on my own but I don't use it at all for work, and I don't even know if I could, since the company may be hesitant to use A.I. generated code in case part of it may be taken from something with restricted licensing, but I haven't seen any guidance yet on it, so I don't bother.

And GPT may be a very eager junior programmer, but it still can't see the forest for the trees yet. It can't hold the entire program in its head, or know what to prioritize, or figure out fuzzy requirements, or how to integrate that little task into the larger project, and know when it needs to ask clarifying questions, etc. It might get there eventually, but it's not there yet. Right now it's not much better than getting lucky and landing on just the right answer in Stack Overflow.

I'd take the junior programmers that I'm managing right now, with the dealing with the shortcuts and oversights and mistakes they send my way when they think they've completed a PR, over what ChatGPT is capable of today.

Don't think so. I say more to do with: over hiring; possible recession; remote work; end of financial year... Things are changing not just AI and this firings must have been planned for awhile

Recent ML development/revelation do put pressure on these companies to shift priorities fast. But everyone is still scrambling to see what the AI future will be

If anything they need more people than ever working in AI product applications

I think it has nothing to do with the decline (which is mostly a result of an all-time insane bubble in P/E ratios and VC investment with lowest interest rates ever) but it will have everything to do with the lack of rebound from this decline.

Anyone saying that developers gonna be replaced with AI just don’t trully understand what software engineering profession is exactly about.

Agreed, AI wont be able to pump out jira stories with vague requirements and totally random story point estimates like todays humans.

Of course it "correlates"

So does the sale of tube socks in Ghana and consumption of Twix bars in Suriname

data, hardware, and further levels of abstraction. Do you write machine code or even assembly? We've had compilers producing very good code for decades.

There are hard practical limits on just how much self-optimizing any paradigm shift towards higher levels of abstraction can do.

No. IT layoffs are because companies realized they could do layoffs.

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