Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dogman144 732 days ago
I think it’s important to calibrate what “great pay” is in a full spectrum way.

Cutting corners on details here - Jane, making $120-150k as an engineer at non-FAANG, but fully (or at least maximized risk controlled) on the right side of every gnarly automation unemployment theme we all know is coming simply because Jane knows how to code, link systems, and is ahead of the curve such that she can learn how to use AI in time, is in a much different and much more beneficial position than Sarah, at a bank, making $300k, knowledge stops at excel wizardry, and a LLM is about to unemploy her at 40 bc it gets better than a CFA 3.

1 comments

This is a potential outcome, but by no means guaranteed.
It is happening already, the extent to which it fully occurs is the potential part. The vendors are out there and shopping. Or, OAI and co are totally blowing smoke.

Latter is possible for sure, but I don’t think anyone really thinks the tech hasn’t arrived, or isn’t on edge enough to give it the serious benefit of the doubt. Things just have to develop naturally from Netflix in 2013 (laggy and small library) to Netflix in 2024, and we’re there. IMO it’s a willful blind spot from those benefiting from this change to fully argue otherwise.

People said similar things about the cloud: shrink your IT staff!

I don't think that dream quite materialized.

I doubt it will with AI either; they will just be supervising the AI, or spending time on more important things that the AI frees them up for.

That's my "prediction", anyway...

Where this equivalency fails Imo is cloud’s expansion into employment market tasks was just providing a wrapper of a nice UI and automation suite on server admin tasks. That ability to scale quickly probably creates products that expanded into other labor markets more faster than if racking and stacking was required by every startup. But, that expansion probably would occur anyway, just slower.

What labor tasks AI providers a nice automation and UI wrapper on is… a much much larger scope than what cloud could do.