Any excuse to fire the poor performers without perceptions of a normal layoff

I work in software, every week I try to get copilot to entirely complete a simple work item as a benchmark of where the technology is up to.

For the last month or two, I have had two models in copilot regularly successfully identify the problem, write unit tests and then fix production code. Only minor manual changes have been necessary.

It's getting to the point where the LLM is solving the problem and completing the work item in less time than most non-senior developers. No one is being fired as a direct result, but instead people are starting to work faster.

The first six months was definitely a productivity loss though.

Laughing at that last row: "Chief executives."

What percentage of chief executives will push an AI replacement agenda, and then coincidentally decide that their executive roles are so strategic and complicated they can't possibly be replaced?

What explains the depressing job market — most starkly illustrated in a viral chart on X, based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, showing the number of position openings cratering since ChatGPT was released? And what about early career jobs, which seem scarce these days, to the chagrin of recent graduates?

Some think that the softening in the job market should instead be attributed to the US Federal Reserve putting a kibosh to the era of zero interest-rate policy in 2022. Before it ended, companies borrowed massive amounts of capital at cheap rates and plowed them into high-risk startups — thereby inflating assets, making lots of millionaires, and fueling a gold rush of well-paying tech positions. (Squint at that chart in the previous paragraph and it does seem to support this thesis, with the decline in openings coinciding more cleanly with the interest rate hike than the release of ChatGPT.)

As for early career positions decreasing, some experts think the phenomenon predates ChatGPT and could be a sign that there are simply more college graduates than there are early career jobs where a higher degree is a must, along with other structural changes.

And there are the headlines, which are littered with stories of people getting laid off due to AI — but maybe that’s a function of some CEOs jumping the gun and buying into the hype even though AI still leaves much to be desired in practice. That’s reflected in the uneven adoption of AI across industrial sectors.

While generative AI looks likely to join the ranks of transformative, general purpose technologies,” the Yale study reads, “It is too soon to tell how disruptive the technology will be to jobs.

I think it can be valuable. But not how it exists now, and definitely not with how much energy it requires. If we do get it to the level where we all have our own Jarvis that would be sick. Can't be in the corpos hands tho...

I use it at work when im having a hard time getting started on a project, because I'll want to yell at it and tell it how its wrong, and how i can do it better.

That is basically a list of, does your work require your body of not.

But I basically agree with the list, at least for a few more years. I expect robotics to quickly get better and start replacing some of the jobs on the left of the list.