Comment by simonsarris

ZIRP was a central banking thing, not just an American phenomenon. At least in the tech industry, the declines we're seeing in job opportunities are a result of capital being more expensive for VCs, meaning less investments are made (both in new and existing businesses), meaning there's less cash to hire and expand with. It just felt like the norm because ZIRP ran more or less uninterrupted for 10 years.

You're right that we should see comparisons in other developed countries, but with SV being the epicenter of it all, you'd expect the fallout to at least appear more dramatic in the U.S.

And an overwhelming number of (focusing exclusively on the U.S.) tech "businesses" weren't businesses (i.e., little to no profitability). At best they were failed experiments, and at worst, tax write-offs for VCs.

So, what looked like a booming industry (in the literal, "we have a working, profitable, cash-flowing business here" sense) was actually just companies being flooded with investment cash that they were eager to spend in pursuit of rapid growth. Some found profitability, many did not.

Again, IMO, AI isn't so much the cause as it is the bandage over the wound of unprofitability.

There isn’t anything magically about precisely zero percent interest rates; the behavior we see is mostly a smooth extension of slightly higher rates, which the EU was at.

And of course ZIRP was pioneered in Japan, not the US.

This is a weird take. Employees are supposed to be business expenses, that's the core idea of running a business: profit = revenue - expenses, where expenses are personnel / materials, and pay taxes over profit. Since the R&D change, businesses can't fully expense employees and need to pay (business) taxes over their salaries. Employees - of course - still pay personal taxes also (as was always the case).

TACO

It's not exactly the same this time around, the dot-com bubble was a bit different, but both then and now were preceded by huge hiring bubbles and valuations that were stupid. Now it's a little different 25 years later, tech has advanced and AI means cutting the fat out of a lot of companies, even Microsoft.

AI is somewhat creating a similar bubble now, because investors still have money, and the current AI efforts are way over-hyped. 6.5 billion paid to aquihire Jony Ive is a symptom of that.

> Keynes lived in a time when the working class ...

Keynes lived in a time when the working class could not buy cheap from China... and complain that everybody else was doing the same!

He was extrapolating, as well. Going from children in the mines to the welfare state in a generation was quite something. Unfortunately, progress slowed down significantly for many reasons but I don’t think we should really blame Keynes for this.

> We live in a time that the working class is unbelievably brainwashed and manipulated.

I think it has always been that way. Looking through history, there are many examples of turkeys voting for Christmas and propaganda is an old invention. I don’t think there is anything special right now. And to be fair to the working class, it’s not hard to see how they could feel abandoned. It’s also broader than the working class. The middle class is getting squeezed as well. The only winners are the oligarchs.

It is very possible that foreign powers use AI to generate social media content in mass for propaganda. If anything, the internet up to 2015 seemed open for discussion and swaying by real people’s opinion (and mockery of the elite classes), while manipulation and manufactured consent became the norm after 2017.

He also lived in a time when the intense importance and function of a moral and cultural framework for society was taken for granted. He would have never imagined the level of social and moral degeneration of today.

I will not go into specifics because the authoritarians still disagree and think everything is fine with degenerative debauchery and try to abuse anyone even just pointing to failing systems, but it all does seem like civilization ending developments regardless of whether it leads to the rise of another civilization, e.g., the Asian Era, i.e., China, India, Russia, Japan, et al.

Ironically, I don’t see the US surviving this transitional phase, especially considering it essentially does not even really exist anymore at its core. Would any of the founders of America approve of any of America today? The forefathers of India, China, Russia, and maybe Japan would clearly approve of their countries and cultures. America is a hollowed out husk with a facade of red, white, and blue pomp and circumstance that is even fading, where America means both everything and nothing as a manipulative slogan to enrich the few, a massive private equity raid on America.

When you think of the Asian countries, you also think of distinct and unique cultures that all have their advantages and disadvantages, the true differences that make them true diversity that makes humanity so wonderful. In America you have none of that. You have a decimated culture that is jumbled with all kinds of muddled and polluted cultures from all over the place, all equally confused and bewildered about what they are and why they feel so lost only chasing dollars and shiny objects to further enrich the ever smaller group of con artist psychopathic narcissists at the top, a kind of worst form of aristocracy that humanity has yet ever produced, lacking any kind of sense of noblesse oblige, which does not even extend to simply not betraying your own people.

Keynes didn't anticipate social media

Presumably the reduction to a 15 hour workweek would be much the same as the reduction to the 40 hour workweek - everyone takes the same reduction in total hours and increase in hourly compensation encoded in labor laws specifically so there isn't this tragedy of the commons.

The reality of most people is that they need to work to financially sustain themselves. Yes, there are people who just like what they do and work regardless, but I think we shouldn't discount the majority which would drop their jobs or at least work less hours had it not been out of the need for money.

What percentage of people would you say like working for fun? Would you really claim they make up a significant portion of society?

Even myself, work a job that I enjoy building things that I’m good at, that is almost stress free, and after 10-15 years find that I would much rather spend time with my family or even spend a day doing nothing rather than spend another hour doing work for other people. the work never stops coming and the meaninglessness is stronger than ever.

Meanwhile your examples for happy working are all billionaires who do w/e tf they want, and your example of sad non working are disabled people.

You're lucky. Most companies don't accept that. Frequently, even when they have part time arrangements, the incentives are such that middle managers are incentivized to squeeze you (including squeezing you out), despite company policies and HR mandates.

I'm working hard on this one. I'm down to a three-day week, and am largely keeping the boundaries around those other four.

It came about late last year when the current employer started going getting gently waved off in early funding pitches. That resulted in some thrash, forced marches to show we could ship, and the attendant burnout for me and a good chunk of the team I managed. I took a hard look at where the company was and where I was, and decided I didn't have another big grind in me right now.

Rather than just quit like I probably would have previously, I laid it out to our CEO in terms of what I needed: more time taking care of my family and myself, less pressure to deliver impossible things, and some broad idea of what I could say "no" to. Instead of laughing in my face, he dug in, and we had a frank conversation about what I _was_ willing to sign up for. That in turn resulted in a (slow, still work-in-progress) transition where we hired a new engineering leader and I moved into a customer-facing role with no direct reports.

Now I to work a part-time schedule, so I can do random "unproductive" things like repair the dishwasher, chaperone the kid's field trip, or spend the afternoon helping my retired dad make a Costco run. I can reasonably stop and say, "I _could_ pay someone to do that for me, but I actually have time this week and I can just get it done" and sometimes I...actually do, which is kind of amazing?

...and it's still fucking hard to watch the big, interesting decisions and projects flow by with other people tackling them and not jump in and offer to help. B/c no matter what a dopamine ride that path can be, it also leads to late nights and weekends working and traveling and feeling shitty about being an absentee parent and partner.

The trade is you need to live in VHCOL city to earn enough and have a high savings rate. Avoid spending it all on VHCOL real estate.

And then after living at the center of everything for 15-20 years be mentally prepared to move to “nowhere”, possibly before your kids head off to college.

Most cannot meet all those conditions and end up on the hedonic treadmill.

I foresee programers replaced by AI and the people who programed becoming pointy haired bosses to the AI.

> "Bullshit jobs" are the rubbish required to keep the paperwork tidy, assessed and filed.

It's also the jobs that involve keeping people happy somehow, which may not be "productive" in the most direct sense.

One class of people that needs to be kept happy are managers. What makes managers happy is not always what is actually most productive. What makes managers happy is their perception of what's most productive, or having their ideas about how to solve some problem addressed.

This does, in fact, result in companies paying people to do nothing useful. People get paid to do things that satisfy a need that managers have perceived.

AI is going to 10x the amount of bullshit, fully automating the process.

NONE of the bullshit jobs are going away, there will simply be bigger, more numerous bullshit.

Washing machines created a revolution where we could now expend 1/10th of the human labour to wash the same amount of clothes as before. We now have more than 10 times as much clothes to wash.

I don’t know if it’s induced demand, revealed preference or Jevon’s paradox, maybe all 3.

We've got 10 whole hours left over for "actual" work!

(Quotes because I personally have a significantly harder time doing bloody housework...)

Clearly you don’t have children!

Source? Keynes was a serious economist, not a charlitan futurist.

Why not just find one that starts in 2022 then. It would look even more dire.

I basically agree with you, and I think the thing that is missing from a bunch of responses that disagree is that it seems fairly apparent now that AI has largely hit a brick wall in terms of the benefits of scaling. That is, most folks were pretty astounded by the gains you could get from just stuffing more training data into these models, but like someone who argues a 15 year old will be 50 feet tall based on the last 5 years' growth rate, people who are still arguing that past growth rates will continue apace don't seem to be honest (or aware) to me.

I'm not at all saying that it's impossible some improvement will be discovered in the future that allows AI progress to continue at a breakneck speed, but I am saying that the "progress will only accelerate" conclusion, based primarily on the progress since 2017 or so, is faulty reasoning.

> Yet we're what? 5 years into "AI will replace programmers in 6 months"?

Realistically, we're 2.5 years into it at most.

Four years into people mocking "we'll have self driving cars next year" while they are on the street daily driving around SF.

As far as I've seen we appear to already have self driving vehicles, the main barriers are legal and regulatory concerns rather than the tech. If a company wanted to put a car on the road that beetles around by itself there aren't any crazy technical challenges to doing that - the issue is even if it was safer than a human driver the company would have a lot of liability problems.

100% this. I always argue that groundbreaking technologies are clearly groundbreaking from the start. It is almost a bit like a film, if you have to struggle to get into it in the first few minutes, you may as well spare yourself watching the rest.

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Over ten years for the we'll have self driving car spiel

> I don’t use RAG, and have no doubt the infrastructure for integrating AI into a large codebase has improved

It really hasn't.

The problem is that a GenAI system needs to not only understand the large codebase but also the latest stable version of every transitive dependency it depends on. Which is typically in the order of hundreds or thousands.

Having it build a component with 10 year old, deprecated, CVE-riddled libraries is of limited use especially when libraries tend to be upgraded in interconnected waves. And so that component will likely not even work anyway.

I was assured that MCP was going to solve all of this but nope.

> I could easily go back to the models I was using 1-2 years ago with little impact on my work.

I can't. GPT-4 was useless for me for software development. Claude 4 is not.

I agree that the core models are only going to see slow progression from here on out, until something revolutionary happens... which might be a year from now, or maybe twenty years. Who knows.

But we are going to see a huge explosion in how those models are integrated into the rest of the tech ecosystem. Things that a current model could do right now, if only your car/watch/videogame/heart monitor/stuffed animal had a good working interface into an AI.

Not necessarily looking forward to that, but that's where the growth will come.

A decade?

The explosion of funding, awareness etc only happened after gpt-3 launch

All these folks are once again seeing the first 1/4 of a sigmoid curve and extrapolating to infinity.

with autonomous vehicles, the narrative of imperceptibly slow incremental change about chasing 9's is still the zeitgeist despite an actual 10x improvement in homicidality compared to humans already existing.

There is a lag in how humans are reacting to AI which is probably a reflexive aspect of human nature. There are so many strategies being employed to minimize progress in a technology which 3 years ago did not exist and now represents a frontier of countless individual disciplines.

> Think 3D-printing that was supposed to take over manufacturing.

3D printing is making huge progress in heavy industries. It’s not sexy and does not make headlines but it absolutely is happening. It won’t replace traditional manufacturing at huge scales (either large pieces or very high throughput). But it’s bringing costs way down for fiddly parts or replacements. It is also affecting designs, which can be made simpler by using complex pieces that cannot be produced otherwise. It is not taking over, because it is not a silver bullet, but it is now indispensable in several industries.

>Think 3D-printing that was supposed to take over manufacturing

This was never the case, and this is obvious to anyone who has ever been to factories that doing mass-produced plastic

>Or self-driving, that is "just around the corner" for a decade now.

But it is really around the corner, all that remains is to accept it. That is, to start building and modifying the road infrastructure and changing the traffic rules to enable effective integration self-driving cars into road traffic.

How have you measured this performance boost?

Or low-code / no-code?

Stocks are valued against the risk free interest, or so the saying goes.

Doubling interest rate from .1% to .2% does a lot for your DCF models, and in this case we went from zero (or in some cases negative) to several percentage units. Of course stock prices tanked. That's what any schoolbook will tell you, and that's what any investor will expect.

Companies thus have to start turning dials and adjust parameters to make number go up again.

Look at that graph again. It's indexed to 100 in Feb 1, 2020. It's now at 106. In other words, after all the pandemic madness, the total number of job postings on indeed is slightly larger than it was before, not smaller.

But for software, it's a lot smaller.

This website has its own graph which looks different.

https://www.trueup.io/job-trend

I have never gone to Indeed to apply for a job.

"Moonshots" was probably a bad term. Twitter devs used to be very active in open source, in Scala, actors, etc in particular. Fairly sure that's all dead. From most reports the majority of current Twitter devs are basically visa-shackled to the company.

What happened to X, the payment app?

I think the reality is Lemon Market Economics. We'll sacrifice quality for price. People want better quality but the truth is that it's a very information asymmetric game and it's really hard to tell quality. If it wasn't, we could all just rely on Amazon reviews and tech reviewers. But without informed consumers, price is all that matters even if it creates a market nobody wants.

I think that's true in software development. A lot of the focus is on coding because that's really the domain of the people interested in AI, because ultimately they ARE software. But the killer app isn't software, it's anything where the operation is formulaic, but the formula can be tedious to figure out, but once you know it you can confirm that it's correct by working backwards. Software has far too many variables, not least of which is the end user. On the other hand things like accounting, finance, and engineering are far more suitable for trained models and back testing for conformity.

Get worse for who? The ruling class will simply never care how bad things get for working people if things are getting better for the ruling class.

>If we were to unionize

Last time it was tried the union coerced everyone to root for their exploiters. People that unionize aren't magically different.

I think the issue at play here is the quickly changing job descriptions, RSU's and the higher paid bunch benefiting from very unequal pay across a job category.

> If the last CEO did their job there shouldn't be much fat left

funny how that fat analogy works...because the head (brain) has a lot more fat content than muscles/limbs.

yet this will continue until it grounds to a halt.

It's amazing and cringy the level of parroting performed by executives. Independent thought is very rare amongst business "leaders".

"War with Russia" sounds like someone willingly started that war, and Russia was the target.

Of course, nothing is further from the truth. "Russian invasion of Ukraine" is what should be written there.

2 trillion in unnecessary Covid related spending when Covid impact was winding down was the key reason for inflation. "$2000 checks!" was the campaign slogan

I don’t believe the war specifically drove the Fed to raise interest rates. Inflation and asset prices have risen sharply a year prior to the war.

Raising interest rates has nothing to do with the 2022 war. If it did, rates would have come back down. Interest rate increases don't help with supply/demand driven price spikes. They do help with money supply and aggregate demand driven inflation, which was the cause of our recent inflation (that started way before Russia invaded Ukraine). The war was a convenient excuse because it deflects responsibility.

And remember when they first said inflation was "transitory" and caused by supply chain issues from the economy reopening after covid? They didn't raise interest rates then because, like I mentioned above, interest rates don't help with supply shocks. If they did, the Fed would have raised rates then.

Anecdotally, I detected a cooling starting in March of 2022.

Was actively looking at this time for months prior and it went from a few recruiters a day reaching out to a few a week.

You are wrong, Trump's 2017 Tax cut bill had a provision that kicked in that caused the layoffs. Engineers became more expensive because now companies had to amortize their costs over 5 years instead of immediately.

There is no proof that higher interest rates lead to greater unemployment. In fact, macro employment kind of boomed during the referenced period. I'd posit that higher rates actually boosted macro employment stats . Why ? Because higher rates = higher income to rich people via interest income channel = higher fed budget deficits ( gov is net payer of interest) = higher GDP = lower unemployment ceterus paribus.

Why would it have anything to do with AI? Generative AI has been widely used for two years and the drop is exactly around January 20. What happened in AI around that time?