Notes on AI adoption and employment
I am not a prognosticator and very much not an economist, but here are some links and brief thoughts about the job market:
- Coinbase is laying off ~14% of its workers, including a bunch of programmers. There are many other such stories.
- But a lot of the aggregates floating around (e.g., this one) suggest that the overall market for programmers is good.
- If you had told me six months ago that the average company would do, say, three rounds of laying off 14% of their programmers (so a total cut of 1/3 to 1/2), with the remaining jobs being perhaps 5% to 15% lower-compensated on average, I would have been relieved.
- Here is Steve Yegge claiming that 20% of Google engineers are "outright refusers" when it comes to AI, and 80% are at most "using Cursor or equivalent chat tool." You can believe that or not, but he's a reputable and well-connected person, and has only (to my knowledge) doubled down on the claim when pressured about it.
- Finger to the wind, Yegge's numbers feel about right to me (industry-wide, not at any specific company). 80% is roughly (roughly!) everything up to one standard deviation to the right of the median of a bell curve. It feels just about right to me that +1 standard deviation in AI adoption is just beyond "OK, install the thing everyone's using and tell it to do things."
Again, I am not an economist and have many speculations but no firm beliefs about where the dust of the labor market here will settle.