AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

Too bad engineers were “too important” to unionize because their/our labor is “too special .”

I think you could find 10,000 quotes from HN alone why SDEs were immune to labor market struggles that would need a union

Oh well, good luck everyone.

This is, if true, a fundamental shift in the value of labor. There really isn’t a non-Luddite way to save these jobs without destroying American tech’s productivity.

That said, I’m still sceptical it isn’t simply a reflection of an overproduction of engineers and a broader economic slowdown.

This was when programmers were making software to time Amazon worker's bathroom breaks so believing "this could never happen to me" was probably an important psychological crutch.

Yeah I agree that outsourcing and oversupply are the real culprits and AI is a smoke screen. The outcome is the same though.

Unions won’t solve this for you. If a company just decides they have enough automation to reduce union workforce it can happen the next time contracts get negotiated.

Either way, there are layoff provisions with union agreements.

Unions would just delay the inevitable while causing other downsides like compressing salary bands, make it difficult to fire non-performers, union fees, increasing chance of corruption etc.

For a recent example:

> Volkswagen has an agreement with German unions, IG Metall, to implement over 35,000 job cuts in Germany by 2030 in a "socially responsible" way, following marathon talks in December 2024 that avoided immediate plant closures and compulsory layoffs, according to CNBC. The deal was a "Christmas miracle" after 70 hours of negotiations, aiming to save the company billions by reducing capacity and foregoing future wage increases, according to MSN and www.volkswagen-group.com.

I'm not necessarily opposed to unionization in general but it's never going to save many US software industry jobs. If a unionization drive succeeds at some big tech company then the workers might do well for a few years. But inevitably a non-union startup competitor with a lower cost structure and more flexible work rules will come along and eat their lunch. Then all the union workers will get laid off anyway.

Unionization kind of worked for mines and factories because the company was tied to a physical plant that couldn't easily be moved. But software can move around the world in milliseconds.

In Hollywood, union bargaining bought some time at least. Unions did mandate limits on the use of AI for a lot of the creation process.

AI is still used in Hollywood but nobody is proud of it. No movie director goes around quoting percentages of how many scenes were augmented by AI or how many lines in the script were written by ChatGPT.

Tell that to dock workers, who have successfully delayed the automation of ports to the extent we see them automated in e.g. the PRC [0].

Hell, they're even (successfully) pushing back against automated gates! [1]

[0] https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/02/business/dock-workers-strike-...

[1] https://www.npr.org/2024/10/03/nx-s1-5135597/striking-dockwo...

Indeed, just look at the CGI VFX industry of Hollywood. US invented it and was the leader for a long time, but now it has been commodified, standardized and run into the ground, because union or not, you can't stop US studios form offshoring the digital asset work to another country where labor is 80% cheaper than California and quality is 80% there. So the US is left with making the SW tools that VFX artist use, as the cutting edge graphics & GPU knowhow is all clustered there.

Similarly, a lot of non-cutting edge SW jobs will also leave the US as tooling becomes more standardized, and other nations upskill themselves to deliver similar value at less cost in exchange for USD.

Isn't that just delaying the inevitable? Yangshan Deep-Water Port in Shanghai is one of the most automated ports. Considering there are more people in China than in the US, China still automated their port.

> outcome is the same though

Not really. If it’s overproduction, the solution is tighter standards at universities (and students exercising more discretion around which programmes they enroll in). If it’s overproduction and/or outsourcing, the solutions include labour organisation and, under this administration, immigration curbs and possibly services tariffs.

Either way, if it’s not AI the trend isn’t secular—it should eventually revert. This isn’t a story of junior coding roles being fucked, but one of an unlucky (and possibly poorly planning and misinformed) cohort.

It can be oversupply/outsourcing and also secular: You can have basically chronic oversupply due to a declining/maturing industry. Chronic oversupply because the number of engineers needed goes down every year and the pipeline isn't calibrated for that (academia has been dealing with this for a very long time now, look up the postdocalypse). Outsourcing, because as projects mature and new stuff doesn't come along to replace, running maintenance offshore gets easier.

Software isn't eating the world. Software ate the world. New use cases have basically not worked out (metaverse!) or are actively harmful.

I'm not making a value judgment on the specific case of dock workers, I'm rather saying that unions can and do prevent automation. If Software Devs had unionized earlier, a lot of positions would probably still be around.

Unions can only prevent automation up to a point. Really the only thing that could have reasonably prevented this would have been for programmers to not produce as much freely accessible training data (formerly known as "open source software").

I mean, I still don't want to unionize with the guys who find `git` too complicated to use (which is apparently the majority of HN). Also, you guys all hate immigrants which is not my vibe, sorry.

Unions wouldnt stop any of this but professionalization would

Unions work in physical domains that need labor “here and now”, think plumbers, electricians, and the like. You can’t send that labor overseas, and the union can control attempts at subversion via labor force importation. But even that has limitations, e.g. union factory workers simply having their factory shipped overseas.

Software development at its core can be done anywhere, anytime. Unionization would crank the offshoring that already happens into overdrive.

So what your argument is we're so special that we deserve to hold back human progress to have a privileged life? If it's not that what would you want a union to do in this situation?

Saying “programmers” did this is about as useful as saying humans did it.

The dock owner may not have a lot of alternatives to negotiating with the union. If devs unionize, the work can move.

We're not "too important." All a union would do is create extra problems for us.

There are two possibilities:

a) This is a large scale administrative coordination problem

b) We don't need as many software engineers.

Under (a) unionizing just adds more administrators and exacerbates the problem, under (b) unions are ineffective and just shaft new grads or if they manage to be effective, kills your employer (and then no one has a job.)

You can't just administrate away reality. The reason SWEs don't have unions is because most of us (unlike blue collar labor) are intelligent enough to understand this. I think additionally there was something to be said about factory work where the workers really were fungible and it was capital intensive, software development is almost the polar opposite where there's no capital and the value is the theory the programmers have in their head making them a lot less fungible.

Finally we do have legal tools like the GPL which do actually give us a lot of negotiating power. If you work on GPL software you can actually just tell your employer "behave or we'll take our ball and leave" if they do something stupid.

Unions _can_ protect against this, but they have to do it via lobbying the government for protectionism, tariffs, restricting non-union competition etc.

I’d prefer that my family are financially stable over “human progress”. One benefits me and the other benefits tech companies. Easy choice.

Exactly. I am always so impressed by the fact that developers never see that open source is essentially them giving away free labor to giant corporations. Developers basically programmed their way out of a job, for free. It's the only profession that is proud to have its best work done on unpaid time and used for free by big corporations.

If our ancestors had thought like that we'd all be very busy and "stable" doing subsistence farming like we were doing 10,000 years ago.

Better our children never have to work because the robots do everything and they inherited some ownership of the robots.

Do you really believe that all technological progress has bettered humanity? Where’s the four day work week we were promised? I thought automation was supposed to free us from labor.

I like human progress. I don’t like the apparent end goal that the entire wealth of the planet belongs to a few thousand people while the rest of us live in the mud.

I don't think all progress has benefitted humanity but I do think we've never worked less while earning more than the present.

You said: All a union would do is create extra problems for us.

Then you said:

a) This is a large scale administrative coordination problem

Pray tell: what is it a union does other than the latter?

Or is your position that “union” is some narrowly defined, undifferentiated structural artifact of a specific legal system?

Then don’t complain when some other group treats you the same