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

(www.cnbc.com)
440 points pseudolus | 2 comments | 28 Aug 25 14:13 UTC | HN request time: 0.406s | source
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Havoc ◴[29 Aug 25 12:14 UTC] No.45063050[source]▶
Not sure what these guys are studying but can tell you in the real world - essentially zero AI rollout in accounting world for anything serious.

We've got access to some fancy enterprise copilot version, deep research, MS office integration and all that jazz. I use it diligently every day...to make me a summary of today's global news.

When I try to apply it to actual accounting work. It hallucinates left, right & center on stuff that can't be wrong. Millions and millions off. That's how you get the taxman to kick down your door. Even simple "are these two numbers the same" get false positives so often that it's impossible to trust. So now I've got a review tool that I can't trust the output of? It's like a programming language where the equality (==) symbol has a built in 20% random number generator and you're supposed to write mission critical code with it.

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1. cyrialize ◴[29 Aug 25 13:43 UTC] No.45064042[source]▶
There's a very fun video about accounting by Dan Toomey [0] that I think really drives home the point that accounting is:

1) Extremely important

2) Not that glamorous

I always think of accountants as the "nerds" of the finance world. I say this lovingly - I think in another life I would have become an accountant. I find it very fascinating. I worked at a company that worked with auditing datasets, so I knew much more about accounting that I would have otherwise.

Nobody ever wants to listen to accountants because they either are giving you bad news, or telling you the things that you should be doing. No one can deny how important they are, despite how much it seems like everyone wants to get rid of them.

An accounting story I love is how my old company got a lot of business because of Enron. Part of the reason that Enron was caught was due to their audit fees.

Their audit fees were reporting that Arthur Andersen was charging for a huge percentage of non-auditing work (audit fees report what percentage was auditing related and not). This was a huge red flag.

My company was the only one at the time that kept track of audit fees, and so a huge number of people paid to access that data stream.

If one day I quit programming, maybe I'll get my CPA.

[0]: https://youtu.be/vL4INHaK-sA?si=jIvFQVtrXU6tjh-1

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2. Havoc ◴[29 Aug 25 22:32 UTC] No.45070157[source]▶
Yeah the boring part is definitely true. It is a good path to a reasonably high paycheque with bulletproof job security. To take your Enron example - even when it turned into a smoking crater and all business stopped they still had accountants working on the wreckage years later.

Very nearly went programming (now do that as a hobby). Still not sure how I feel about that choice, especially around mental stimulation. But if we're about to hit a recession/depression then it's not a bad place to be. The space I'm in has future revenues locked in for 10+ years.