I’ve been baffled by how common these illusions about the labor market can be among people who have been isolated from the realities of the world in their career. I most commonly see it in juniors who never had jobs before graduating college, but I’ve heard it from adults who didn’t realize how much of their career fell into a very lucky, cushy track.

One of my strangest memories was a junior hire who decided after a few months that they didn’t like the work they were hired to do (which was exactly the job description, no surprises).

They informed their boss that the job wasn’t working out for them so the company would have to find some different work for them to do. There were a lot of difficult conversations trying to explain that they were hired to do a specific job that was needed, not to become part of a family where everyone belongs no matter what. This was a small company that didn’t have other open roles and wouldn’t have the budget to backfill even if they could move the person.

Yet it didn’t register. The person viewed their job as a jobs program, where they were chosen to join the company like a family and then it was the company’s job to find enjoyable work for them to do. They saw the paycheck as owed for their presence, and work produced for the company to be a nice bonus when it worked out.

It was a difficult situation until the person was finally let go because they could not accept the idea that their job was to do work in exchange for pay, and that the company wasn’t going to pay them if their work was not producing the necessary.

That’s the most extreme example but I’ve run into this a lot more in recent years. It got really bad again for the cohort of graduates who entered the job market post-COVID and thought getting jobs was always going to be this easy. I’ve been helping with resume review on and off and it’s stunning to see so many people who worked for 2-3 years post-COVID and can’t really tell you what work they did, but are so angry and shocked that their employers let them go.

> The opening premise baffles me. What kind of illusion must one be under to believe that employers would ever pay you the same amount of money to do less work?

It seems like a pretty common misunderstanding in rank-and-file AI-boosterism. I'm guessing that reflects their initial experience, before their employer adjusts their expectations, extrapolated out to infinity. Your correct understanding makes AI sound like a bad deal for workers (and it is), so my theory AI-enthusiastic boosters have to engage in a degree of reality distortion to keep up their enthusiasm.

You are missing a critical third - people organize and via unions or the polls push back and require less work. There is no reason we aren’t working seven days a week beyond people fighting not to.

> What kind of illusion must one be under to believe that employers would ever pay you the same amount of money to do less work?

Because supposedly, the new tooling (in this case, AI) allows them to produce the same or greater output despite doing less work. Workers are under the perennial illusion that they'll ever benefit from productivity gains, but that hasn't been the case since the 1970s.

Even in the first paragraph the author goes into some nuance about what they mean and it's not at all what you're saying? Years ago, I'd work on one or two things at a time. Now I do maybe 10+ things in parallel. I work more hours, "let me just finish up this one thing" I'll say, and I look at the clock and it's later than I thought. At the end of the day, my brain is cooked. Right now I'm motivated by the novelty of this new tool that gives me superhuman productivity, but a few years from now when that novelty has worn off? Well, probably a few years from now we won't have software in any recognizable sense anyway, so maybe it's not worth thinking about.

We have our own small boutique software type of business, so we aren't dealing with "employers", but all of us have never worked more, and for less (per hour) pay. Customers simply have higher expectations now, and we have to compete globally with basically an entire planet willing to vibe-code things, along with internal pressure at clients of "we can just do this ourselves".

So that means shipping higher quality, faster, with more features, and for a lower end price.

Because for salaried knowledge work, the premise is that your impact or output and not the hours worked is the basis for your compensation.

Suppose someone (pre AI) wrote 100k lines in 50 hrs/week of bad code but someone else wrote 10k good lines working 40 hours. In theory the former person would not be the high performer.

I agree many places don’t work that way, but also many do - so it’s maybe a hard discussion to have broadly and not scoped to the individuals limited experience.

Wages do historically appear to grow slightly above inflation: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q so some of the productivity gain is captured by the workers.

How much, presumably, depends on their bargaining power, such as unions or low unemployment.

The question is not so much how AI affects productivity, but how it affects the economic value of human labor.

The point is work is exploding. Mgmt. until AI could be reasoned with. Trade-offs between different interests and stakeholders were negotiated like investing in features now vs. development velocity vs. long term architecture vs. bug fixes vs. production incidents.

Now with AI and the flood of CVEs, management anxiety makes discussions much harder. Throw in unrealistic expectations about productivity - derived from venture money fueled AI POCs in greenfield hotel california and stress goes up.

The CVE’s drive work, the introduction of AI drives work, the old ci/cd is creaking under the load and architecture really needs a rethink. Add to that the genius manager pronouncing that very soon nobody will be coding fueling the dissonance between what is needed from me today and where we are supposedly heading increasing motivation - not.

I feel like this conflates work with productivity. One can be working more than ever and still be unproductive.

In my opinion what people think is that they will be more productive for the same amount of work, not have more work than previously and still only be approximately at the same level of productivity.

What AI has done to many is create more busywork than it solves in many cases, rather than making me more efficient for the same amount of working hours.

It’s been deployed widely enough that it’s becoming apparent where its lines are from genuine tool that boosts productivity to bolted on and makes things the same or worse, the pipeline for the work simply looking different

A rational employer is interested in how much value they can get, not how hard you work. In most cases, in the short term, an increase in efficiency means they can get more value from you working the same amount of the same pay.

We had to riot and sometimes people were killed rioting to secure the weekend.

If things are to rebalance again and give some of the productivity gains back to the rest of us, we should be working far less and I hope it comes with less of a fight than it took for us to get 2 days a week off.

It's been over 100 years now.

> Realistically there were only ever two possible outcomes: you do more work for the same amount of money, or you’re one of the ones who were laid off and your work was transferred to the former.

Workers need an answer to this problem and we shouldn't wait until all the deleterious effects stack up to make the demand.

A 32 hour work week would be a really good start.

> The only way it will result in less work and the same or better quality of life is if you’re self-employed or are employed by a compassionate human. Sadly that does not apply to the majority of people.

Even that is unlikely. If you are self-employed in any remotely competitive industry, everyone is continuing to work the same amount and AI is boosting their productivity. If you just start slacking off, your product will become inferior.

This then extends to the employment situation as well.

Only way you can get less work is if you (or your employer) are in a monopoly with a strong moat.

Yeah, I also don't get why people expect to work 2 hrs instead of 8 and receive same salary.

Once you go from horse to tractor the fields increase but work hours doesn't decrease. And if you still use a horse, you are outperformed by the tractor guys who will sell stuff at less the price that you can sustain.

I don’t think this was ever the idea. It’s always been pitched as a productivity improvement tool but AI leadership comms has clearly been a complete clusterf*k.

The idea is that each individual employee does more with less and therefore the price of the end product comes down, raising the standard of living for everybody.

Once a total economic conversion happens, which might take a decade, individual employees can definitely upskill and jump revenue bands. Electric utility workers get paid 10x more than the lamplighters of yore, but it’s just a different job.

Perhaps is not correctly phrased, but the way I see it:

Because these tools are now available whoever that is up in the management chain (possibly someone that has no idea about code or technology) is now entitled to request the undeliverable in the same amount of time.

I believe a couple of scenarios might unfold in the near mid-term future:

* Programming becomes now a task that anyone can do (assuming models outpace even the highest standards when it comes to certain software qualities). Under this premise wages go to the floor, now even grandma can do it.

* Companies still demand competent people as models plateau and do not offer outstanding software qualities yet the output is good enough that programmers should be able to do way way more than before. The job should then be high-paid but turns out highly-stressful.

* For some years eveything goes "just fine" under the vibe code party until competent people at major companies realize that have disastrous products and basically unfixable. Models start to decay. Then old school competent developers become again highly required and only a minority of "skilled-previous-generation" programmers that decided to keep doing things the old way get desperately required.

Obviously no-one has the crystal ball and anything can happen...

For years, decades even, employers were straight up offended by the idea of paying someone work 4 days instead of 5 days, while paying them the same. It made zero economical sense to them.

Then companies started testing it out, and have noticed that things like sick leaves plummeted, and that the employees produced the same amount, sometimes even more.

Yeah, everybody wants freedom and flexibility from self-employment, but that's generally speaking not a realistic attainable goal. The most defensible small businesses are ones that are sweaty i.e. require a lot hard work and hours others just wont justify doing, and that's an extremely important facet because without employees its much easier for a business to catastrophically collapse. Pretty much by definition anything that requires low effort is easy to clone and thus become saturated.

What can make sense, and what has been my personal experience, is that I have shifted my most draining work to the AI, so I can actually get more useful work done without getting exhausted. Just like 10 hours mining sitting inside of equipment is better than 10 hours with a pickaxe and a shovel, even if we ignore productivity

> employers would ever pay you the same amount of money to do less work?

Shouldn’t they now pay more for more work?

This is the goal of every productivity gain from the worker's side, and owners failing to deliver for long enough inevitably results in revolution (usually after some demand-destroying crisis).

What you call an illusion is reality, and the notion that it's an illusion is absurd.

> The only way it will result in less work and the same or better quality of life is if you’re self-employed or are employed by a compassionate human

Or you have a good union

> The only way it will result in less work and the same or better quality of life is if you’re self-employed or are employed by a compassionate human.

May we take this as an opportunity to recognize what a bad deal we get from most employers and explore better ways to organize labor. It's never been more possible. UBI is unlikely to happen and uncertain it would even be beneficial. If AI can lead to a better world, this seems like the most promising path.

there is a 3rd option and it involves us organizing and actually exerting some of our power as the critical dependency in basically all of the modern economy.

>What kind of illusion must one be under to believe that employers would ever pay you the same amount of money to do less work?

There's the historical experience with early/mid 20th century unions, the establishment of the 8 hour workweek and worker rights, even Henry Ford's wage increases.

Not necessarily that they'd do it out of their own good heart, of course.

I think there is a real world space separating people in work experience.

I've never worked a job where 40hrs was even enough, so any efficiency is instantly absorbed. That is the work world as I see it.

However I've run into in people online and in real life whom's entire work life seems to be on the opposite side. It seems to be a rather large swath of people as well. They have never worked anywhere where they even have 40hrs of work a week to be done.

Even last year I ran into a guy who gets paid 140k to by his own admission(12+yrs), to basically update a handful of websites a few times a week(shockingly...he is concerned about ai taking his job). Those jobs are not coming back and those that exist are rapidly drying up. Thats the disconnect. There are in a national sense a large number of people that have literally never worked an actual job even though they went into an office their whole working life, and everything about their life outside all reflect that they have worked a job despite never having done so. Those people are in for some tough times.

I am surprised people don't look at this like hiring a plumber. When you hire a company to do something for you if they are doing less work and/or the work is easy enough you can do it yourself, you would not want to pay someone a lot to do the work.

If you don't recall the early innings of AI - that was a big promise from a vocal group of people.

What does compassion have to do with it? If the industry requires more output or your business fails what options do you have?

Also, as someone who has been self employed I can tell you that you're working 2x-3x as much as someone who is employed and you have to pay more in taxes.

Market dynamics will sort this out

> same amount of money to do less work

Um… work is not important. Value is important. Your employer is employing you because they expect your value to be higher than your cost. Moreover, if you are busy, your marginal value is likely declining. You are not taking the time to think about things that will actually have high impact. This to me is the biggest problem I see with AI assisted work, it makes it very easy to feel productive, when in reality you only worked on the easy low value things.

What’s more, is I have a very distinct experience working on a team years ago that decided to do less work. The team actively started turning down tickets and commiting to fewer tasks each week. And the counter intuitive thing, was that not only did that force only the higher value tickets get closed, we actually ended up closing more tickets. Was really wild to watch and experience.

I'd recommend those employers to read "The Goal" from Eliyahu M. Goldratt.

By not limiting WIP they are actually making their employees less efficient.

I work for a big company.

I always plan our capacity based on a % of bugs/support/upgrade vs. new feature development which is roughly at 50%.

AI will be able to reduce this while also increasing quality which will allow us build more features faster which is actually quite fun.

How it will impact budget etc. no clue yet, in best case though i can transfer my team into a new product while maintaining the old one with very little effort.

I agree that it's incredibly naive, but it's pretty much the sales pitch from the AI industry to the rest of society.

At best all we can do is make knowledge work cheaper right now. But knowledge work was never the bottleneck behind energy prices, food production, transportation, cargo, etc.

If the overall efficiency of the economy improves, "the same amount of money" can afford more things. You don't get a bigger share of the pie, but the pie gets bigger.

If you also want a bigger share of the larger pie you need to be one of the people driving its growth, merely being employed by one of the many competing companies that is purchasing more efficient tools from a third party vendor does not qualify.

Oh, but it's very simple. You have elections, you collectively don't vote for the uniparty, you raise the minimum wage and then they will pay.

One can pretend it is very very complicated and invent many excuses. One can pretend not to notice only the uniparty is promoted on the Tee Vee and in the old media. One can pretend it doesn't cost many millions to pull the wool over your eyes.

Surely if increasing the minimum wage was impossible they wouldn't need to do all that? They would keep the money in their pocket. Apparently those with absolute control over everything experience it quite differently? They seem to still believe you can change things.

Oh but AI has wiped out some of the most tedious work I have to do. I can now easily work every waking minute, and some sleeping minutes, at a level approximately comparable to my prior 8h workload from 10 years ago if I wanted!

The amount of mental energy saved, and downright stimulation gained from seeing rapid feedback in a tight loop is making my workday much easier. I have enough left to continue it longer.

EDIT: Making the continuation mandatory would be a bad thing, but it's not bad that I can do this now.

>The opening premise baffles me. What kind of illusion must one be under to believe that employers would ever pay you the same amount of money to do less work?

Work is about the work written down in your work contract. If you manage to fulfill your contract by doing less, you still worked according to your contract so you should be able to expect the same amount of pay.

Let me get this straight: If someone who works for you takes more time but achieves less in that time, you would still pay them more. And if they took less time but achieved more, you would pay them less? That's some sick logic.

Then we riot and burn it to the ground.

The value proposition is extremely simple:

1. Clankers do almost everything for us as ethical slaves

2. Everything costs next to nothing, from raw materials to finished products, and much of it can be done at home, sustainably and even better than we have it today

3. Society transitions towards utopia, basic needs met for all, away from hand-to-mouth, and we spend our time on friends, family, community and personal enrichment

The alternative is a dystopia beyond Orwellian.

People need to get this idea into their heads: our governments work for us and with almost infinite cheap robot labour and national resources the focus should be on society and not enriching some fucking crooks.

Its literally us or them, literally a fight for our lives

In other words, companies capture all the benefits of AI, while the workers get the downsides.

No wonder there's so much animosity towards AI -- it's not the tech itself, it's the fact that it makes the lives of a small minority better while making the lives of the vast majority worse.

It could be used to make most people's lives better, but it's not, and it won't be.

> The opening premise baffles me. What kind of illusion must one be under to believe that employers would ever pay you the same amount of money to do less work?

You do much less work than a farm labourer 200 years ago and get paid more.

If productivity goes through the roof, working part-time may become normalized.

It's not that simple. In a time of massive flux and shake up you have to be ready to jump to different kinds of roles in different kinds of organizations. Maybe you've been an enterprise and need to jump to a startup or the reverse... or maybe you've been in an internal only role and need to move into a customer facing role or any number of other possibilities. Admittedly one way of interpreting the need for evolving is that it could be exhausting so in that sense the author has a point but it's not as black and white as you imply. At any moment in time there are growth areas in the economy and growth teams within companies and there are atrophying or declining areas of the economy or teams within companies. These macrodynamics are just as important as who you happen to work for and what the tools du jour mean for your work. But they require you to be intentionalable about making changes

Oh, so in your view, productivity improvements are not meant to benefit the workers?

Exactly. That's why we NEED THE STATE to intervene and ask for wealth redistribution, because employers won't do it willingly