alt Hacker NewsA 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.
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The problem is how 'hard work' is defined. Does staying after hours count? Not automatically, but managers everywhere use it as a proxy ( whether it is dumb position or not is an argument in itself ). Does carefully considering your options count? Does being anal when it comes to minute detail count? All of these are small dimensions of hard work, but we throw those vague terms willy nilly, because we hope the audience will accept our 'used key term values' within our message to them.
Good thing all employers are rational.
Keep in mind that developers at Amazon were pressured this year to burn through as many tokens as possible because their “rational” employer assumed that productivity equals tokens consumed. I experienced similar situations on my last project.
The abstract concept of value you mention is part of the same vocabulary managers use, and I believe they often end up confusing even themselves with it.
They are just as rational as any other human being.
Yeah but if the AI is doing the work, why should I pay you?
> an increase in efficiency
An increase in efficiency in and of itself, maybe, but there is no such thing. The increase in efficiency has largely come from deskilling the job. Deskilling the job makes the employees time less valuable, because they can be substituted for another more easily.
[edit: it's important to mention that this is compatible with programmer ego trips. I consider myself a reasonably good programmer and I've been doing it for a long time, but AI has made me far more eligible for jobs in languages that I have never used on platforms that I have never worked with.]
But another factor is that just because you can do work faster doesn't mean there's more work to do, so if you were hitting all your deadlines before with two employees, now you can fire one. Which one that will be is the result of a reverse wage auction.
Is the increased value coming from you? Or from the tool they purchased to improve your efficiency?
A dump truck driver doesn't necessarily get paid more than a taxi driver, just because he's hauling more material. It's all about the value you personally bring to the table, not the value of the tools you're using, unless it's a tool unique to you.