alt Hacker NewsUS Job Market Visualizer
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It's wild that there are as many jobs in the category "Top Executives" as in the category "Retail Sales Worker".
This makes sense given both automation and the US's role in the global economy, but it runs somewhat contrary to standard ideas of class and inequality.
Cool stuff. would be nice to have a color blind mode. I literally can't distinguish the red from green in this visualization.
If AI produces surplus where does it go? Not talking about investment backed datacenter buildout and AI labs. Talking about the results of AI work...
I think AI outcomes distribute to contexts where it is used, and produce a change in how we work, what work we take on. Competition takes care of taking those surpluses and investing them in new structure, which becomes load bearing and we can't do without it anymore.
In the end it looks like we are treading water, just like it was when computers got 1M times faster in a couple of decades, but we felt very little improvement in earnings or reduction in work.
Surplus becomes structure and the changed structure is something you can't function without. Like the cell and mitochondrion, after they merged they can't be apart, can't pay their costs individually anymore. Surplus is absorbed into the baseline cost.
Data is coming from BLS. Their data lags the true state of affairs, and their growth projections are never reliable. Remember when they touted from 2000-2010 that Actuaries are the hottest growing field with the best forward looking outlook?
BLS forward looking guidance means nothing when technology revolutionizes the nature of work.
>Software Developers +15%
Yay!
>Computer Programmers: -6%
Oh no
Am I being obtuse, or is there no license?
I'd like to use this on my website and also see if I can create variations for some of the major EU markets.
Interestingly, it seems from these statistics the median wage for individuals with a Master's is lower than a Bachelor's. I wonder if that's because of immigrants who pursue higher education for visa reasons skewing the data.
My takeaway here: 3.XT $ of US salaries are the TAM for AI companies.
Apple, a very successful company, makes 300B/y revenue? (ish)
~10% is all you need to be Apple.
And, it can work by taking all of 10% of the jobs and collecting the whole salary (the AI employee -- dubious proposition),
or by taking 10% of everyone's salary and automating part of everyone's job (the AI "tool" -- much more plausible).
If "part" being automated is >10%, we all win in the long run, every company gets productivity growth without cost growth, etc etc.
If you add in data center costs, and multiple competing AI companies, and then expand the TAM to all white collar work worldwide, you can make everyone successful beyond their wildest dreams with a "20% of work for 20% of the cost" model. Again, how you distribute that 20% remains to be seen (20% new unemployment, or new 0% unemployment with "tools".
I formalized my thoughts here: https://jodavaho.io/posts/ai-jobpocolypse.html
> You are an expert analyst evaluating how exposed different occupations are to AI. You will be given a detailed description of an occupation from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
> Rate the occupation's overall AI Exposure on a scale from 0 to 10.
Are LLMs good at scoring? In my experience, using an LLM for scoring things usually produces arbitrary results. I'm surprised to see Karpathy employ it
Mouse hover seems to be critical for this visualization. Not much useful in mobile.
Are childcare and kindergarten teachers really exposed to AI? In theory, we could put a class of 30 children in front of chatbots with one supervisor. But I doubt we would chose to do this as a society. If office work becomes more automated, early childhood education is actually one area I'd expect to take up the Slack. I can't imagine a situation where we have millions of unemployed former office workers but we leave them idle and let our children waste away in front of screens.
Insights from a real estate perspective: Most of the jobs that have the highest AI exposure are office jobs. Clerks, assistants, secretaries, software developers, bookkeepers, customer service, lawyers, etc. There has been a narrative the past couple years that office real estate was recovering as companies returned to office. If AI job losses materialize, it looks like there may be a second hit to that sector.
Question for those in the know: are IT jobs being affected the same as software engineering jobs with all the consolidation and AI?
Whats the outlook like?
Thank you!
I wish there would be a color blind friendly version of this. I have deuteranopia and can’t distinguish red from green in the page.
Has some similar conclusions to my Job Quality-Adjusted Displacement Index https://github.com/quinndupont/JQADI
Nifty!
Needs
- [utility] add filter by keyword / substring match, e.g majority of visualized reports are un-labeled requiring hovering with a mouse pointer
- [improve discovery] add sort by demographic / pop impact, e.g largest block is 7m ('Hand laborers and movers') and default sorted to bottom-left
Bet on high job-growth market: Security guard for data centers.
Stand in front with a gun while mobs come to burn down the data center that took their jobs.
(I think I'm half joking).
It just comes up a black screen for me. Is this happening to anyone else?
Data in, data out. Reminder that the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has been…well, I can’t find the right word.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-jobs-firing-f00e9bf96d01105...
Does the LLM understand or consider "rent seeking"? Lot's of high-paying jobs and entire industries seem to be propped-up by those same people who already have the power.
It looks like this is using 2024 data so quite old?
Cool site and Andrej is the man. But the BLS data...
> Taxi Drivers, Shuttle Drivers, and Chauffeurs
> Overall employment of taxi drivers, shuttle drivers, and chauffeurs is projected to grow 9 percent from 2024 to 2034, much faster than the average for all occupations.
...word?
I enjoy that this visualization directly contradicts the mainstream narrative that white collar work is being replaced by blue collar work.
Almost everyone I know is limited to two areas, and of those, 90% are in one corner.
I'd like to see this but - not sure if it is already - adjusted by total pay. so # employed * average salary.
A -4.0% hit to cashiers may have less of an impact than -4.0% to lawyers or another category that is propping up the middle of the economy with spending.
> This is not a report, a paper, or a serious economic publication — it is a development tool for exploring BLS data visually.
I guess that was to be expected...
This (tech) career has proven to be so disappointing, and it's all the stuff around the actual work. I love working on computers.
Started my career in the decade of offshoring and didn't think we'd have anything close to an "AI" taking our jobs before we potentially unionized or had a government that would protect its labor force from being replaced by literal robots.
2020-2022 felt like the usa tech ship was finally growing into something really great. All gone now.
When I worked in devops I always worried that my job was automating away other engineers, it definitely had a "when will this come for me" feeling, because it really was, now the dev and ops are both getting automated away.
This is my first time looking at HN in practically a year. Tech is just so uninteresting to me now. Nobody is hiring SDE/SWE/SREs except for the problem makers, like Anthropic, Meta, etc. Anthropic has pages and pages of $300k-$600k roles open right now. But do you go help the rest of your colleagues lose their jobs?
I guess lets talk about kubernetes or something...
This is a surprisingly bad treemap, which is surprising given how easy it is to build a good one these days.
It's kinda cool to see a whole lot of otherwise intelligent people who are so dogmatically and ideologically opposed to anything AI that they're going to willfully dismiss anything that AI produces regardless of utility.
It's not great for them, but it's a definite advantage for people who are already in the mindset of distinguishing and discriminating information and sources on merit, instead of running an "AI bad" rubric as part of their filter.
AI has already won. It's taking over. It might be a year or two, or five, or ten, but AI isn't slowing down, nobody is going to pause, and there's a whole shit ton of work people do that won't be meaningful or economically relevant in the very near term. Jevons paradox isn't relevant to cognitive surplus - you need a very different model to capture what's going to happen.
It's time to surf or drown, because it doesn't look like any of the people in charge have the slightest clue about how to handle what's coming.
> You are an expert analyst evaluating how exposed different occupations are to AI. You will be given a detailed description of an occupation from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
> Rate the occupation's overall AI Exposure on a scale from 0 to 10.
The sad part isn't that this is low-effort AI slop, but that intelligent people and policy makers are going to see it and probably make important decisions impacting themselves and others based on these numbers.
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I'll tell you what AI apparently can't replace and that is information graphics designers who are familiar with the exotic detail known as "contrast".
This is an AI slop website the same as spammed on Show HN. Doesn't matter if the author is incredibly wealthy.
Wow, I had no idea the reason my peers and I can't find another position in less than 12 months is because the market for software developers is growing faster than average!