OpenAI eats jobs, then offers to help you find a new one at Walmart

entry "throw away, no skill" positions for programming are also kinda going away, or at least get collapsed to a small fraction of positions

to be fair this positions never made that much sense as they tend to cause more trouble then they are helping on the long run, but they exist anyway

and companies should know better then throwing away "junior, not yet skilled, but learning" positions (but then many small startups also are not used to/have the resources to teach juniors, which is a huge issue in the industry IMHO)

but I imagine for many of the huge "we mainly hire from universities"/FANG companies it will turn into a "we need only senior engineers and hire juniors only to grow our own senior engineers", this means the moment to you growth takes too long/stagnates by whatever _arbitrary_ metric you get kicked out fast. And like with their hiring process they have the resources, scale, and number of people who want to work for them to be able to really use some arbitrary imperfect effective discriminatory metrics.

Another aspect is that a lot of the day to day work of software engineering is really dump simple churn, and AI has the potential to massively cut down the time a developer needs to do that, so less developers needed especially in mid to low skill positions.

Now the only luck devs have is that there is basically always more work which was cut due to time pressure but often isn't even supper low priority, so getting things done faster might luckily not map one to one to less jobs being available.

That book was weirdly prescient. IIRC Gibson himself noted that he was too on-the-nose with The Jackpot, which has made it very difficult to write the sequels.

Hyperstition is a real thing... if, that is, you're William Gibson.

There's no doubt it can function as a convenient cover, but that doesn't mean it's having no effect at all. It would be naive to assume that the introduction of a fundamentally new general-purpose work tool across millions of workers in nearly every industry and company within the span of a couple years has not played any role whatsoever in making teams and organizations more efficient in terms of headcount.

There is something kafkaesque about these giant tech companies restricting what you can talk to the AI about under the name of ethics while at the same time openly planning to replace you in the workforce.

tbh. for companies like SalesForce I always assume they have a lot of bloated unnecessary jobs which are done well enough by the people having them to needing a external reason to firing them

in addition SalesForce grew in employment size in 2025 AFIK and 4000 jobs are for them only around ~~5%, which means it's to small to be a meaningful metric if you don't fully trust what their press department does (and you shouldn't)

still I see people using modern AI for small productivity boosts all over the place including private live (and often with a wastely underestimate risk assessment) so in the best case it's only good enough to let people process more of the backlog (which otherwise would be discarded due to time pressure but isn't worthless) and in the worst case will lead to idk. 1/3 of people in many areas losing their job. But that is _without_ major breakthrough in AI, just based one better applying what AI already can do now :/ (and is excluding mostly physical jobs, but it's worse for some other jobs, like low skill graphic design positions)