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Where is the AI jobs crisis?

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Re: Where is the AI jobs crisis?

#31
You can't draw any conclusions based on "job openings" without dealing with, or at least addressing, "ghost job listings". There are several issues here:

1. AI ATS systems have made posting jobs "cheap", such that too companies post jobs that don't exist (ie "ghost jobs") to keep up appearances they're hiring or just to keep people in the pipeline in case they hire. This is a huge waste of everybody's time and should be illegal;

2. The hiring process itself gets increasingly Kafkaesque. AI screening, automated online tests, unpaid take-home work, etc. You have to get pretty far until a human gets involved. 10+ years ago this didn't happen because people needed to be involved much sooner and that's expensive;

3. In a lot of companies, getting employees to interview people is unpaid extra work effectively. They say it's important. You might even get dinged for not doing it. But anyone who has done it realizes pretty quickly a bunch of people who shouldn't get interviewed are getting interviewed and management doesn't care, even though employee time is expensive, because you essentially have to "make up the time" so it's still "free";

4. Even if you go through all that and get hired, you get laid off within a year such that income isn't dependable and you end up wasting a ton of time on the job-seeking process itself.

I've been thinking about this recently and high-information is part of the problem. In years long gone, it was hard to reach applicants so you'd have a small pool of higher-relevance candidates applying for a job. Say 10 people applying for 10 jobs. The odds were better. It was less work on everybody's side.

But now you have 200 people applying for 200 positions. This wastes everybody's time but the problem is that companies have offset this by pushing filtering onto these automated systems. People still need to enter all their bio information, etc. So it's just much more inefficient inherently even if the job opening is legitimate.

Re: Where is the AI jobs crisis?

#34
maybe look into industries AI is best at automating? like constant layoffs in Software? 160,000 people lost jobs in just 2026?

the claim "hey there is no AI job crisis", when previous SWE of 6-figures now takes job dishwashing in McDonalds + one more gig as Uber driver + food delivery gig is "job creation! now they have 3 jobs!". does not make any sense.

Re: Where is the AI jobs crisis?

#36

maybe look into industries AI is best at automating? like constant layoffs in Software? 160,000 people lost jobs in just 2026? the claim "hey there is no AI job crisis", when previous SWE of 6-figures now takes job dishwashing in McDonalds + one more gig as Uber driver + food delivery gig is "job creation! now they have 3 jobs!". does not make any sense.

Why would you assume that’s from AI

You talk to any SE and it’s obvious we’re not running out of work to do since these tools became available

Re: Where is the AI jobs crisis?

#38

I'll need to look at the underlying data, but it seems that the job "classification/category" should be more important than the raw number. A boost in lower paid/service industry jobs does not mean that there wasn't a loss in a category where AI can be more easily dropped into existing businesses. Data : https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf

Average weekly and hourly earnings were up in May [1], though “real average hourly earnings for all employees decreased 0.5 percent from March to April, seasonally adjusted” [2]. Nominal wages being up rejects the hypothesis that folks are being downsized into lower-paying roles. [1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t19.htm [2] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/realer.nr0.htm

The median would be interesting than the mean, as you can be hollowing out the middle, leaving more low-wage workers and a few very highly paid ones and the "average" still looks good.
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