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Where is the AI jobs crisis?

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Re: Where is the AI jobs crisis?

#61

Post by WillPostForFood »

markstos wrote: post #38
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Median is also up:

Median weekly earnings of the nation's 121.0 million full-time wage and salary workers were $1,235 in the first quarter of 2026 (not seasonally adjusted), the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. This was 3.4 percent higher than a year earlier, compared with a gain of 2.7 percent in the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) over the same period.

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf

Re: Where is the AI jobs crisis?

#62

Post by 9rx »

handfuloflight wrote: post #57
9rx wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The results of them actually talking to businesses and asking questions that are more than "did you have a job ad posted?" You are hardly the first person to imagine that job ads aren't representative of actual job opportunities. Obviously they are going to put in effort to avoid those weak signals.

How many businesses were surveyed?

As many as was required to find statistical significance. This S in BLS stands for statistics, after all.

Re: Where is the AI jobs crisis?

#63

Post by 5701652400 »

voidfunc wrote: post #51
dywilby wrote: post #29

Anecdotally, there's an AI job crisis for juniors right now

Yea, we're basically not hiring anyone that isn't a senior developer already. That's going to be a huge problem eventually but not my problem to deal with. My best advice for folks that want to get into software now is be willing to do it cheap for awhile and then jump once you've developed some skills. If you were getting into this industry for the money you're properly fucked and I hope you didn't load up on debt.…

same applies for seniors as well. ther isn't much distinction of senior vs junior human dev (as in cost and efficiency) compared to AI-dev (cost and efficiency). more so, at current imrpovement rate. in couple more years you would not need seniors anymore either.

Re: Where is the AI jobs crisis?

#64

Post by paulpauper »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #23
adamredwoods wrote: post #7

Bold claim to say "no signs" based on non-contextual numbers. I think I recall somewhere that most jobs added were in healthcare. >> The May jobs report reinforced this with nonfarm payrolls jumping by 172,000, confirming that there are no signs of workers being replaced by ChatGPT.

Well... if you think in terms of a society spending its people on doing various things, spending more people on healthcare could be a good thing. It means we're getting food grown and stuff made with fewer people, so we can spend more people on making sure that everybody lives, and lives healthier.

Healthcare is a huge sink if you have the income to afford it . People will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on various protocols to look younger, beat aging, and so on.

Re: Where is the AI jobs crisis?

#65

Post by 5701652400 »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #61
markstos wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Median is also up: Median weekly earnings of the nation's 121.0 million full-time wage and salary workers were $1,235 in the first quarter of 2026 (not seasonally adjusted), the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. This was 3.4 percent higher than a year earlier, compared with a gain of 2.7 percent in the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) over the same period. https://www.bls.gov/news.re…

wonder how much of it is K-shaped. if is payouts for execs, capital gains and alike are boosting aggregate.

Re: Where is the AI jobs crisis?

#67

Post by rich_sasha »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #19
BaconPackets wrote: post #3

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

In absolute terms AI is nibbling on a fairly small slice of the global pie of jobs - junior coders, lawyers, accountants, bankers.

The average person earns an average salary doing something very different to the stuff we on HN stress about.

Re: Where is the AI jobs crisis?

#69

Post by atleastoptimal »

It's crazy that so often I see articles, here on HN and elsewhere, where some pundit claims that there is no AI job crisis, AI isn't replacing any jobs, that layoffs are actually due to post-pandemic ZIRP overhiring, etc.

But then people who work in actual tech companies come in and explicitly say they are not hiring any juniors anymore specifically because AI is good enough to do most of what juniors do, and that senior engineers can now write 3x as much code, etc.

There seems to be a desire for a narrative that AI really just can't replace productive work, and that it's all a mirage. However it seems just like common sense that if an AI can do junior-engineer-level coding work, that a company has less reason to hire a junior engineer.

Re: Where is the AI jobs crisis?

#70

Post by darth_avocado »

adamredwoods wrote: post #7

Bold claim to say "no signs" based on non-contextual numbers. I think I recall somewhere that most jobs added were in healthcare. >> The May jobs report reinforced this with nonfarm payrolls jumping by 172,000, confirming that there are no signs of workers being replaced by ChatGPT.

It’s so frustrating that someone with a title of “Chief Economist” puts things like this out there.

Job numbers get revised every month, in a negative direction.

New grad unemployment is high and trending higher.

New jobs exclusively are held up by addition in healthcare industry, almost every other sector is seeing some negative movement.

A lot of job openings, a good chunk of them, are just fake jobs where the company has no intention of filling them.

Pretty bold for someone to ignore all of that and come up with a claim like that.

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