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Where is the AI jobs crisis?

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Re: Where is the AI jobs crisis?

#161

Post by shinryuu »

specproc wrote: post #114

I'm a consultant, and had my first conversation about an AI clean-up job this week. I'm also just starting another gig analysing LLM output, my sell is that the analysis is hand-coded, as they weren't able to do it themselves with LLM support. On the other hand, I'm just finishing an agent-heavy piece. After getting it set up, it's been some of the most mindless and soul-destroying work I've had the displeasure of in…

As a fellow freelancer where do you see that you could survive this into the future?

Re: Where is the AI jobs crisis?

#162

Post by james_marks »

sp1982 wrote: post #30

I run a job search site and I don't see a crisis in terms of job openings even for SWE - but there is very clear signal that AI is deeply getting embedded in every SWE job. https://corvi.careers/blog/global_software-engineering_jobs_...

In the news I hear about tech layoffs, but I am having a difficult time trying to hire high quality senior SWE's. Perhaps it's not the senior's that were hit by the layoffs, or I'm just looking in the wrong places.

The big job sites feel rife with unqualified applicants and outright fraud, leaving me frankly unsure how to proceed.

It feels like a crisis of candidates-to-job-openings matching, and AI has made it much worse.

Re: Where is the AI jobs crisis?

#163

Post by IX-103 »

paulpauper wrote: post #43

If America becomes wealthier due to AI, it will mean more follow-on jobs such as people using their newfound fortunes to remodel their homes, consume more , vacation, etc. Companies will expand and hire. All of this creates jobs even if AI may also destroy some jobs. The net result is more jobs. There is a huge market for upper-middle-class people in their 30-50s to look younger. This means more health clinic jobs an…

Theoretically, that's true. In practice the gains were limited to the wealthy who use that money to fund increasingly deranged start-ups* until the market crashes. Then rinse and repeat. The failed start-ups effectively waste any increased productivity leaving everyone about where they were before.

*They fund these start-ups to get a good return on investment so they can get even more money. As the economy overheats the number of places to invest with a reasonable return falls so they are left with the high-risk stuff to invest in. I'm not sure what they want the money for, though, since they could already afford most of the things I would find useful...

Re: Where is the AI jobs crisis?

#164

Post by porridgeraisin »

alephnerd wrote: post #22
ams92 wrote: post #18

I wonder when we’ll reach diminishing returns on new AI models. Haven’t tried Mythos or Fable yet but it seems like Anthropic is already priming itself for this by calling for a “slowdown” of AI development.

At least in cybersecurity, we already have seen diminishing returns with newer models. At this point the harness/applayer matters more, as different models perform better or worse on exploit classes depending on the prompt, tuning, and various other parameters. Of course, by the time HN hyperfixates on a topic, it's already been executed on and HN is too late.

Yea, in many usecases the tooling space is increasingly sophisticated context management such as fine tuning domain specific mappings into the model so that it is able to work directly with a compressed form of some data without needing to decompress into the context.

In larger models, these fine tuning techniques work more reliably/robustly. Because of this many usecases tend to prefer larger models. It is possible to work the same behaviour into the smaller model, but it requires more effort. But it's one-time. And smaller models are usually much cheaper. People make a tradeoff along this curve.

This is observed at few-B scale upto hundred-B scale. No way for us non-anthropic/openai to fine tune beyond that of course.

Re: Where is the AI jobs crisis?

#165

Post by IX-103 »

5701652400 wrote: post #41
ex-aws-dude wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

1. C-level says so 2. on-the-ground people indeed much more productive but of course, it is not just AI. Software is consolidating and automating even without AI, that's the whole point of software.

Even if they're more productive, the amount of work to be done has also increased significantly. Not only is there so much work to be done on AI integrations but all of the other products have bug trackers exploding with new privacy and security vulnerabilities that need to be addressed.

Some of the security people I work with claim that without the productivity gains from AI, there is no way they could keep up with the bugs.

Re: Where is the AI jobs crisis?

#166

Post by deadbabe »

OptionOfT wrote: post #108
atleastoptimal wrote: post #69

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 se…

> 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. Yes, and juniors aren't known for their productive work in the beginning. That's not their purpose. Their purpose is to do the mundane work, because it is important for them to become less junior and more senior. That is robbed of them. Which in 5-10 years means the need for senior developers is…

The need for seniors isn’t going to “shoot through the roof” if they are using AI.

If senior engineers are even 2x more productive with AI, then it’s like there are 2x as many senior engineers.

Most likely, seniors will be 10x more productive in 5 years using AI. This outpaces the retirement rate.

All the software engineers we need for the next 20-30 years are already in the current workforce.

Only way juniors can rise to the level of seniors will be through independent projects, long unpaid internships/apprenticeships, etc.

The industry will now have heavy gatekeeping built in.

Re: Where is the AI jobs crisis?

#167

Post by x312 »

pockybum522 wrote: post #74

It's really funny that the first thing in the article is a graph showing a long downward trend with a tiny, brief uptick circled at the end and then the entire article appears to be written about that.

True, but coding agents have only been practically useful since early 2025. Jobs are flat or a bit up since then.

Re: Where is the AI jobs crisis?

#168

Post by tamimio »

7e wrote: post #2

A "job opening" is not a job. It's an aspirational advertisement. Further, the graph shown is pretty noisy and I'm not sure the upward move which counters the downward trent is statistically significant.

Advertisement or trying to fool investors that they are growing

Re: Where is the AI jobs crisis?

#169

Post by nwatson »

piloto_ciego wrote: post #142
txru wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a suspicion that Twitter laying off so much of the software staff was very influential for people with hiring abilities. The company didn't crash, and they (relatively slowly) began shipping new features again. I think that coincided with the pandemic-era overhiring, and we've been working against that combo ever since. Every now and then, I actively try to make an LLM replace my tasks, and fully do greenfield…

I hate to be "that guy" but you're crazy if you don't see AI being able to do greenfield projects you'd accept. I mean, in your defense, last year I think you would have been right, but right now? Codex rocks, as does Claude. I am literally making money shipping a greenfield project to a customer right now. I'm basically a cheap consultant that is incrementally adding features to make something exactly what they want…

I'm curious, did you choose "blind pilot" as your username before or after your adoption of LLMs for projects?

Re: Where is the AI jobs crisis?

#170

Post by mindcandy »

AFAICT, the "Rising layoffs year after year" news lately has been an intentional misreporting of "Layoff rates slowly returning to normal after the hiring spree during COVID stimulation"

https://blog.glassdoor.com/site-us/wp-content/uploads/sites/...

https://www.glassdoor.com/blog/worklife-trends-2026/

But, CEOs figured out that if they blame layoffs on AI, stock go up a lot. Reporters know that anxiety about AI drives the clicks that write the checks.

I do think that AI anxiety is making HR around the world anxious about hiring. That's my best guess for why everyone is finding they need to apply to 500 jobs to get anywhere. So, AI is making it hard for you to find a job not because it took your job, but because HR is reading ragebait and turning it into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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