Where is the AI jobs crisis?

>Now, to your point. Is the code all that clean? Nope... but who cares?

Typically, this is not the type of phrase that is said right before everything goes extremely well

I used to think comparisons of AI with the web where ridiculous, but increasingly it looks like they're not that dissimilar as far as how they change how we work. But as someone who graduated college during the bust there was a loooong gap between peak hype and things like online banking and e-commerce becoming standard.

Even if AI is an absolutely bubble, and SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI all cease to exist in a year... there's simply no way that AI has not fundamentally changed work. Even if I was forever pinned to the local models I'm running and the agent harnesses they use, I would never write code for work the same way.

But I lived through the rise of the web. I remember serving dynamic websites through cgi (which meant a new instance of an interpreter was spawned per user session). I vividly remember great JavaScript books saying things like "never use JavaScript for core functionality". I recall Java engineers saying Ruby on Rails was a toy and would never take off, that Python offered nothing over Perl and that "rich web applications" where never going to replace app native interfaces. I remember when the MVC pattern from the early Smalltalk days being dusted off and repurposed for web applications, completely changing how we designed software for the web.

And all of that is just software. It wasn't until the pandemic that ebooks replaced print books in share of academic library circulation (reversing a decades long trend of reduced circulation).

In my daily use of agents for coding and other forms of problem solving, while it is a wild accelerant, it's also clear we have not even started scratching the surface of how to think about building things with these tools.

I suspect we'll adapt to AI faster, but having lived through one major tech revolution, transforming work still takes some time. I'm not surprised we don't see an immediate jobs crisis.

Not to mention the completely separate topic that huge classes of employees were not and are not all that productive, so boosts in productivity don't imply lost jobs. That would require a boost in productivity combined with pressure to create concrete value with less, looking at the SpaceX IPO we're still a ways away from working about how efficiently we create concrete value.

It seems to me that the hiring crisis started in 2022 and never ended.

I haven't been on the market for long luckily, but as an independent consultant I went from getting 2 to 3 contacts per week to none per months.

Have never worked in my life like last year, and there's no signs of slowing down.

At least I don't have to review PRs, we have built a team around the concept of trust and not needing to check each other's work.

There's simply too much work to start nit picking in PRs, everybody's very talented and a good engineer you can trust. They ask for feedback when they want it.

And no, we're not producing slop, if anything AI has helped improve the codebase a lot and the harnessing has definitely raised the bar at all levels.

But sure as hell, the job sucks now, and I hate it. And it's not just due to the amount of work.

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

There's no way of knowing what the industry will look like decades from now. Even assuming the prediction that seniors become 10x more productive, that would mean software becomes much cheaper to produce. Does that induce enough demand for additional software that keeps employment levels high? Could be, who knows.

Alternatively, maybe software hits a saturation point where there just isn't as much new ground to cover and employment levels crater. That could happen too.