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Where is the AI jobs crisis?

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Re: Where is the AI jobs crisis?

#261

Post by epolanski »

ubercore wrote: post #250
epolanski wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 A…

75% of the value on PR review is team visibility

We have built our team around not needing team visibility. We're 5 developers working on 7 products used by 5 different companies.

I *don't* want to have to know what others are doing nor how. This may work on teams that work on a narrower scope and lower rhythms, cannot work for us.

Re: Where is the AI jobs crisis?

#262

Post by punkbit »

mbgerring wrote: post #229

The AI job crisis is large tech employers firing workers to free up cash for AI capex, and those workers competing with everyone else in a competitive job market. I’ve been unemployed and actively looking for a job for about 6 months, the longest stretch of active job searching I’ve ever done in my career. Several close friends who work in tech or tech-adjacent fields are in the same boat. Anecdata on Hacker News or…

That's true! In 12 months, I got two contracts: a 3-month fixed-term contract and a previous 10-day contract role. Let's say that the landlord decides to sell the place I'm renting, I won't be able to rent another place due to unemployment.

Re: Where is the AI jobs crisis?

#263

Post by punkbit »

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_...

Have you tried to verify if those job positions are real? Try to apply yourself and go through the interview process to understand what's going on.

Re: Where is the AI jobs crisis?

#264

Post by recursive-call »

colesantiago wrote: post #147
Daishiman wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as architectural decisions have long-term costs and you need human taste and judgement to speculate on what business needs will come about in the next few years you'll still need human engineers.

We replaced most of our juniors and seniors at my company with AI. We only have like 2 seniors down from 30 and they are more productive than ever. I expect with Mythos we can get this down to at least 1 highly paid senior engineer and the rest a swarm of agents they are managing.

[dead]

Re: Where is the AI jobs crisis?

#265

Post by mancerayder »

heathrow83829 wrote: post #211
gruez wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>shelter isn't just a cherry picked item. It's by an far the largest spending category, that and healthcare. The BLS agrees. That's why "shelter" is weighted 35.6% in the CPI basket, by far the biggest item. > I couldn't care less about all the other categories, personally. If we're going by what people "care" about (whatever that means), the basket would probably be like 70% gas prices, 20% grocery prices, and 10% f…

yeah, staggering. it's utterly amazing how much people care about gas prices. i can't wrap my mind around it. I mean, would people really rather be out on the street rather than get an EV or god forbid a hybrid?

Gas is misleading - petrol / oil would be better. I don't know if natural gas is going up, but if we mean pump prices of the liquid that goes into cars: that's also used (although with some differences) to heat people's homes - oil heat is extremely common in rural areas. This winter it cost me about 600 dollars in one month to heat a home in the Northeast I kept at 60 degrees except weekends!

Electricity is even worse.

Petroleum also impacts industrial goods prices, flight costs, etc. It's more than just a talking point for drivers.

Re: Where is the AI jobs crisis?

#266

Post by fzeroracer »

Companies learned one weird trick, that's why you don't see job opening collapse. Most of the job openings listed are fake. Companies aren't hiring despite showing signals that they are; you can ask any engineer that's been laid off over the past year and they'll tell you the same story of how bad the job market is right now.

Re: Where is the AI jobs crisis?

#267

Post by zardo »

5701652400 wrote: post #82
rich_sasha wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

key point, those 6 figures SWEs earn, they would spend to "local non SWE" economy. your local datacenter does not care about local chickens or eggs, or private tutor, or pretty much anything at all. not even energy, it is has its own nucleaer reactor nearby. it is one-way economy from now on. you are only a consumer, not a producer. there is virtually nothing you (nor average joe) can provide that "datacenter" needs.

It doesn't have a nuclear reactor, it has two dozen natural gas turbines.

Re: Where is the AI jobs crisis?

#268

Post by Windchaser »

sdellis wrote: post #110
nawgz wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I mean, if we want to not talk about economics that’s fine, but can the AI actually do junior work at the same price? What if we don’t look only at quarterly reports, and instead include the value of having people knowing about the business having to explain it to…

It's not so much a question of whether AI is strong or not. It's a question of whether the tradeoffs (theft of intellectual property, coal burning, lack of transparency, stealing water, rising energy prices, global surveillance, etc.) are worth the outcomes. It's not even a serious question. If AI was truly strong, we would be seeing signs in the job market. And we would certainly be seeing a lot more subscriptions a…

> If AI was truly strong, we would be seeing signs in the job market.

Recalling past business cycles, the job market can look "strong" with low unemployment, even while a lot of creative destruction is going on. Look at the 2004-2009 cycle, where the economy looked strong until some time in 2008 even though a lot of money was being wasted on bad projects.

It's only when the tide goes out that you see who's swimming without trunks. So unemployment doesn't typically rise until the recession part of the cycle.

Re: Where is the AI jobs crisis?

#269

Post by iceflinger »

mbgerring wrote: post #229

The AI job crisis is large tech employers firing workers to free up cash for AI capex, and those workers competing with everyone else in a competitive job market. I’ve been unemployed and actively looking for a job for about 6 months, the longest stretch of active job searching I’ve ever done in my career. Several close friends who work in tech or tech-adjacent fields are in the same boat. Anecdata on Hacker News or…

Same boat, used to do backend infrastructure but have now been doing basic IT support at a non-tech industry; on paper I'm still employed, but between making not enough to make ends meet anymore and not even being fully engaged with the work, I feel effectively unemployed.

Re: Where is the AI jobs crisis?

#270

Post by TomasBM »

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…

Can confirm. From my experience, since December 2025, state-of-the-art models can replace a lot of need for junior, medior or senior developers.

This meant that, in my example and given the same scope, one junior person with AI could easily handle multiple projects in 2026 that would require 2 or more medior people as recently as 2025. The only reasons for involving multiple people were time, learning opportunity, or increased scope - not skill.

If we paused AI progress today, and ignored the option of adding agents recursively, the current state of things still provides several alternatives to any honest & informed manager:

- Altruistic or optimistic: Keep all current jobs, and move the scope until there's a need and/or funds to hire more devs;

- Pragmatic or neutral: Keep the current jobs, but not hire anyone else as long as the scope is balanced against time (our current situation);

- Cold or pessimistic: Lay off anyone who doesn't fit the leanest model at current (or acceptably lower/higher) scope.

I don't know whether this translates into a "job's crisis", and I can only hope it won't. But hope is not a career strategy, scope is not inexhaustible, and the political, economic and social pressures are quite strong even if you removed AI.

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