Initial effects of AI technology on employment look positive • Hacker News Board

Re: Initial effects of AI technology on employment look positive

#121

Post by georgeburdell » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 4:33 AM UTC

R_D_Olivaw wrote: post #101

georgeburdell wrote: post #5

I can’t read the article but in my group, which is not terribly AI exposed due to its hands-on nature, we are in fact hiring extra people into next year to handle additional AI initiatives that I am confident will succeed. In subsequent years, the plan as I have heard it is to let headcount go down by attrition. I would not take extra hiring now as evidence that AI is preserving job numbers.

This is indeed HN, so comments are of course skewed to a particular upper echelon of knowledge work, but I'll ask anyways: When you say (and perhaps you might speculate across other businesses) "hiring extra people... To handle AI initiatives" does that mean you're hiring Very niche and specialized AI people to handle these initiatives? I'm curious because I have seen some versions of this sentiment on HN and it sort…

No we are not hiring AI experts, just people we think can be trained to think AI-natively. It’s a different mindset that presumes whatever work you’re doing now is ultimately going to be used to train AI to do it later.

Re: Initial effects of AI technology on employment look positive

#122

Post by briga » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 4:47 AM UTC

mbgerring wrote: post #64

I was laid off as a senior product manager in December of 2025. I’ve been looking for a new job in clean energy (which is supposedly “having a moment” due to data centers) since then. There is no “jobs boom”. There are certainly job openings — black holes into which you can lodge your resume. Occasionally, multiple rounds of interviews that go nowhere. I’ve been paying my bills as an art fabricator and live event ele…

I don't think this is entirely true: let's just say the jobs boom is unevenly distributed. There are definitely more openings than there were a year ago, but it is also now much more of a challenge to effectively market yourself as a person in tech.

On the one hand there is the problem that every job posting is flooded with hundreds of bogus AI resumes which, if they are not outright fabrications, stretch the truth enough to make it hard to tell who is qualified and who is not.

Anecdotally, it seems to me like directly applying to jobs is a waste. You either have to find some way to attract recruiter outreach, or network with people who can get you a foot in the door.

Re: Initial effects of AI technology on employment look positive

#123

Post by vanuatu » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 5:47 AM UTC

I think this is Jevon's paradox playing out in full force, and I'm quite confident we'll continue to see the growth in well paid STEM jobs despite the anecdata in this thread (anecdotally my group of ICs on tech have all seen our comp grow a lot in the last few years)

Until we saturate the demand for software which may very well be infinite

Re: Initial effects of AI technology on employment look positive

#124

Post by sznio » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 5:50 AM UTC

datadrivenangel wrote: post #117

kalleboo wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the robots are just a few years away. I thought that spatial reasoning was going to be a lot harder for AI, but Astra is showing that progress on that front is also moving very rapidly.

humanoid robots are decades away, and they are not going to be good or cheap for a long time.

> humanoid robots are decades away

I think the world has gone too crazy to make any such claim. They could be decades away, they could be a year away.

Remember that it doesn't have to be necessarily better than a human, it just needs to make economical sense. A robot that fails 20% of the time but costs 0.10$/h to run beats a person for many tasks.

Re: Initial effects of AI technology on employment look positive

#125

Post by vanuatu » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 6:12 AM UTC

dist-epoch wrote: post #20

AI boosters: "look, AI is creating jobs, all of these doomers scaring you with job loses, don't listen to them" also AI boosters: "we are going to build a million robots, and the robots will build factories producing robots, there will be infinite abundance, nobody will need to work anymore"

unironically the second scenario sounds better

Re: Initial effects of AI technology on employment look positive

#126

Post by vanuatu » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 6:14 AM UTC

xlayn wrote: post #104

No they are not, try to change jobs and if you can't or takes a really long time you know this is some of the finest baloney. And no, it's not creating a lot of jobs, one one of the kind that will be destroyed by AI no, and that's the point... you built something that removes the pricey laywer, software developer, insurance policy writer, designer, etc... and replace it with a ONE TIME go work under the sun with no a…

if you're going by anecdata, myself and a few of my colleagues (senior ics) switched jobs relatively easily for a solid pay increase within the last year. definitely easier than post-covid

engineering (hardware, software) and data center construction are going through a boom cycle right now and will eventually bust, and so on and so forth

Re: Initial effects of AI technology on employment look positive

#127

Post by Roland303 » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 6:20 AM UTC

georgeburdell wrote: post #121

R_D_Olivaw wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is indeed HN, so comments are of course skewed to a particular upper echelon of knowledge work, but I'll ask anyways: When you say (and perhaps you might speculate across other businesses) "hiring extra people... To handle AI initiatives" does that mean you're hiring Very niche and specialized AI people to handle these initiatives? I'm curious because I have seen some versions of this sentiment on HN and it sort…

No we are not hiring AI experts, just people we think can be trained to think AI-natively. It’s a different mindset that presumes whatever work you’re doing now is ultimately going to be used to train AI to do it later.

ok well I went from not knowing what a tensor was to having my pi coding agent polish up my orchestration layer in about ~60 days, wheres the ai dreg hiring at?

Re: Initial effects of AI technology on employment look positive

#128

Post by nsonha » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 7:18 AM UTC

datadrivenangel wrote: post #117

kalleboo wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the robots are just a few years away. I thought that spatial reasoning was going to be a lot harder for AI, but Astra is showing that progress on that front is also moving very rapidly.

humanoid robots are decades away, and they are not going to be good or cheap for a long time.

"humanoid" robots are as relevant to commercial robotics as AGI to LLM, that is, not at all. As long as they can move on wheels and operate 2 hands (doesn't matter how many fingers), the application is huge already.

Re: Initial effects of AI technology on employment look positive

#129

Post by altern8 » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 7:19 AM UTC

armanckeser wrote: post #36

elmer2 wrote: post #32

I'm a consultant and I've already worked for multiple AI companies that shut down over the last two years. I think the main problem is that they all are relying on the big token providers and trying to capture value with various services. At some point the token costs will increase so much, it will put all of these AI companies out of business. Don't get me wrong. AI is definitely useful. The high costs are currently…

Why assume token costs will increase as opposed to become commoditized?

Right now they're losing billions/year, it's not sustainable

Re: Initial effects of AI technology on employment look positive

#130

Post by bheadmaster » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 7:37 AM UTC

lovich wrote: post #107

xlayn wrote: post #104

No they are not, try to change jobs and if you can't or takes a really long time you know this is some of the finest baloney. And no, it's not creating a lot of jobs, one one of the kind that will be destroyed by AI no, and that's the point... you built something that removes the pricey laywer, software developer, insurance policy writer, designer, etc... and replace it with a ONE TIME go work under the sun with no a…

AI has completely broken interviewing as well. The asks I am getting in the few interviews I can achieve are schizophrenic. They have pretty uniformly wanted me to demonstrate using AI but then freak out and interrogate me for every prompt and then want me to demonstrate I can do the task by hand. And that’s only after getting through the AI run filtering that gives a different score everytime your unchanged resume i…

> It’s dark times for employment currently unless you’ve got a rare nepotism path.

In the civilized society, we call that "recommendation".