Tech jobs are getting demolished in ways not seen since 2008

We are only slowing growth after a big jump in hiring during COVID 2020-2022... these attention grabbing slop headlines are junk news.

"We’ve lost 50k jobs last two years after decades of adding 100k+ every year including the pandemic highs of 300k+ per year. Total employment remains way above 2000s, 2008 and 2020 unlike the title suggests."

See the thread here for more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47278426

"Business Insider" is a waste of time in my opinion.

The process of figuring out what to build has always been harder and more drawn out than the process of building it. I’m not arguing one way or the other for the Jevon’s paradox claims, but the steelman argument that you’ve missed is that job losses can happen very quickly (“last week’s version of Claude code is good enough that we can fire Joe and have Sarah do twice the work”), but the recovery can take a long time as the tech slowly diffuses throughout the economy and slowly spurs new ideas.

That will always be true for some individuals. But the sector isn't going away. Everyone is retooling right now and it's hard to tell what this generation of AI is even going to do to jobs. I strongly suspect that the companies that manage the retooling most successfully will be hiring more people not less.

It has been the dream of the wealthy to eliminate labor since at least the Industrial Revolution (and probably much longer). Workers are annoying. You have to pay them. They demand things like time off and safe working conditions. They hurt profits.

Through the 20th century we saw increased automation that displaced so-caleld blue collar workers who were repeatedly told "get better skills" like this was somehow their fault.

In 2000 we had the dot-com crash that saw massive unemployment in the tech sector. A lot of these people left the industry and never came back. The software engineer to plumber pipeline was a real thing.

2008 saw a crash that eliminated entry-level jobs in many white-collar fields that never came back. This decimated the millenials who did the right thing, went to college and accurred massive debt and then found there were no jobs for them so ended up as baristas, working at Walmart or, ultimately, doing gig work.

And now in the mid-2020s, the tech people who told people to do computer science in college are now seeing automation come for their jobs. And now it's somehow an emergency worth addressing. Weird.

The core problem is that if the wealthy succeed and replace all the workers, who will buy their products? How will society survive if people don't have jobs? The only growth area is healthcare because you need everyone from orderlies to surgeons, at least until automation comes for those jobs too.

This is why I think we're headed for systemic collapse. The flood waters keep rising and we're running out of high ground to retreat to.

> Makes me wonder if it's just because WFH proved it works, so why not hire from Krakow?

As someone in the room when those decisions were/are made, pretty much.

Additionally, when the COVID recession began (before the stimulus package) most employers were laying off employees on work visas or giving them the option to open and expand offices in their home country.

A lot of senior Indian and Polish Googlers took the offer, and that's how you saw the massive Google expansion in India and Poland over the past few years.

Additionally, the Indian, Polish, Israeli, Romanian, and other governments are giving massive subsidizes to attract GCCs, while states like NC and GA which used to offer subsidizes to open offices in RTP became much less responsive and inefficient due to domestic politics (turns out it's easier for local politicans to be elected on culture war topics instead of tech hub expansion).

I can pick up a phone right now and get connected with senior bureaucrats in Czechia, Poland, and even the UK and India in a day if I offer to open a $20M R&D hub - most US states don't do that anymore.

Edit: can't reply

> For better or for worse, the most desirable places in the US not only refuse to participate in the race to the bottom anymore

Absolutely, but tbf, you don't really need subsidizes to attract business in an already established hub becuase the ecosystem already exists and the risks and mitigation strategies are well understood.

A subsidy helps when I am entering a new or unknown ecosystem to mitigate risk.

Additionally, local governments in the major hubs like NYC (even under Mamdani) and SF are fairly responsive to business needs and requests.

This is why I keep harping that in the world we live in today, American SWEs need to live in the major tech hubs because the density of employers and opportunities is significant, which reduces risks of becoming structurally unemployed as a SWE.