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Where is the AI jobs crisis?

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Re: Where is the AI jobs crisis?

#151
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does your job, but not completely autonomously so you don't see it? It requires a lot of guidance, luckily, I mean thank god otherwise we would be goners. The job itself hasn't become easier, but it did change. If you come across failures you update the spec, the guard rails, whatever you use to guide it. It's not a "it produced bad code and now it's forever useless" type of situation.

[flagged]

You just did. But it's OK, I understand.

Re: Where is the AI jobs crisis?

#153
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…

Since this comment began so rudely, I decided against reading the rest. All the best.

Re: Where is the AI jobs crisis?

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's quite frustrating that they track average rather than median wages. As wealth inequality increases, average will be less and less representative of worker health.

Old joke: Bill Gates walks into a bar. On average everyone there is a millionaire

Gold

Re: Where is the AI jobs crisis?

#155
post #89
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…

>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? Even if we assume it can then not hiring Juniors still doesn't make sense - where will seniors come from in the future?

This is a collective action problem. Its too easy to claim the answer is "we'll hire our competitors juniors when they become seniors" and then every company wants to do that and not train their own juniors. Soon no one is willing to train juniors because theyll just leave for the companies that dont train juniors.

Re: Where is the AI jobs crisis?

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, we're basically not hiring anyone that isn't a senior developer already. That's going to be a huge problem eventually but not my problem to deal with. My best advice for folks that want to get into software now is be willing to do it cheap for awhile and then jump once you've developed some skills. If you were getting into this industry for the money you're properly fucked and I hope you didn't load up on debt.…

Me and most of my friends from school started in low paying consultant jobs, in fact most from my class dont do software at all only 5 of us had jobs after education ended, this is like 12 years ago, it was also hard back then to get a job, maybe people forgot or something.

This.

I have been out of the tech startup labor market for many years. But when I was doing hiring in a startup around 2017, we had to put specific, conscious effort into accepting inexperienced candidates. The default mode for hiring is finding like-minded individuals whose experience overlaps with the existing team.

Using AI as a scapegoat for hiring freezes or layoffs is just more FUD. Like all propaganda campaigns, the purpose of fatigue is to induce an amnesia effect.

Re: Where is the AI jobs crisis?

#157

20 years ago, everyone was whining about losing their jobs to outsourcing. Seems like the more things change, the more they stay the same.

In the US there is a widening income equality gap[0], of which outsourcing is one plausible component in a large, complex system.

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-...

Re: Where is the AI jobs crisis?

#158

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…

The decline in junior hiring began before ChatGPT had wide adoption, so AI is not a likely cause. https://www.employamerica.org/labor-market-analysis/dont-bla... The New York Fed has also released some research suggesting remote work has been a major factor differentially affecting early career workers. https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2026/06/remote... "But then people who work in actual tech companies…

> https://www.employamerica.org/labor-market-analysis/dont-bla...

I would have preferred someone who uses a null hypothesis and statistical tests.

Re: Where is the AI jobs crisis?

#159
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Since this comment began so rudely, I decided against reading the rest. All the best.

You do you, I literally say why you would have been right a year ago, but “so rudely” is a pretty funny stretch.

Re: Where is the AI jobs crisis?

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

people keep saying that assuming that in 5-10 years AI won’t be as good as senior engineers

What hubris on HN, to downvote this very reasonable comment.

A year ago I had no use for any LLM-driven tools, and today I can do my entire job without writing a single line of code.

If that happened in a year, what can we expect in 5? I have no idea what my job might even look like by then.

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