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The tech jobs bust is real. Don't blame AI (yet)

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171–180 of 207 posts

Re: The tech jobs bust is real. Don't blame AI (yet)

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It generates economic activity and taxes in the US and suppresses wages. Most of the H1 candidates are in shitty roles that are well defined low/moderate skill jobs for giant companies. Hire people whom you can’t actively exploit and those are the kind of jobs where unions can organize. The alternative is offshoring the work, not hiring Americans. The smart thing would be to just let people immigrate. Instead we have…

Then offshore the work. Americans aren't getting the jobs anyway and the imported labor now competes for things like groceries, gas, housing, etc. which drives up prices.

Look, I can make a solid economic argument against offshoring and how certain business practices hollow out local economies.

However immigrants are a net increase in investment and GDP. Yes - terms and conditions apply (its economics, when do they not)

Immigrants have to pay rent, buy clothes and groceries from wherever they live. This creates demand which depends the consumption economy. These are positive growth levers. This is despite whatever work they do in that region.

In contrast, asset prices like house prices rising, because they have become stores of wealth, are a different deal altogether. In that situation house owners benefit from just holding onto property, and not renting. The asset appreciates all the same.

The issue which can be brought up is wage depression, and paying immigrants under the table. This should depress wages for American labour.

One solution for this is to increase minimum wage, and to ensure that everyone is paid minimum wage.

This is a simplified model of the situation, but in general immigrants put more into the system than they take out.

Re: The tech jobs bust is real. Don't blame AI (yet)

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wrote my first neural net in the late 90s Why aren't we using it, if that's all the world needs?

Oh this game, huh? If your powers of analysis were worth anything you would be running the world not copy-pasting hype straight from CNBC and Big Tech PR As you are not running the world your analysis is worthless. As such I say; good day, sir.

Why is it important that Google (or any of these large companies) only hire Americans for their jobs in the first place? They are global companies now, they make money from everywhere. Why is the insular "Americans only" idea worthy of consideration at all?

Re: The tech jobs bust is real. Don't blame AI (yet)

#174
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile... I had to step in and hand code lots of css today because copilot couldn't do the thing. And I had to step in and manually fix tests yesterday because copilot couldn't do the thing. Are you paid by OpenAI and/or Anthropic?

Have you considered not using copilot and using Claude Code or Codex directly?

I'm using codex latest model via copilot.

Is this where you say I'm holding it wrong? Is it so hard to admit these AI tools aren't as good as they are hyped up to be?

Re: The tech jobs bust is real. Don't blame AI (yet)

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad I was over working three full time jobs (remote w2) during that period. I stacked A LOT of cash during that those years that has appreciated nicely.

How does this show up in background checks? Genuinely curious

It doesn’t, I have one of these jobs on my resume and I simply don’t mention the others. Who would know if I don’t tell them? The IRS knows I had 3 w2s but they don’t know the dates of employment. It does so happen all three companies used the same large payroll management provider, so that company knows, but it would be pretty bad to share customer data wouldn’t it?

Re: The tech jobs bust is real. Don't blame AI (yet)

#176
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many “best in the world” people are we talking about, though? Based on what I’ve seen that’s a very small percentage (maybe 5%) while the rest were being hired by companies who valued having workers with limited negotiating power. (I’m not opposed to immigration at all but it was transparent how for decades the industry resisted any change which would make it easier for a skilled H1-B worker to take a better job)

> having workers with limited negotiating power Sorry, this is 100% false. Companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Meta etc. do not hire H-1Bs in order to depress wages. That does happen, but not at these companies. It typically happens when hiring IT workers.

If it’s “100% false”, I’d think you could have addressed the point. Do you think that H1-Bs have had the same negotiating power as permanent residents and citizens? Do you think that companies-especially the huge contractors and enterprise vendors who hired so many of them—did not exploit them?

I’m not saying that there aren’t people who really lived up to the idea that the best in the world were coming here—I’ve known a few of them myself—but that there were a much greater number of people who were not in that class and it wasn’t exactly a secret that their managers knew they could be imposed on more than their equivalently-skilled colleagues.

Re: The tech jobs bust is real. Don't blame AI (yet)

#177
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problem with these models is that they are not reliable. You never know when the provider decides to nerf the model and after good week of making progress you find the model is now running in circles and you are burning tokens like you are operating a steam locomotive and standing still.

Tbf people aren't reliable either. Not that I'm defending the AI models but remember these long-standing bugs were introduced by people and not found by people for years. Anytime anyone feels insecure that AI will genuinely do their job, I point them to creators like this [1]. Also, I find it so wild there are people, even here on HN, who don't admit that LLMs hallucinate, lie and forget. I would have a hard time tru…

> Tbf people aren't reliable either.

I only seen one instance where developer came to work still under influence of drugs after the weekend. He was moonlighting as a DJ and as he said the afters was legendary. He was fired that day. Usually you get an odd Monday with younger devs that they call off sick or family/health leave with the older ones. But they never suddenly run in circles for weeks seemingly not knowing what they do after weeks of exemplary performance.

Re: The tech jobs bust is real. Don't blame AI (yet)

#178
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Post dot-com, a LOT of people basically left the industry. They may have continued on in somewhat adjacent roles but people can only afford to keep looking for the sort of employment they had for so long.

Where did they go?

I'm sure you'll find a variety of answers. Often mid-management jobs in possibly tangentially related industries. Basically retired early, or pursued a hobby business, if they could afford to do so. In my case an industry analyst job for about ten years until I went back to marketing for a software company.

Re: The tech jobs bust is real. Don't blame AI (yet)

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would really appreciate if you made an archive link and sharing instead of complaining

Says the person who came here specifically to complain instead of doing it themselves. For the record, I tried, but the archive site only had the preview cached; I suspect it’s looking for a URL identifier to bypass the paywall that I lack access to, but I can’t confirm either way from a mobile device.

Click on one of the other previews that come up, last I looked there were 4 options, at least one had the full article

Re: The tech jobs bust is real. Don't blame AI (yet)

#180
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had a tech industry prior to H1Bs before the 90s. What we didn't have was Silicon Valley corporatism that doesn't value American labor nor American education. It's why SV is so gun-ho on charter schools and devaluing American labor. Let's not act like we need to import 80k "high tech" workers that amount to writing react components and spring endpoints. Hardly anything hard that we couldn't force companies to trai…

> How does that help the person that can't pay for healthcare or afford to go to school How would you like to make t-shirts for rich Chinese, for $5 an hour? There is a reason Americans are not doing that. It is because we are smarter than the rest of the world. How do you think that happened? Were all the smart people born here? Nope. It is because smart people born around the world immigrated here. The prosperity t…

I mean we aren't doing it because capitalists decided they would rather move the factories outside of the country because they don't care about workers.

Americans are absolutely willing to work in factors, but capitalists want chattel slave workers instead.

Your view of history is farcical, acting as if American workers had any real say in their countries industrial capacity rather than a few thousand people decided to inflict mass poverty to tens of millions of Americans.

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