Looks like market is correcting against translators[1]. Usually, when a recession(or hypothetical one) occurs, expensive work forces can’t be paid adequately o

Looks like market is correcting against translators[1]. Usually, when a recession(or hypothetical one) occurs, expensive work forces can’t be paid adequately or adjustments become expensive, so employers try to suppress wage by doing risky layoff[2]. That then becomes a trend for other insignificant players to also follow. After a layoff, expectation for inflation adjustment disappears because one has bills to pay, family to feed, hence desperation leads to wage stagnation. Then suddenly after 1-2 years hiring boom begins and the wage skips a few cycle of correction but most with decent experience can command good pay despite lower adjustments. One problem with such play is that, big players can hold out for few years before the dire consequences of the layoff begin to emerge, but before things get serious they start hiring again. The sad part is that, small players are screwed because they are now left with consequences and expense of hiring new workforce. Also this time it is not only about wage suppression, a massive covert selling of “AI as replacement for those pesky expensive code monkeys” is being peddled(if you look between the lines carefully on layoff/poor productivity/ ai increases productivity play). This will have consequences much dire for the smaller players scrambling to drink the AI coolaid without understanding how it helps, because by the time money had been wasted, the cost will be manyfold to recover the productive workforce and some will fail and become insolvent, but AI will become common place and just another tool like class generator, advanced IDE, no-code tools, uml-to-class generator. AI(we call these LLMs now) of current generation is expensive and it needs massive investments to become viable(think of main frames of older decades), but we are past the age of when saying something will be useful and getting money because most business saw similar(blockchain/no-code/outsourcing/offshoring) trends before. So the same old play, “productivity gains with this cool tech minus the cost of a human” gets big management excited. Once investment keeps flowing, more development and innovation will take place in AI(LLMs) space and it will get cheaper eventually(mainframe to your smartphone) but until then peddling is needed to fund these gambles. I see for what the trend it is, I hope others see it too. [1] I call people learning to code(without formal education on the topic) and then write rote code on what they learned as translator. Code-Monkey is very insulting and should not be a term we use against other human beings. [2] Like I said, it is short term risky because if things go south too fast they can hire immediately and of course new hires usually have 150% more productivity on their first 6month to a year so any lost productivity of the layoff is adequately compensated quickly.