5 ms·

It feels like we're in a phase where hiring is slow for a lot of reasons: 1. Lot's of great talent on the market. It's a great time to be owning a company righ

It feels like we're in a phase where hiring is slow for a lot of reasons: 1. Lot's of great talent on the market. It's a great time to be owning a company right now in terms of hiring. 2. The reality and perception of AI making it possible to do "more with less". I can imagine conversations playing out today, "we need to hire more developers" with the rebuttal, "ok, what about AI? Let's see how far it will go without hiring more people" 3. Even without AI, software teams can do more with less because there's simply much better tooling and less investment is required to get software off the ground. 4. Interest rates and money is simply more expensive than it was 3-5 years ago, so projects need to show greater return for less money. It does feel like the reality and perception of AI hasn't converged yet. There's a general sense of optimism that AI will solve a lot of huge problems, but we don't really know until it plays out. If you believe history rhymes, humans will figure out what AI does well and doesn't do so well. Once that's worked out, the gap between perception and reality will close and labor markets will tighten up around the new norm.

teeray 1y ago
> I can imagine conversations playing out today, "we need to hire more developers" with the rebuttal, "ok, what about AI? Let's see how far it will go without hiring more people" That is almost certainly happening. What needs to play out for the pendulum to swing the other way is all of these companies realizing that their codebase has become a bunch of AI-generated slop that nobody can work on effectively (including the AIs). Whether that plays out or not is an open question: how much slop can the AI generate before it falls over?
- kyleee 1y ago
  That’s what I am wondering as I aggressively spew technical debt into the universe, is the sudden accelerated creation of technical debt going to be good or bad for my long term job prospects?
araes 1y ago
> It does feel like the reality and perception of AI hasn't converged yet I learned a word cruising Reddit the other day that summarizes that issue quite well - "liminal". At the time, it was in the context of malls, and the collapse of American storefront consumerism, yet the issues are similar: "relating to the transitional stage of a process", or "the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage" > general sense ..., but we don't really know ... the gap between perception and reality will close and labor markets will tighten up We're stuck in that in-between land where your 2) seems like it's often the response to most suggestions. We'll, we don't really want to take a risk ... cause tomorrow AI may make that choice irrelevant. We don't really want to invest ... cause tomorrow AI may make our investment worthless. We don't really want to hire more people ... cause tomorrow AI may do their jobs easily. And there's always that number 3) sensation somewhere "your team can do more, you're just not leveraging tools enough".
noduerme 1y ago
The impact of AI already goes further than just delaying hiring - at least in fields adjacent to engineering, such as technical writing. Anecdotally: For the past 10 years, one of my best friends has been the senior copy editor for [Fortune 500 company's] sprawling website, managing more than a dozen writers. It's a great job, full time, mostly remote, with fantastic benefits (including unlimited PTO, a concept that I can't even fathom as a freelancer). The website comprises thousands of pages of product descriptions, use cases, and impenetrable technical jargon aimed at selling "solutions" to whatever Fortune 500 executives make those kinds of mammoth IT decisions. Recently, he was telling me how AI was impacting his job. He said he and his writers started using GPT a couple years ago to speed things up. "But now I have to use it. I wouldn't be able to work without it," he said, "because in the last year they laid off all but two of the writers. The workload's the same, but they put it all on me and the two who are left. Mostly just to clean up GPT's output." I said, "I don't know who ever read that crap anyway. The companies you're selling to probably use GPT to summarize those pages for them, too." He agreed and said it was mostly now about getting AIs to write things for other AIs to read, and this required paying fewer and fewer employees. So while AI may be a nice productivity booster, it's not like there's unlimited demand for more productivity. Companies only need so much work done. If your employees are made 4x more productive by a new tool, you can lay off 75% of them. And forget about hiring, because the tools are just getting better. Coders like me don't want to believe this is coming for us, but I think it is. I'm lucky to have carved out a niche for myself where I actually own a lot of proprietary code and manage a lot of data-keeping that companies rely on, which effectively constitutes technical debt for them and which would be extremely onerous to transition away from even if they could get an AI to reverse engineer my software perfectly (which I think is still at least a few years off). But humans are going to be an ever-shrinking slice of the information workforce going forward, and staying ahead of those layoffs is not just a matter of knowing a lot about the latest AI tech or having a better resume. I think the smart play at this point is to prepare for more layoffs, consider what it would take to be the last person doing your entire team's job, and then wedge yourself into that position. Make sure you have the only knowledge of how the pipeline works, so it would be too expensive to get rid of you.
- nyarlathotep_ 1y ago
Izkata 1y ago
5 (maybe) - Over the past decade or so, it became really common to job hop for higher salaries, and while that did give a lot of broad experience, it may not have done nearly as much for depth. Everything from tech stack to data being worked with to broader architectural decisions that affect maintenance. I'm wondering if companies have noticed this and are shifting away from job-hoppers to get better return on investment.

teeray 1y ago

> I can imagine conversations playing out today, "we need to hire more developers" with the rebuttal, "ok, what about AI? Let's see how far it will go without hiring more people" That is almost certainly happening. What needs to play out for the pendulum to swing the other way is all of these companies realizing that their codebase has become a bunch of AI-generated slop that nobody can work on effectively (including the AIs). Whether that plays out or not is an open question: how much slop can the AI generate before it falls over?

kyleee 1y ago
That’s what I am wondering as I aggressively spew technical debt into the universe, is the sudden accelerated creation of technical debt going to be good or bad for my long term job prospects?

araes 1y ago

> It does feel like the reality and perception of AI hasn't converged yet I learned a word cruising Reddit the other day that summarizes that issue quite well - "liminal". At the time, it was in the context of malls, and the collapse of American storefront consumerism, yet the issues are similar: "relating to the transitional stage of a process", or "the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage" > general sense ..., but we don't really know ... the gap between perception and reality will close and labor markets will tighten up We're stuck in that in-between land where your 2) seems like it's often the response to most suggestions. We'll, we don't really want to take a risk ... cause tomorrow AI may make that choice irrelevant. We don't really want to invest ... cause tomorrow AI may make our investment worthless. We don't really want to hire more people ... cause tomorrow AI may do their jobs easily. And there's always that number 3) sensation somewhere "your team can do more, you're just not leveraging tools enough".

noduerme 1y ago

The impact of AI already goes further than just delaying hiring - at least in fields adjacent to engineering, such as technical writing. Anecdotally: For the past 10 years, one of my best friends has been the senior copy editor for [Fortune 500 company's] sprawling website, managing more than a dozen writers. It's a great job, full time, mostly remote, with fantastic benefits (including unlimited PTO, a concept that I can't even fathom as a freelancer). The website comprises thousands of pages of product descriptions, use cases, and impenetrable technical jargon aimed at selling "solutions" to whatever Fortune 500 executives make those kinds of mammoth IT decisions. Recently, he was telling me how AI was impacting his job. He said he and his writers started using GPT a couple years ago to speed things up. "But now I have to use it. I wouldn't be able to work without it," he said, "because in the last year they laid off all but two of the writers. The workload's the same, but they put it all on me and the two who are left. Mostly just to clean up GPT's output." I said, "I don't know who ever read that crap anyway. The companies you're selling to probably use GPT to summarize those pages for them, too." He agreed and said it was mostly now about getting AIs to write things for other AIs to read, and this required paying fewer and fewer employees. So while AI may be a nice productivity booster, it's not like there's unlimited demand for more productivity. Companies only need so much work done. If your employees are made 4x more productive by a new tool, you can lay off 75% of them. And forget about hiring, because the tools are just getting better. Coders like me don't want to believe this is coming for us, but I think it is. I'm lucky to have carved out a niche for myself where I actually own a lot of proprietary code and manage a lot of data-keeping that companies rely on, which effectively constitutes technical debt for them and which would be extremely onerous to transition away from even if they could get an AI to reverse engineer my software perfectly (which I think is still at least a few years off). But humans are going to be an ever-shrinking slice of the information workforce going forward, and staying ahead of those layoffs is not just a matter of knowing a lot about the latest AI tech or having a better resume. I think the smart play at this point is to prepare for more layoffs, consider what it would take to be the last person doing your entire team's job, and then wedge yourself into that position. Make sure you have the only knowledge of how the pipeline works, so it would be too expensive to get rid of you.

nyarlathotep_ 1y ago

Izkata 1y ago

5 (maybe) - Over the past decade or so, it became really common to job hop for higher salaries, and while that did give a lot of broad experience, it may not have done nearly as much for depth. Everything from tech stack to data being worked with to broader architectural decisions that affect maintenance. I'm wondering if companies have noticed this and are shifting away from job-hoppers to get better return on investment.