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I think the real white collar bloodbath is that the end of ZIRP was the end of infinite software job postings, and the start of layoffs. I think its easy to now

I think the real white collar bloodbath is that the end of ZIRP was the end of infinite software job postings, and the start of layoffs. I think its easy to now point to AI, but it seems like a canard for the huge thing that already happened. just look at this: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1JmOr https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1JmOr In terms of magnitude the effect of this is just enormous and still being felt, and never recovered to pre-2020 levels. It may never. (Pre-pandemic job postings indexed to 100, its at 61 for software) Maybe AI is having an effect on IT jobs though, look at the unique inflection near the start of 2025: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1JmOv https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1JmOv For another point of comparison, construction and nursing job postings are higher than they were pre-pandemic (about 120 and 116 respectively, where pre-pandemic was indexed to 100. Banking jobs still hover around 100.) I feel like this is almost going to become lost history because the AI hype is so self-insistent. People a decade from now will think Elon slashed Twitter's employee count by 90% because of some AI initiative, and not because he simply thought he could run a lot leaner. We're on year 3-4 of a lot of other companies wondering the same thing. Maybe AI will play into that eventually. But so far companies have needed no such crutch for reducing headcount.

leflambeur 1y ago
It's simply the old Capital vs Labor struggle. CEOs and VCs all sing in the same choir, and for the past 3 years the tune is "be leaner". p.s.: I'm a big fan of yours on Twitter.
- godelski 1y ago
  > the tune is "be leaner". Seems like they're happy to start cutting limbs to lose weight. It's hard to keep cutting fat if you've been aggressively cutting fat for so long. If the last CEO did their job there shouldn't be much fat left
  - leflambeur 1y ago
    yet this will continue until it grounds to a halt. It's amazing and cringy the level of parroting performed by executives. Independent thought is very rare amongst business "leaders".
    - godelski 1y ago
      Let's make the laptops thinner. This way we can clean the oil off of the keyboard, putting it on the screen. At this point I'm not sure it's lack of independent thought so much as lack of thought. I'm even beginning to question if people even use the products they work on. Shouldn't there be more pressure from engineers at this point? Is it yes men from top to bottom? Even CEOs seem to be yes men in response to share holders but that's like being a yes man to the wind. When I bring this stuff up I'm called negative, a perfectionist, or told I'm out of touch with customers and or understand "value". Idk, maybe they're right. But I'm an engineer. My job is to find problems and fix them. I'm not negative, I'm trying to make the product better. And they're right, I don't understand value. I'm an engineer, it's not my job to make up a number about how valuable some bug fix is or isn't. What is this, "Whose Line Is It Anyways?" If you want made up dollar values go ask the business monkeys, I'm a code monkey
      - andsoitis 1y ago
        > I'm an engineer, it's not my job to make up a number about how valuable some bug fix is or isn't. So you think all bugs are equally important to fix?
        godelski 1y ago
        No, of course not. That would be laughably absurd. So do you think I'm trolling or you're misunderstanding? Because who isn't familiar with triage? Do you think every bug's monetary value is perfectly aligned with user impact? Certainly that isn't true. If it were we'd be much better at security and would be more concerned with data privacy. There's no perfect metric for anything, and it would similarly be naïve to think you could place a dollar value on everything, let alone accurately. That's what I'm talking about. My main concern as an engineer is making the best product I can. The main concern of the manager is to make the best business. Don't get confused and think those are the same things. Hopefully they align, but they don't always.
  - chii 1y ago
    > If the last CEO did their job there shouldn't be much fat left funny how that fat analogy works...because the head (brain) has a lot more fat content than muscles/limbs.
    - godelski 1y ago
      I never thought to extend the analogy like that, but I like it. It's showing. I mean look how people think my comments imply I don't know what triage is. Not knowing that would be counter to everything I'm saying, which is that a lot of these value numbers are poor guestimates at best. Happens every time I bring this up. It's absurd to think we could measure everything in terms of money. Even economists will tell you that's silly
- saubeidl 1y ago
  Except Labor in Tech is unique in that it has zero class consciousness and often actively roots for their exploiters. If we were to unionize, we could force this machine to a halt and shift the balance of power back in our favor. But we don't, because many of us have been brainwashed to believe we're on the same side as the ones trying to squeeze us.
  - GoblinSlayer 1y ago
    >If we were to unionize Last time it was tried the union coerced everyone to root for their exploiters. People that unionize aren't magically different.
    - le-mark 1y ago
      What “last time” are you referring to specifically?
      - salawat 1y ago
        I am also curious.
  - wnc3141 1y ago
    I think the issue at play here is the quickly changing job descriptions, RSU's and the higher paid bunch benefiting from very unequal pay across a job category.
digitcatphd 1y ago
As of now yes. But we are still in day 0.1 of GenAI. Do you think this will be the case when o3 models are 10x better and 100x cheaper? There will be a turning point but it’s not happened yet.
- nradov 1y ago
  10× better by what metric? Progress on LLMs has been amazing but already appears to be slowing down.
  - jaggederest 1y ago
    All these folks are once again seeing the first 1/4 of a sigmoid curve and extrapolating to infinity.
    - drodgers 1y ago
      No doubt from me that it’s a sigmoid, but how high is the plateau? That’s also hard to know from early in the process, but it would be surprising if there’s not a fair bit of progress left to go. Human brains seem like an existence proof for what’s possible, but it would be surprising if humans also represent the farthest physical limits of what’s technologically possible without the constraints of biology (hip size, energy budget etc).
      - leoedin 1y ago
        Biological muscles are proof that you can make incredibly small and forceful actuators. But the state of robotics is nowhere near them, because the fundamental construction of every robotic actuator is completely different. We’ve been building actuators for 100s of years and we still haven’t got anything comparable to a muscle. And even if you build a better hydraulic ram or brushless motor driven linear actuator you will still never achieve the same kind of behaviour, because the technologies are fundamentally different. I don’t know where the ceiling of LLM performance will be, but as the building blocks are fundamentally different to those of biological computers, it seems unlikely that the limits will be in any way linked to those of the human brain. In much the same way the best hydraulic ram has completely different qualities to a human arm. In some dimensions it’s many orders of magnitudes better, but in others it’s much much worse.
bawolff 1y ago
Honestly, if anything i think AI is going to reverse the trend. Someone is going to have to be hired to clean up after them.
- tempodox 1y ago
  If anyone will actually bother with cleaning up.
- xkcd1963 1y ago
  Thats the impression I got. Things overall get just worse in quality because people rely too much on low wages and copy pasting LLM answers
  - autobodie 1y ago
    Get worse for who? The ruling class will simply never care how bad things get for working people if things are getting better for the ruling class.
    - xkcd1963 1y ago
      I meant just regular products as example if I login to bitpanda on browser the parts that would hold the translation hold the keys for translations instead. Just countless examples and many security issues as well. Regarding class struggle I think class division always existed but we the mass have all the tools to improve our situation.
    - shswkna 1y ago
      The central problem with this statement is that we expect others to care, but we do not expect this from ourselves. We have agency. Whether we are brainwashed or not. If we cared about ourselves, then we don’t need another class, or race, or whatever other grouping to do this for us.
  - hattmall 1y ago
    I think that's true in software development. A lot of the focus is on coding because that's really the domain of the people interested in AI, because ultimately they ARE software. But the killer app isn't software, it's anything where the operation is formulaic, but the formula can be tedious to figure out, but once you know it you can confirm that it's correct by working backwards. Software has far too many variables, not least of which is the end user. On the other hand things like accounting, finance, and engineering are far more suitable for trained models and back testing for conformity.
jameslk 1y ago
Keynes suggested that by 2030, we’d be working 15 hour workweeks, with the rest of the time used for leisure. Instead, we chose consumption, and helicopter money gave us bullshit jobs so we could keep buying more bullshit. This is fairly evident by the fact when the helicopter money runs out, all the bullshit jobs get cut. AI may give us more efficiency, but it will be filled with more bullshit jobs and consumption, not more leisure.
- pmlnr 1y ago
  Keynes was talking about work in every sense,including house chore. We're well below 15 hours of house chores by now, so that part became true.
  - autobodie 1y ago
    Source? Keynes was a serious economist, not a charlitan futurist.
    - itishappy 1y ago
      John Maynard Keynes (1930) - Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren > For many ages to come the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented. We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich to-day, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us! http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf https://www.aspeninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/files/content/upload/Intro_and_Section_I.pdf https://www.aspeninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/files/cont...
  - itishappy 1y ago
    We've got 10 whole hours left over for "actual" work! (Quotes because I personally have a significantly harder time doing bloody housework...)
csomar 1y ago
Elon Musk experiment is the worst anchor that can be used for comparison since the dude destabilized Twitter (re-branding, random layoffs, etc...). I'd be more interested in companies that went leaner but did it in a sane manner. The Internet user base grew between 2022 and now but Twitter might have lost users in that time period and certainly didn't make any new innovations beyond trying to charge its users more and confusing them.
e40 1y ago
Also section 174’s amortization of software development had a big role.
- jki275 1y ago
  That's about to get repealed it looks like.
  - latchkey 1y ago
    TACO
    - immibis 1y ago
      For those unaware, the "TACO trade" is when Wall Street investors trade based on the principle that "Trump Always Chickens Out". For example, buying in a tariff-induced dip on the principle that he'll probably repeal the tariffs. Now that someone's said to Trump's face that Wall Street thinks he always chickens out, he may or may not stop doing it.
      - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
        > Now that someone's said to Trump's face that Wall Street thinks he always chickens out, he may or may not stop doing it The point is he’s powerless not to. The alternative is allowing a bond rout to trigger a bank collapse, probably in rural America. He didn’t do the prep that produces actual leverage. (Xi did.)
        lazide 1y ago
        Never assume a narcissist will take the sane way out when their game blows up in their face.
        harmmonica 1y ago
        Can you expand on "probably in rural America"? Do you just mean that those smaller community banks are more at risk if rates rise? If so, because they issue more variable rate debt? Or is there something else? edit: grammar
lozenge 1y ago
Macroeconomic policy always changes, recessions come and go, but it's not a permanent change in the way e-commerce or AI is.
bootsmann 1y ago
[flagged]
- pera 1y ago
  For those outside of the US: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_inauguration_of_Donald_Trump https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_inauguration_of_Donal...
- hoseyor 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - quonn 1y ago
    Why would it have anything to do with AI? Generative AI has been widely used for two years and the drop is exactly around January 20. What happened in AI around that time?
    - hoseyor 1y ago
      [flagged]
- pydry 1y ago
  Trump didnt kick off the layoffs. It was the war with Russia that drove the fed to raise interest rates in 2022 - a measure that was intended to curb inflation triggered by spikes in the prices of economic inputs (gas, oil, fertilizer, etc.). The tech layoffs started later that year. Widespread job cuts are an intended effect of raising interest rates - more unemployed = less spending = keeps a lid on inflation. AI is just cashing in on the trend.
  - frontfor 1y ago
    I don’t believe the war specifically drove the Fed to raise interest rates. Inflation and asset prices have risen sharply a year prior to the war.
gmerc 1y ago
The flaw with the Zirp narrative that companies managed to raise more money than ever before the moment they had a somewhat believable narrative instead of the crypto/web3/metaverse nonsense.
xorcist 1y ago
> because he simply thought he could run a lot leaner Because he suddenly had to pay interest on that gigantic loan he (and his business associates) took to buy Twitter. It may not be the only reason for everything that happened, but it sure is simple and has some very good explanatory powers.
- huntertwo 1y ago
  Other companies have different reasons to cut costs, but the incentive is still there.
  - xorcist 1y ago
    Stocks are valued against the risk free interest, or so the saying goes. Doubling interest rate from .1% to .2% does a lot for your DCF models, and in this case we went from zero (or in some cases negative) to several percentage units. Of course stock prices tanked. That's what any schoolbook will tell you, and that's what any investor will expect. Companies thus have to start turning dials and adjust parameters to make number go up again.
perrygeo 1y ago
Such an important point, I've seen and suspected the end of ZIRP being a much much greater influence on white collar work than we suspect. AI is going to take all the negative press but the flow of capital is ultimately what determines how the business works, which determines what software gets built. Conway's law 101. The white collar bloodbath is more of a haircut to shed waste accumulated during the excesses of ZIRP.
- steveBK123 1y ago
  ZIRP and then the final gasp of COVID bubble over hiring. At least in my professional circles the number of late 2020-mid 2022 job switchers was immense. Like 10 years of switches condensed into 18-24 months. Further lot of experiences and anecdotes talking to people who saw their company/org/team double or triple in size when comparing back to 2019. Despite some waves of mag7 layoffs we are still I think digesting what was essentially an overhiring bubble.
- steve_adams_86 1y ago
  Is it negative press for AI, or is it convincing some investors that it’s actually causing a tectonic shift in the workforce and economy? It could be positive in some sense. Though ultimately negative, because the outcomes are unlikely to reflect a continuation of the perceived impact or imaginary progress of the technology.
- hoosieree 1y ago
  AI also happens to be a perfect scapegoat: CEOs who over-hired get to shift the blame to this faceless boogeyman, and (bonus!) new hires are more desperate/willing to accept worse compensation.
fallingknife 1y ago
ZIRP had little to do with it. Tech is less levered than any other major industry. What happened is that growth expectations for large tech companies were way out of line with reality and finally came back down to earth when the market finally realized that the big tech cos are actually mature profitable companies and not just big startups. The fact that this happened at the same time ZIRP ended is a coincidence.
Mistletoe 1y ago
This is so cool. Had no idea FRED had data like this. They have everything.
- cyanydeez 1y ago
  give trump a few more years, and that probably will change.
hombre_fatal 1y ago
Why would you interpret data cut off at 2020 so that you're just looking at a covid phenomenon? The buttons don't seem to do anything on that site, but why not consider 2010-2025? That said, the vibe has definitely shifted. I started working in software in uni ~2009 and every job I've had, I'd applied for <10 positions and got a couple offers. Now, I barely get responses despite 10x the skills and experience I had back then. Though I don't think AI has anything to do with it, probably more the explosion of cheap software labor on the global market, and you have to compete with the whole world for a job in your own city. Kinda feels like some major part of the gravy train is up.
- lbotos 1y ago
  It looks like that specific graph only starts in 2020...
  - hombre_fatal 1y ago
    Why not just find one that starts in 2022 then. It would look even more dire.
oblio 1y ago
> People a decade from now will think Elon slashed Twitter's employee count by 90% because of some AI initiative, and not because he simply thought he could run a lot leaner. That part is so overblown. Twitter was still trying to hit moonshots. X is basically in "keep the lights on" mode as Musk doesn't need more. Yeah, if Google decides it doesn't want to grow anymore, it can probably cut it's workforce by 90%. And it will be as irrelevant as IBM in maximum 10 years.
- aikinai 1y ago
  What moonshots has Twitter gone for in the last decade? Feature velocity is also higher since the acquisition.
  - oblio 1y ago
    "Moonshots" was probably a bad term. Twitter devs used to be very active in open source, in Scala, actors, etc in particular. Fairly sure that's all dead. From most reports the majority of current Twitter devs are basically visa-shackled to the company.
  - nova22033 1y ago
    What happened to X, the payment app?
leptons 1y ago
What's happening now is similar to what happened during the 2000's "dot-com bubble burst". Having barely survived that time, I saw this one coming and people told me I was crazy when I told them to hold on to their jobs and quit job-hopping, because the job-hopper is very often the first one to get laid off. In 2000 I was moved cities and I had a job lined-up at a company that was run by my friends, I had about 15 good friends working at the company including the CEO, and I was guaranteed the job in software development at the company. The interview was supposed to be just a formality. So I moved, and went in to see the CEO, and he told me he could not hire me, the funding was cut and there was a hiring freeze. I was devastated. Now what? Well I had to freelance and live on whatever I could scrape together, which was a few hundred bucks a month, if I was lucky. Fortunately the place I moved into was a big house with my friends who worked at said company, and since my rent was so low at the time, they covered me for a couple of years. I did eventually get some freelance work from the company, but things did not really recover until about 2004 when I finally got a full-time programming job, after 4 very difficult years. So many tech companies over-hired during covid, there was a gigantic bubble happening with FAANG and every other tech company at the time. The crash in tech jobs was inevitable. I feel bad for people who got left out in the cold this time, I know what they are going through.
- yellow_lead 1y ago
  Those are some great friends. Aside from job hoppers, I noticed there are a lot of company loyalists getting canned too though (i.e worked at MSFT 10 years)
  - leptons 1y ago
    It's not exactly the same this time around, the dot-com bubble was a bit different, but both then and now were preceded by huge hiring bubbles and valuations that were stupid. Now it's a little different 25 years later, tech has advanced and AI means cutting the fat out of a lot of companies, even Microsoft. AI is somewhat creating a similar bubble now, because investors still have money, and the current AI efforts are way over-hyped. 6.5 billion paid to aquihire Jony Ive is a symptom of that.
intalentive 1y ago
Yes. Tech is clearly a beneficiary of the Cantillon Effect.
rglover 1y ago
IMO this is dead on. AI is a hell of a scapegoat for companies that want to save face and pretend that their success wasn't because of cheap money being pumped into them. And in a world addicted to status games, that's a gift from the heavens.
- esperent 1y ago
  ZIRP is an American thing? In that case maybe we could try comparisons with the job markets in other developed Western countries that didn't have this policy. If it was because of ZIRP, then their job markets should show clearly different patterns.
  - Armisael16 1y ago
    There isn’t anything magically about precisely zero percent interest rates; the behavior we see is mostly a smooth extension of slightly higher rates, which the EU was at. And of course ZIRP was pioneered in Japan, not the US.
  - rglover 1y ago
    ZIRP was a central banking thing, not just an American phenomenon. At least in the tech industry, the declines we're seeing in job opportunities are a result of capital being more expensive for VCs, meaning less investments are made (both in new and existing businesses), meaning there's less cash to hire and expand with. It just felt like the norm because ZIRP ran more or less uninterrupted for 10 years. You're right that we should see comparisons in other developed countries, but with SV being the epicenter of it all, you'd expect the fallout to at least appear more dramatic in the U.S. And an overwhelming number of (focusing exclusively on the U.S.) tech "businesses" weren't businesses (i.e., little to no profitability). At best they were failed experiments, and at worst, tax write-offs for VCs. So, what looked like a booming industry (in the literal, "we have a working, profitable, cash-flowing business here" sense) was actually just companies being flooded with investment cash that they were eager to spend in pursuit of rapid growth. Some found profitability, many did not. Again, IMO, AI isn't so much the cause as it is the bandage over the wound of unprofitability.
jt2190 1y ago
It’s a shame that this is the top comment because it’s backward looking (“here’s why white-collar workers lost their jobs in the last year”) instead of looking forward and noticing that even if interest rates are reduced back to zero these jobs will not be performed by humans ever again. THAT is the message here. These workers need to retrain and move on.
- SR2Z 1y ago
  > even if interest rates are reduced back to zero these jobs will not be performed by humans ever again It's not like companies laid off whole functions. These jobs will continue to be performed by humans - ZIRP just changes the number of humans and how much they get paid. > These workers need to retrain and move on. They only need to "retrain" insofar as they keep up with the current standards and practices. Software engineers are not going anywhere.
niuzeta 1y ago
FRED continues to amaze me with the kind of data they have availab.e
- brfox 1y ago
  That's from Indeed. And, Indeed has fewer job postings overall [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUS https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUS]. Should we normalize the software jobs with the total number of Indeed postings? Is Indeed getting less popular or more popular over this time period? Data is complicated
  - simonsarris 1y ago
    Look at that graph again. It's indexed to 100 in Feb 1, 2020. It's now at 106. In other words, after all the pandemic madness, the total number of job postings on indeed is slightly larger than it was before, not smaller. But for software, it's a lot smaller.
  - dxxmxnd 1y ago
    This website has its own graph which looks different. https://www.trueup.io/job-trend https://www.trueup.io/job-trend I have never gone to Indeed to apply for a job.
treyd 1y ago
That inflection point seems to more specifically start at the day of the new administration's inauguration.
Lu2025 1y ago
> unique inflection near the start of 2025 I wonder what happened in January 2025...
wonderwonder 1y ago
Saw something similar the other day. X was awash with stories that IBM was laying off several thousand people in their HR dept. being let go due to Ai. Then over the course of the day the story shifted to IBM was outsourcing them all to India. Was a very interesting transition, seemed intentional.
- Lu2025 1y ago
  IBM seemed to outsource recruiting to Indian firms too and it's awful. The accounts who contact me on LinkedIn are grossly unprofessional and downright nasty.
alfiedotwtf 1y ago
Bingo!
jalapenos 1y ago
Always disheartening how much people forget and tolerate the underlying deliberate human absurdity that created these events. Almost no one has seen a world where the price of money wasn't centrally planned, a committee of experts deciding it based on gut feel like they did in command economies like the Soviet union. And then thousands of people's lives are disrupted as the interest rate swings wildly due purely to government action (corona lockdowns and fed zirp response), and it all somehow just ends up people talking about AI instead. The true wrongdoers get absolutely no consequences, and we all just carry on like there's no problem. Often because our taxes go to paying hordes of academics and economists to produce layers and layers of sophisticated propaganda that of course this system is the best one. Absurd and shitty world.
1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago
ZIRP jobs, n., jobs the compensation for which is derived from zero interest loans, often in the form of venture capital, instead of reserves, profits or other sources "When interest rates return to normal levels, the ZIRP jobs will disappear." -- Wall Street analyst
fennecfoxy 1y ago
Inflation & mismanagement.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

leflambeur 1y ago

It's simply the old Capital vs Labor struggle. CEOs and VCs all sing in the same choir, and for the past 3 years the tune is "be leaner". p.s.: I'm a big fan of yours on Twitter.

godelski 1y ago
> the tune is "be leaner". Seems like they're happy to start cutting limbs to lose weight. It's hard to keep cutting fat if you've been aggressively cutting fat for so long. If the last CEO did their job there shouldn't be much fat left
- leflambeur 1y ago
  yet this will continue until it grounds to a halt. It's amazing and cringy the level of parroting performed by executives. Independent thought is very rare amongst business "leaders".
  - godelski 1y ago
    Let's make the laptops thinner. This way we can clean the oil off of the keyboard, putting it on the screen. At this point I'm not sure it's lack of independent thought so much as lack of thought. I'm even beginning to question if people even use the products they work on. Shouldn't there be more pressure from engineers at this point? Is it yes men from top to bottom? Even CEOs seem to be yes men in response to share holders but that's like being a yes man to the wind. When I bring this stuff up I'm called negative, a perfectionist, or told I'm out of touch with customers and or understand "value". Idk, maybe they're right. But I'm an engineer. My job is to find problems and fix them. I'm not negative, I'm trying to make the product better. And they're right, I don't understand value. I'm an engineer, it's not my job to make up a number about how valuable some bug fix is or isn't. What is this, "Whose Line Is It Anyways?" If you want made up dollar values go ask the business monkeys, I'm a code monkey
    - andsoitis 1y ago
      > I'm an engineer, it's not my job to make up a number about how valuable some bug fix is or isn't. So you think all bugs are equally important to fix?
      - godelski 1y ago
        No, of course not. That would be laughably absurd. So do you think I'm trolling or you're misunderstanding? Because who isn't familiar with triage? Do you think every bug's monetary value is perfectly aligned with user impact? Certainly that isn't true. If it were we'd be much better at security and would be more concerned with data privacy. There's no perfect metric for anything, and it would similarly be naïve to think you could place a dollar value on everything, let alone accurately. That's what I'm talking about. My main concern as an engineer is making the best product I can. The main concern of the manager is to make the best business. Don't get confused and think those are the same things. Hopefully they align, but they don't always.
- chii 1y ago
  > If the last CEO did their job there shouldn't be much fat left funny how that fat analogy works...because the head (brain) has a lot more fat content than muscles/limbs.
  - godelski 1y ago
    I never thought to extend the analogy like that, but I like it. It's showing. I mean look how people think my comments imply I don't know what triage is. Not knowing that would be counter to everything I'm saying, which is that a lot of these value numbers are poor guestimates at best. Happens every time I bring this up. It's absurd to think we could measure everything in terms of money. Even economists will tell you that's silly
saubeidl 1y ago
Except Labor in Tech is unique in that it has zero class consciousness and often actively roots for their exploiters. If we were to unionize, we could force this machine to a halt and shift the balance of power back in our favor. But we don't, because many of us have been brainwashed to believe we're on the same side as the ones trying to squeeze us.
- GoblinSlayer 1y ago
  >If we were to unionize Last time it was tried the union coerced everyone to root for their exploiters. People that unionize aren't magically different.
  - le-mark 1y ago
    What “last time” are you referring to specifically?
    - salawat 1y ago
      I am also curious.
- wnc3141 1y ago
  I think the issue at play here is the quickly changing job descriptions, RSU's and the higher paid bunch benefiting from very unequal pay across a job category.

digitcatphd 1y ago

As of now yes. But we are still in day 0.1 of GenAI. Do you think this will be the case when o3 models are 10x better and 100x cheaper? There will be a turning point but it’s not happened yet.

nradov 1y ago
10× better by what metric? Progress on LLMs has been amazing but already appears to be slowing down.
- jaggederest 1y ago
  All these folks are once again seeing the first 1/4 of a sigmoid curve and extrapolating to infinity.
  - drodgers 1y ago
    No doubt from me that it’s a sigmoid, but how high is the plateau? That’s also hard to know from early in the process, but it would be surprising if there’s not a fair bit of progress left to go. Human brains seem like an existence proof for what’s possible, but it would be surprising if humans also represent the farthest physical limits of what’s technologically possible without the constraints of biology (hip size, energy budget etc).
    - leoedin 1y ago
      Biological muscles are proof that you can make incredibly small and forceful actuators. But the state of robotics is nowhere near them, because the fundamental construction of every robotic actuator is completely different. We’ve been building actuators for 100s of years and we still haven’t got anything comparable to a muscle. And even if you build a better hydraulic ram or brushless motor driven linear actuator you will still never achieve the same kind of behaviour, because the technologies are fundamentally different. I don’t know where the ceiling of LLM performance will be, but as the building blocks are fundamentally different to those of biological computers, it seems unlikely that the limits will be in any way linked to those of the human brain. In much the same way the best hydraulic ram has completely different qualities to a human arm. In some dimensions it’s many orders of magnitudes better, but in others it’s much much worse.

bawolff 1y ago

Honestly, if anything i think AI is going to reverse the trend. Someone is going to have to be hired to clean up after them.

tempodox 1y ago
If anyone will actually bother with cleaning up.
xkcd1963 1y ago
Thats the impression I got. Things overall get just worse in quality because people rely too much on low wages and copy pasting LLM answers
- autobodie 1y ago
  Get worse for who? The ruling class will simply never care how bad things get for working people if things are getting better for the ruling class.
  - xkcd1963 1y ago
    I meant just regular products as example if I login to bitpanda on browser the parts that would hold the translation hold the keys for translations instead. Just countless examples and many security issues as well. Regarding class struggle I think class division always existed but we the mass have all the tools to improve our situation.
  - shswkna 1y ago
    The central problem with this statement is that we expect others to care, but we do not expect this from ourselves. We have agency. Whether we are brainwashed or not. If we cared about ourselves, then we don’t need another class, or race, or whatever other grouping to do this for us.
- hattmall 1y ago
  I think that's true in software development. A lot of the focus is on coding because that's really the domain of the people interested in AI, because ultimately they ARE software. But the killer app isn't software, it's anything where the operation is formulaic, but the formula can be tedious to figure out, but once you know it you can confirm that it's correct by working backwards. Software has far too many variables, not least of which is the end user. On the other hand things like accounting, finance, and engineering are far more suitable for trained models and back testing for conformity.

jameslk 1y ago

Keynes suggested that by 2030, we’d be working 15 hour workweeks, with the rest of the time used for leisure. Instead, we chose consumption, and helicopter money gave us bullshit jobs so we could keep buying more bullshit. This is fairly evident by the fact when the helicopter money runs out, all the bullshit jobs get cut. AI may give us more efficiency, but it will be filled with more bullshit jobs and consumption, not more leisure.

pmlnr 1y ago
Keynes was talking about work in every sense,including house chore. We're well below 15 hours of house chores by now, so that part became true.
- autobodie 1y ago
  Source? Keynes was a serious economist, not a charlitan futurist.
  - itishappy 1y ago
    John Maynard Keynes (1930) - Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren > For many ages to come the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented. We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich to-day, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us! http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf https://www.aspeninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/files/content/upload/Intro_and_Section_I.pdf https://www.aspeninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/files/cont...
- itishappy 1y ago
  We've got 10 whole hours left over for "actual" work! (Quotes because I personally have a significantly harder time doing bloody housework...)

csomar 1y ago

Elon Musk experiment is the worst anchor that can be used for comparison since the dude destabilized Twitter (re-branding, random layoffs, etc...). I'd be more interested in companies that went leaner but did it in a sane manner. The Internet user base grew between 2022 and now but Twitter might have lost users in that time period and certainly didn't make any new innovations beyond trying to charge its users more and confusing them.

e40 1y ago

Also section 174’s amortization of software development had a big role.

jki275 1y ago
That's about to get repealed it looks like.
- latchkey 1y ago
  TACO
  - immibis 1y ago
    For those unaware, the "TACO trade" is when Wall Street investors trade based on the principle that "Trump Always Chickens Out". For example, buying in a tariff-induced dip on the principle that he'll probably repeal the tariffs. Now that someone's said to Trump's face that Wall Street thinks he always chickens out, he may or may not stop doing it.
    - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > Now that someone's said to Trump's face that Wall Street thinks he always chickens out, he may or may not stop doing it The point is he’s powerless not to. The alternative is allowing a bond rout to trigger a bank collapse, probably in rural America. He didn’t do the prep that produces actual leverage. (Xi did.)
      - lazide 1y ago
        Never assume a narcissist will take the sane way out when their game blows up in their face.
      - harmmonica 1y ago
        Can you expand on "probably in rural America"? Do you just mean that those smaller community banks are more at risk if rates rise? If so, because they issue more variable rate debt? Or is there something else? edit: grammar

lozenge 1y ago

Macroeconomic policy always changes, recessions come and go, but it's not a permanent change in the way e-commerce or AI is.

bootsmann 1y ago

[flagged]

pera 1y ago
For those outside of the US: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_inauguration_of_Donald_Trump https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_inauguration_of_Donal...
hoseyor 1y ago
[flagged]
- quonn 1y ago
  Why would it have anything to do with AI? Generative AI has been widely used for two years and the drop is exactly around January 20. What happened in AI around that time?
  - hoseyor 1y ago
    [flagged]
pydry 1y ago
Trump didnt kick off the layoffs. It was the war with Russia that drove the fed to raise interest rates in 2022 - a measure that was intended to curb inflation triggered by spikes in the prices of economic inputs (gas, oil, fertilizer, etc.). The tech layoffs started later that year. Widespread job cuts are an intended effect of raising interest rates - more unemployed = less spending = keeps a lid on inflation. AI is just cashing in on the trend.
- frontfor 1y ago
  I don’t believe the war specifically drove the Fed to raise interest rates. Inflation and asset prices have risen sharply a year prior to the war.

gmerc 1y ago

The flaw with the Zirp narrative that companies managed to raise more money than ever before the moment they had a somewhat believable narrative instead of the crypto/web3/metaverse nonsense.

xorcist 1y ago

> because he simply thought he could run a lot leaner Because he suddenly had to pay interest on that gigantic loan he (and his business associates) took to buy Twitter. It may not be the only reason for everything that happened, but it sure is simple and has some very good explanatory powers.

huntertwo 1y ago
Other companies have different reasons to cut costs, but the incentive is still there.
- xorcist 1y ago
  Stocks are valued against the risk free interest, or so the saying goes. Doubling interest rate from .1% to .2% does a lot for your DCF models, and in this case we went from zero (or in some cases negative) to several percentage units. Of course stock prices tanked. That's what any schoolbook will tell you, and that's what any investor will expect. Companies thus have to start turning dials and adjust parameters to make number go up again.

perrygeo 1y ago

Such an important point, I've seen and suspected the end of ZIRP being a much much greater influence on white collar work than we suspect. AI is going to take all the negative press but the flow of capital is ultimately what determines how the business works, which determines what software gets built. Conway's law 101. The white collar bloodbath is more of a haircut to shed waste accumulated during the excesses of ZIRP.

steveBK123 1y ago
ZIRP and then the final gasp of COVID bubble over hiring. At least in my professional circles the number of late 2020-mid 2022 job switchers was immense. Like 10 years of switches condensed into 18-24 months. Further lot of experiences and anecdotes talking to people who saw their company/org/team double or triple in size when comparing back to 2019. Despite some waves of mag7 layoffs we are still I think digesting what was essentially an overhiring bubble.
steve_adams_86 1y ago
Is it negative press for AI, or is it convincing some investors that it’s actually causing a tectonic shift in the workforce and economy? It could be positive in some sense. Though ultimately negative, because the outcomes are unlikely to reflect a continuation of the perceived impact or imaginary progress of the technology.
hoosieree 1y ago
AI also happens to be a perfect scapegoat: CEOs who over-hired get to shift the blame to this faceless boogeyman, and (bonus!) new hires are more desperate/willing to accept worse compensation.

fallingknife 1y ago

ZIRP had little to do with it. Tech is less levered than any other major industry. What happened is that growth expectations for large tech companies were way out of line with reality and finally came back down to earth when the market finally realized that the big tech cos are actually mature profitable companies and not just big startups. The fact that this happened at the same time ZIRP ended is a coincidence.

Mistletoe 1y ago

This is so cool. Had no idea FRED had data like this. They have everything.

cyanydeez 1y ago
give trump a few more years, and that probably will change.

hombre_fatal 1y ago

Why would you interpret data cut off at 2020 so that you're just looking at a covid phenomenon? The buttons don't seem to do anything on that site, but why not consider 2010-2025? That said, the vibe has definitely shifted. I started working in software in uni ~2009 and every job I've had, I'd applied for <10 positions and got a couple offers. Now, I barely get responses despite 10x the skills and experience I had back then. Though I don't think AI has anything to do with it, probably more the explosion of cheap software labor on the global market, and you have to compete with the whole world for a job in your own city. Kinda feels like some major part of the gravy train is up.

lbotos 1y ago
It looks like that specific graph only starts in 2020...
- hombre_fatal 1y ago
  Why not just find one that starts in 2022 then. It would look even more dire.

oblio 1y ago

> People a decade from now will think Elon slashed Twitter's employee count by 90% because of some AI initiative, and not because he simply thought he could run a lot leaner. That part is so overblown. Twitter was still trying to hit moonshots. X is basically in "keep the lights on" mode as Musk doesn't need more. Yeah, if Google decides it doesn't want to grow anymore, it can probably cut it's workforce by 90%. And it will be as irrelevant as IBM in maximum 10 years.

aikinai 1y ago
What moonshots has Twitter gone for in the last decade? Feature velocity is also higher since the acquisition.
- oblio 1y ago
  "Moonshots" was probably a bad term. Twitter devs used to be very active in open source, in Scala, actors, etc in particular. Fairly sure that's all dead. From most reports the majority of current Twitter devs are basically visa-shackled to the company.
- nova22033 1y ago
  What happened to X, the payment app?

leptons 1y ago

What's happening now is similar to what happened during the 2000's "dot-com bubble burst". Having barely survived that time, I saw this one coming and people told me I was crazy when I told them to hold on to their jobs and quit job-hopping, because the job-hopper is very often the first one to get laid off. In 2000 I was moved cities and I had a job lined-up at a company that was run by my friends, I had about 15 good friends working at the company including the CEO, and I was guaranteed the job in software development at the company. The interview was supposed to be just a formality. So I moved, and went in to see the CEO, and he told me he could not hire me, the funding was cut and there was a hiring freeze. I was devastated. Now what? Well I had to freelance and live on whatever I could scrape together, which was a few hundred bucks a month, if I was lucky. Fortunately the place I moved into was a big house with my friends who worked at said company, and since my rent was so low at the time, they covered me for a couple of years. I did eventually get some freelance work from the company, but things did not really recover until about 2004 when I finally got a full-time programming job, after 4 very difficult years. So many tech companies over-hired during covid, there was a gigantic bubble happening with FAANG and every other tech company at the time. The crash in tech jobs was inevitable. I feel bad for people who got left out in the cold this time, I know what they are going through.

yellow_lead 1y ago
Those are some great friends. Aside from job hoppers, I noticed there are a lot of company loyalists getting canned too though (i.e worked at MSFT 10 years)
- leptons 1y ago
  It's not exactly the same this time around, the dot-com bubble was a bit different, but both then and now were preceded by huge hiring bubbles and valuations that were stupid. Now it's a little different 25 years later, tech has advanced and AI means cutting the fat out of a lot of companies, even Microsoft. AI is somewhat creating a similar bubble now, because investors still have money, and the current AI efforts are way over-hyped. 6.5 billion paid to aquihire Jony Ive is a symptom of that.

intalentive 1y ago

Yes. Tech is clearly a beneficiary of the Cantillon Effect.

rglover 1y ago

IMO this is dead on. AI is a hell of a scapegoat for companies that want to save face and pretend that their success wasn't because of cheap money being pumped into them. And in a world addicted to status games, that's a gift from the heavens.

esperent 1y ago
ZIRP is an American thing? In that case maybe we could try comparisons with the job markets in other developed Western countries that didn't have this policy. If it was because of ZIRP, then their job markets should show clearly different patterns.
- Armisael16 1y ago
  There isn’t anything magically about precisely zero percent interest rates; the behavior we see is mostly a smooth extension of slightly higher rates, which the EU was at. And of course ZIRP was pioneered in Japan, not the US.
- rglover 1y ago
  ZIRP was a central banking thing, not just an American phenomenon. At least in the tech industry, the declines we're seeing in job opportunities are a result of capital being more expensive for VCs, meaning less investments are made (both in new and existing businesses), meaning there's less cash to hire and expand with. It just felt like the norm because ZIRP ran more or less uninterrupted for 10 years. You're right that we should see comparisons in other developed countries, but with SV being the epicenter of it all, you'd expect the fallout to at least appear more dramatic in the U.S. And an overwhelming number of (focusing exclusively on the U.S.) tech "businesses" weren't businesses (i.e., little to no profitability). At best they were failed experiments, and at worst, tax write-offs for VCs. So, what looked like a booming industry (in the literal, "we have a working, profitable, cash-flowing business here" sense) was actually just companies being flooded with investment cash that they were eager to spend in pursuit of rapid growth. Some found profitability, many did not. Again, IMO, AI isn't so much the cause as it is the bandage over the wound of unprofitability.

jt2190 1y ago

It’s a shame that this is the top comment because it’s backward looking (“here’s why white-collar workers lost their jobs in the last year”) instead of looking forward and noticing that even if interest rates are reduced back to zero these jobs will not be performed by humans ever again. THAT is the message here. These workers need to retrain and move on.

SR2Z 1y ago
> even if interest rates are reduced back to zero these jobs will not be performed by humans ever again It's not like companies laid off whole functions. These jobs will continue to be performed by humans - ZIRP just changes the number of humans and how much they get paid. > These workers need to retrain and move on. They only need to "retrain" insofar as they keep up with the current standards and practices. Software engineers are not going anywhere.

niuzeta 1y ago

FRED continues to amaze me with the kind of data they have availab.e

brfox 1y ago
That's from Indeed. And, Indeed has fewer job postings overall [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUS https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUS]. Should we normalize the software jobs with the total number of Indeed postings? Is Indeed getting less popular or more popular over this time period? Data is complicated
- simonsarris 1y ago
  Look at that graph again. It's indexed to 100 in Feb 1, 2020. It's now at 106. In other words, after all the pandemic madness, the total number of job postings on indeed is slightly larger than it was before, not smaller. But for software, it's a lot smaller.
- dxxmxnd 1y ago
  This website has its own graph which looks different. https://www.trueup.io/job-trend https://www.trueup.io/job-trend I have never gone to Indeed to apply for a job.

treyd 1y ago

That inflection point seems to more specifically start at the day of the new administration's inauguration.

Lu2025 1y ago

> unique inflection near the start of 2025 I wonder what happened in January 2025...

wonderwonder 1y ago

Saw something similar the other day. X was awash with stories that IBM was laying off several thousand people in their HR dept. being let go due to Ai. Then over the course of the day the story shifted to IBM was outsourcing them all to India. Was a very interesting transition, seemed intentional.

Lu2025 1y ago
IBM seemed to outsource recruiting to Indian firms too and it's awful. The accounts who contact me on LinkedIn are grossly unprofessional and downright nasty.

alfiedotwtf 1y ago

Bingo!

jalapenos 1y ago

Always disheartening how much people forget and tolerate the underlying deliberate human absurdity that created these events. Almost no one has seen a world where the price of money wasn't centrally planned, a committee of experts deciding it based on gut feel like they did in command economies like the Soviet union. And then thousands of people's lives are disrupted as the interest rate swings wildly due purely to government action (corona lockdowns and fed zirp response), and it all somehow just ends up people talking about AI instead. The true wrongdoers get absolutely no consequences, and we all just carry on like there's no problem. Often because our taxes go to paying hordes of academics and economists to produce layers and layers of sophisticated propaganda that of course this system is the best one. Absurd and shitty world.

1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago

ZIRP jobs, n., jobs the compensation for which is derived from zero interest loans, often in the form of venture capital, instead of reserves, profits or other sources "When interest rates return to normal levels, the ZIRP jobs will disappear." -- Wall Street analyst

fennecfoxy 1y ago

Inflation & mismanagement.

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