5 ms·

Okay. It also coincides with the end of the post-pandemic hiring boom and the UK bank rate going from 0.1% to 5.25%. It's kind of funny that reliable data analy

Okay. It also coincides with the end of the post-pandemic hiring boom and the UK bank rate going from 0.1% to 5.25%. It's kind of funny that reliable data analysis has never been part of the AI hype when you consider that AI is used for data analysis.

eru 1y ago
> It also coincides with the end of the post-pandemic hiring boom and the UK bank rate going from 0.1% to 5.25%. I agree that the former is a strong signal. However the latter doesn't tell you anything without further context: did interest rates go up, because the economy was strong, or did rising interest rates dampen the economy? (It's similar to how you can't tell how hot it is in my apartment, purely from looking at my heating bills: does a low heating bill mean that it's cold in my flat, because I'm too cheap too heat? Or does a low heating bill mean it's summer and really hot anyway?)
- HDThoreaun 1y ago
  > did interest rates go up, because the economy was strong, or did rising interest rates dampen the economy? It doesnt matter. Whether it went from strong -> weak or weak -> weaker is beside the point, the question is if genAI is the main reason for entry level job loss and raising interest rates are another possible answer.
- captainbland 1y ago
  In this case it was widely publicised that interest rates went up to try to bring inflation down (which was significantly above the 2% target). Growth was weak to unremarkable although the hiring market was good for job seekers at the time shortly before the interest rises were introduced.
  - eru 1y ago
    Yes, if you bring in more context interest rates can be enlightening. But by themselves they are almost useless information.
  - Analemma_ 1y ago
    Growth in the US, and Europe to a lesser degree, was very strong in this period, so it was natural that their interest rates went up. And when interest rates go up in the UK's two primary trading partners, it doesn't really have any choice but to hike rates with them, lest people flee the pound and make inflation even worse. It was unfortunate that this had to happen in a weak growth regime, but the British economy is such a boondoggle at the moment I don't think the alternative would've been any better.
    - eru 1y ago
      Alas, it would be better if the Bank of England had a nominal GDP level target, and then they could let inflation, exchange rate and interest rates be what they may in order to reach the nominal spending target.
- efficax 1y ago
  interest rates are controlled by central bankers, not magic. they make decisions based on their analysis of the economy. they raised rates to slow down the rate of investment and to suppress wages, in order to get inflation under control. Less money in circulation means reduced demand means prices stay lower, meaning lower inflation. that's the theory anyway, and the explictly expressed reason for raising rates by central banks. there's no mystery about it.
  - eru 1y ago
    So here you are suggesting that when we observe that interest rates have been raised, we should conclude that the economy was strong? (Otherwise the central bankers wouldn't have raised.) But the original comment I first replied to seemed to suggest that high interest rates should lead us to deduce a weak economy.
    - mvdtnz 1y ago
      I don't know if you're being intentionally obtuse but it doesn't matter what caused the increase in rates. The increase results in people and companies having less money to spend and investment being more expensive (by design). This means less hiring.
    - efficax 1y ago
      you raise interest rates to slow economic activity, you lower them to speed it up. yes, if interest rates are raised, that means employment is too high, basically, and they want to lower it.
      - eru 1y ago
        > yes, if interest rates are raised, that means employment is too high, basically, and they want to lower it. Not directly. The Bank of England targets inflation, not employment.
lazide 1y ago
‘AI’ is terrible for accurate data analysis, so this isn’t surprising at all.
esafak 1y ago
Teasing that apart is what causal inference is for. Wait for an econometrics paper.
heresie-dabord 1y ago
There are complex economic shifts happening but LLMs ("AI") have little practical to do with it. Stupendous loads of money have been allocated to a solution looking for a problem to solve. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-06-25-gartner-predicts-over-40-percent-of-agentic-ai-projects-will-be-canceled-by-end-of-2027 https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-06-2...
- causal 1y ago
  That reallocation of capital is also a culprit
ninetyninenine 1y ago
Your comment also lacks analysis. This is an observational study there is no way to pinpoint causation. Yeah it can correlate with the end of a post pandemic hiring boom, and it can correlate with the bank rate. But no matter what it also correlates with the rise of AI. All are true and causation cannot be established for any of the 3 through just an observational study.
- Barrin92 1y ago
  >This is an observational study there is no way to pinpoint causation. Given that AI tools are only really used for white collar work, but white collar professions have not been declining faster than entry level jobs in hospitality, vocational jobs, nursing or transportation (all of which are down), this gives you a pretty decent natural control group. The whole debate about bifurcation of the labour market, that entry level coders are having a harder time than they used to, precedes even the pandemic or recent economic woes.
  - ninetyninenine 1y ago
    This is somewhat true but it may not be the full story. We don’t know if 2 causal events will stack. It may be that one causal event does so much damage that the second causal event can’t do much. It’s like firing a bullet and throwing a stone at a window. Whichever came first will mask the causative nature of the second. The window can't break twice.
orochimaaru 1y ago
In the US I think it’s may be driven more by r&d cost amortization changes since 2023. It’s attributed to AI but I believe tax implications are to blame as well apart from interest rates and the covid hiring.
- klipklop 1y ago
  Hopefully that will be fixed this year, or tech layoffs and outsourcing in the US will pick up pace. Without the R&D write off, each dev in the US is a massive financial black hole vs hiring outside the US.
xivzgrev 1y ago
Yes, but overall job ads are up. Pay is going up. But specifically entry level is down significantly since Nov 2022. All of your points - interest rates, post pandemic hiring boom would apply to market as a whole. Not saying it’s causation like the article claims, but there’s at least some correlation trend.
- madaxe_again 1y ago
  An awful lot of graduate positions in the U.K. are things like customer service, account management, paralegal, data analysis. These categories have seen broad application of AI tools: - CS, you’ll most likely talk to an LLM for first tier support these days. - Account management comprises pressing the flesh (human required) and responding to emails - the latter, AMs have seen their workload slashed, so it stands to reason that fewer are required. - Paralegal - the category has been demolished. Drafting and discovery are now largely automated processes. - Data analysis - why have a monkey in a suit write you barely useful nonsense when a machine can do the same? So - yeah, it’s purely correlative right now, but I can see how it being causative is perfectly plausible.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - kmac_ 1y ago
    There's always a new tech frontier. Like, weaving machines replaced looms, cars replaced carriages, and now it's AI. Each time, we need a new kind of worker. We shouldn't worry about jobs changing or vanishing, but we should worry that we won't learn and teach the new stuff fast enough.
    - scarface_74 1y ago
      There is a huge difference. If I am running a factory that use to create carriages and now creates cars, I need people who can create cars now. If I want to expand the number of customers I serve, I need to hire more people. If I am a software company, I don’t need to scale the number of software engineers I hire to serve more customers. Since gen AI has been a thing, I mostly pivoted to more strategy based cloud consulting than hands on keyboard software development. But before Gen AI, I would have needed a couple of junior developers to do the grunt work of implementing well defined implementations. Now I can do both the strategy and implementations in the same amount of time. Even before Gen AI the entire reason that software engineers get paid so much because software development has high fixed costs but near zero marginal costs. No other industry has been like that historically.
alpineman 1y ago
and an increase in employer taxes for each employee introduced in the UK this year
bunderbunder 1y ago
> It's kind of funny that reliable data analysis has never been part of the AI hype when you consider that AI is used for data analysis. If you've ever tried to use AI to help with this kind of analysis, you might find this to be more inevitable than it is funny. It's really, really, really good at confidently jumping to hasty conclusions and confirmation bias. Which perhaps shouldn't be surprising when you consider that it was largely trained on the Internet's proverbial global comments section.
- 0x20cowboy 1y ago
  > It's really, really, really good at confidently jumping to hasty conclusions and confirmation bias. Kind of like entry level software engineers. I am kidding, I believe the market has more to do with tax changes than AI. I just couldn't pass up the joke.
- banannaise 1y ago
  I presume when they say "AI is used for data analysis" they're talking about traditional AI (more frequently referred to as "machine learning") rather than generative AI (LLMs).
  - edanm 1y ago
    Traditional AI isn't "referred to" as Machine Learning, they're separate things. ML is a subset of the field of AI, that focuses on AI algorithms that (loosely speaking) "learn" from data, as opposed to being AI that is explicitly defined.
    - bunderbunder 1y ago
      And LLMs belong to this subset. They're largely built using supervised machine learning. But also, "AI" is polysemous. There's "AI" the academic field, and machine learning is a subset of that field. But there's also "AI" the marketing term, which is much more well-known nowadays. And for that meaning of the term, it's the other way around -- it's a subset of machine learning. Under either definition, though, I agree it doesn't make much sense to talk about them as if they are two different things, because either way one is just a particular kind of the other.
x0x0 1y ago
Also, it mentions apprenticeships have also declined by 30%. Assuming that means trades, you either should be pretty skeptical that LLMs are causing this, or at minimum be proposing some method by which an LLM reduces demand for plumbers and cabinet makers and electricians and so forth.

eru 1y ago

> It also coincides with the end of the post-pandemic hiring boom and the UK bank rate going from 0.1% to 5.25%. I agree that the former is a strong signal. However the latter doesn't tell you anything without further context: did interest rates go up, because the economy was strong, or did rising interest rates dampen the economy? (It's similar to how you can't tell how hot it is in my apartment, purely from looking at my heating bills: does a low heating bill mean that it's cold in my flat, because I'm too cheap too heat? Or does a low heating bill mean it's summer and really hot anyway?)

HDThoreaun 1y ago
> did interest rates go up, because the economy was strong, or did rising interest rates dampen the economy? It doesnt matter. Whether it went from strong -> weak or weak -> weaker is beside the point, the question is if genAI is the main reason for entry level job loss and raising interest rates are another possible answer.
captainbland 1y ago
In this case it was widely publicised that interest rates went up to try to bring inflation down (which was significantly above the 2% target). Growth was weak to unremarkable although the hiring market was good for job seekers at the time shortly before the interest rises were introduced.
- eru 1y ago
  Yes, if you bring in more context interest rates can be enlightening. But by themselves they are almost useless information.
- Analemma_ 1y ago
  Growth in the US, and Europe to a lesser degree, was very strong in this period, so it was natural that their interest rates went up. And when interest rates go up in the UK's two primary trading partners, it doesn't really have any choice but to hike rates with them, lest people flee the pound and make inflation even worse. It was unfortunate that this had to happen in a weak growth regime, but the British economy is such a boondoggle at the moment I don't think the alternative would've been any better.
  - eru 1y ago
    Alas, it would be better if the Bank of England had a nominal GDP level target, and then they could let inflation, exchange rate and interest rates be what they may in order to reach the nominal spending target.
efficax 1y ago
interest rates are controlled by central bankers, not magic. they make decisions based on their analysis of the economy. they raised rates to slow down the rate of investment and to suppress wages, in order to get inflation under control. Less money in circulation means reduced demand means prices stay lower, meaning lower inflation. that's the theory anyway, and the explictly expressed reason for raising rates by central banks. there's no mystery about it.
- eru 1y ago
  So here you are suggesting that when we observe that interest rates have been raised, we should conclude that the economy was strong? (Otherwise the central bankers wouldn't have raised.) But the original comment I first replied to seemed to suggest that high interest rates should lead us to deduce a weak economy.
  - mvdtnz 1y ago
    I don't know if you're being intentionally obtuse but it doesn't matter what caused the increase in rates. The increase results in people and companies having less money to spend and investment being more expensive (by design). This means less hiring.
  - efficax 1y ago
    you raise interest rates to slow economic activity, you lower them to speed it up. yes, if interest rates are raised, that means employment is too high, basically, and they want to lower it.
    - eru 1y ago
      > yes, if interest rates are raised, that means employment is too high, basically, and they want to lower it. Not directly. The Bank of England targets inflation, not employment.

lazide 1y ago

‘AI’ is terrible for accurate data analysis, so this isn’t surprising at all.

esafak 1y ago

Teasing that apart is what causal inference is for. Wait for an econometrics paper.

heresie-dabord 1y ago

There are complex economic shifts happening but LLMs ("AI") have little practical to do with it. Stupendous loads of money have been allocated to a solution looking for a problem to solve. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-06-25-gartner-predicts-over-40-percent-of-agentic-ai-projects-will-be-canceled-by-end-of-2027 https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-06-2...

causal 1y ago
That reallocation of capital is also a culprit

ninetyninenine 1y ago

Your comment also lacks analysis. This is an observational study there is no way to pinpoint causation. Yeah it can correlate with the end of a post pandemic hiring boom, and it can correlate with the bank rate. But no matter what it also correlates with the rise of AI. All are true and causation cannot be established for any of the 3 through just an observational study.

Barrin92 1y ago
>This is an observational study there is no way to pinpoint causation. Given that AI tools are only really used for white collar work, but white collar professions have not been declining faster than entry level jobs in hospitality, vocational jobs, nursing or transportation (all of which are down), this gives you a pretty decent natural control group. The whole debate about bifurcation of the labour market, that entry level coders are having a harder time than they used to, precedes even the pandemic or recent economic woes.
- ninetyninenine 1y ago
  This is somewhat true but it may not be the full story. We don’t know if 2 causal events will stack. It may be that one causal event does so much damage that the second causal event can’t do much. It’s like firing a bullet and throwing a stone at a window. Whichever came first will mask the causative nature of the second. The window can't break twice.

orochimaaru 1y ago

In the US I think it’s may be driven more by r&d cost amortization changes since 2023. It’s attributed to AI but I believe tax implications are to blame as well apart from interest rates and the covid hiring.

klipklop 1y ago
Hopefully that will be fixed this year, or tech layoffs and outsourcing in the US will pick up pace. Without the R&D write off, each dev in the US is a massive financial black hole vs hiring outside the US.

xivzgrev 1y ago

Yes, but overall job ads are up. Pay is going up. But specifically entry level is down significantly since Nov 2022. All of your points - interest rates, post pandemic hiring boom would apply to market as a whole. Not saying it’s causation like the article claims, but there’s at least some correlation trend.

madaxe_again 1y ago
An awful lot of graduate positions in the U.K. are things like customer service, account management, paralegal, data analysis. These categories have seen broad application of AI tools: - CS, you’ll most likely talk to an LLM for first tier support these days. - Account management comprises pressing the flesh (human required) and responding to emails - the latter, AMs have seen their workload slashed, so it stands to reason that fewer are required. - Paralegal - the category has been demolished. Drafting and discovery are now largely automated processes. - Data analysis - why have a monkey in a suit write you barely useful nonsense when a machine can do the same? So - yeah, it’s purely correlative right now, but I can see how it being causative is perfectly plausible.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- kmac_ 1y ago
  There's always a new tech frontier. Like, weaving machines replaced looms, cars replaced carriages, and now it's AI. Each time, we need a new kind of worker. We shouldn't worry about jobs changing or vanishing, but we should worry that we won't learn and teach the new stuff fast enough.
  - scarface_74 1y ago
    There is a huge difference. If I am running a factory that use to create carriages and now creates cars, I need people who can create cars now. If I want to expand the number of customers I serve, I need to hire more people. If I am a software company, I don’t need to scale the number of software engineers I hire to serve more customers. Since gen AI has been a thing, I mostly pivoted to more strategy based cloud consulting than hands on keyboard software development. But before Gen AI, I would have needed a couple of junior developers to do the grunt work of implementing well defined implementations. Now I can do both the strategy and implementations in the same amount of time. Even before Gen AI the entire reason that software engineers get paid so much because software development has high fixed costs but near zero marginal costs. No other industry has been like that historically.

alpineman 1y ago

and an increase in employer taxes for each employee introduced in the UK this year

bunderbunder 1y ago

> It's kind of funny that reliable data analysis has never been part of the AI hype when you consider that AI is used for data analysis. If you've ever tried to use AI to help with this kind of analysis, you might find this to be more inevitable than it is funny. It's really, really, really good at confidently jumping to hasty conclusions and confirmation bias. Which perhaps shouldn't be surprising when you consider that it was largely trained on the Internet's proverbial global comments section.

0x20cowboy 1y ago
> It's really, really, really good at confidently jumping to hasty conclusions and confirmation bias. Kind of like entry level software engineers. I am kidding, I believe the market has more to do with tax changes than AI. I just couldn't pass up the joke.
banannaise 1y ago
I presume when they say "AI is used for data analysis" they're talking about traditional AI (more frequently referred to as "machine learning") rather than generative AI (LLMs).
- edanm 1y ago
  Traditional AI isn't "referred to" as Machine Learning, they're separate things. ML is a subset of the field of AI, that focuses on AI algorithms that (loosely speaking) "learn" from data, as opposed to being AI that is explicitly defined.
  - bunderbunder 1y ago
    And LLMs belong to this subset. They're largely built using supervised machine learning. But also, "AI" is polysemous. There's "AI" the academic field, and machine learning is a subset of that field. But there's also "AI" the marketing term, which is much more well-known nowadays. And for that meaning of the term, it's the other way around -- it's a subset of machine learning. Under either definition, though, I agree it doesn't make much sense to talk about them as if they are two different things, because either way one is just a particular kind of the other.

x0x0 1y ago

Also, it mentions apprenticeships have also declined by 30%. Assuming that means trades, you either should be pretty skeptical that LLMs are causing this, or at minimum be proposing some method by which an LLM reduces demand for plumbers and cabinet makers and electricians and so forth.