20 ms·

Evidence that AI is destroying jobs for young people

351 points by duck 1y ago

charcircuit 1y ago
This article continues to propagate the misconception that young is the same thing as inexperienced.
- dataexec 1y ago
  We can assume the two are so strongly correlated that it's not worth it to differentiate. Even though many exceptions exist.
  - charcircuit 1y ago
    I don't think it's true at all. Considering it only takes 2 to 3 years to rack up the 10,000 hours to "master" something, young people can get very good at a lot of things. The biggest barrier in my opinion are child labor laws that get in the way of people getting experience.
    - iammrpayments 1y ago
      If you do something 80 hours per week for 2 years it totals 8320 hours? This is far from average behavior even if you have nothing else to do except coding.
      - brazukadev 1y ago
        Yes. That is why we have many 18 years old better at programming than fresh graduates. Teenagers have a lot of free time to code.
        mrheosuper 1y ago
        I will be extremely concerned if my teenage boy spending >10 hours everyday, in 2 years, just sitting in front of computer screen.
    - notTooFarGone 1y ago
      The audacity to paint child labor laws as a "barrier for experience"... Children can work open source and rack up experience there. This is like the most humane way in any job ever to get experience as a minor.
      - charcircuit 1y ago
        In practice they will not just do open source and people will exploit them for free work since there are significant barriers to access employers able to pay market rate. Even open source itself can potentially be exploitative due to being free work. While open source may be okay for coding, there are other skills which may not be so easy to do from your own home. In practice they will not just do open source and people will exploit them for free work
    - lelanthran 1y ago
      > I don't think it's true at all. Considering it only takes 2 to 3 years to rack up the 10,000 hours to "master" something, young people can get very good at a lot of things. They can, if they practice with feedback 8 hours a day. Typically, young people, as a group, are not famous for practicing something 8 hours a day. This means, for the group as a whole, it is true.
- programjames 1y ago
  I think you are referring to > The strategic thinking that goes into longer-horizon tasks may be something LLMs aren’t as good at, which aligns with why entry-level workers are more affected than experienced workers. I think the article is talking in generalities, so on average entry-level software engineers have less experience with long-horizon tasks (e.g. months-long development), though there are definitely the exceptions that prove this rule.
TuringNYC 1y ago
How does one explain the drop starting January 2023 (esp for things like Customer Service Rep, which is an NLP-heavy task) when most corporations didnt even start LLM/NLP pilots until mid/late 2023? I skimmed thru the 100+ page paper but didnt see an explanation for this strange leading effect. SWE figures dropped mid-2022 (almost magically in line with interest rate hikes) and LLM-copilots werent introduced for another year. The paper notes they did an adjustment for the end of ZIRP. I dont know enough econometrics to understand whether this adjustment was sufficient, but the chart doesnt make sense since the labor efforts seem to be leading the actual technology by over a year or more. From informal surveys, LLM-copilot usage didnt become widespread until late 2023 to mid 2024, certainly not widespread enough to cause macro labor effects in mid-2022.
- thrawa8387336 1y ago
  Coordination, plain and simple.
  - TuringNYC 1y ago
    Could you please explain more. Very interested in anything that explains the massive hole in the timeline.
    - thrawa8387336 1y ago
      This is a second hand anecdote but someone commented here or on X, that basically he was on a cruise and overheard two heads of HR of 2 big Co's talking to each other about shenanigans. Would not be the craziest considering that AI has to make a ROI. Even if it's not up there yet to do so organically. If you annihilate the entry labor market, then after some time, you have no choice but to use AI because there is no one remaining with the skills. AI is lower than entry level -> No one is hiring new grads -> There is no new talent being developed -> use AI for everything!
      - cactusplant7374 1y ago
        > This is a second hand anecdote but someone commented here or on X, that basically he was on a cruise and overheard two heads of HR of 2 big Co's talking to each other about shenanigans. I have no idea what this means.
esafak 1y ago
Discussed earlier in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45052423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45052423
- dang 1y ago
  Thanks! Macroexpanded: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45052423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45052423 - Aug 2025 (629 comments)
phyzome 1y ago
Skimming this, I'm not sure why it couldn't be explained by the layoffs we had a couple years ago, which were primarily at tech companies (which are indeed more exposed to LLMs) and probably hit junior devs more.
- iJohnDoe 1y ago
  Not wrong. Also want to point out the continued layoffs at Microsoft, Intel, etc.
throwmeaway222 1y ago
[flagged]
- tasty_freeze 1y ago
  Do you really think that companies were hiring that many unqualified people for DEI reasons? Just about every time the subject came up there were people saying it was just lip service and theater -- put a DEI statement on your company's public-facing webpage and pretend they actually did anything.
  - leetrout 1y ago
    Maybe. I had two different hiring managers in two different companies explicitly tell me and others to hire women or PoC. Yes it was illegal. No one cares.
    - ajsnigrutin 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - nomel 1y ago
        > why AfD is on the rise Except for the 6 that just died, right before a local election [1]. [1] https://www.thetimes.com/world/europe/article/germany-afd-candidates-die-election-2025-q05fsnjj9 https://www.thetimes.com/world/europe/article/germany-afd-ca...
        humpty-d 1y ago
        No mention that 2 candidates from other parties died in the run up. Or that it's out of 20,000+ individuals contesting various seats. No mention that they are mostly 59+ years old with preexisting health conditions. Luckily it gives us the most critical bit of info we could ask for, that Musk tweeted "!!" In summary this article is shit.
redwood 1y ago
Does the ADP data include international employees in lower cost geos?
swayvil 1y ago
As individuals less work is a good thing obviously. But as a society less work is a bad thing. Perverse.
- senectus1 1y ago
  As individuals less work is a good thing obviously. But as a society less productivity is a bad thing. I think the concept that AI sellers are trying to push is that we can work less and be more productive. Not sure its there yet :-P
resters 1y ago
Demand will shift to AI-literate knowledge workers whose productivity will be increased.
iJohnDoe 1y ago
A lot of CEOs are saying do more with less. Basically they are saying, “If there are any requests to hire additional people the first thing I ask them is if any AI tools have been tried first.” Then every 2-bit president, leader, manager, CEO out there regurgitates the same thing. So yes, companies want to save money and do more with leas. It certainly won’t help job seekers or the economy.
jampa 1y ago
I think not hiring juniors is a tragedy of the commons situation. It started before the AI boom, during COVID. It's not tax-related as people claim here, since this phenomenon is not US-only. The ZIRP era made companies hire people as if there was no tomorrow, and companies started "poaching" engineers from others, including juniors. I saw some interns with 2 years of experience getting offers as seniors. I had friends being paid to attend boot camp. Then everyone realized they were training junior engineers who would quickly get offers from other companies as “Senior" and leave. So companies stopped hiring them.
- causal 1y ago
  Also AI hype is sucking all capital out of traditional hiring
whatever1 1y ago
Software engineering is in correction mode since 2022, right after the Covid highs. AI is just the facade for job cuts. Zuck has been doing “the year of efficiency” for years now.
foxfired 1y ago
We need to reframe it. At this point, what we call "AI" is not a technology, but a subscription company. A technology is a tool you can adopt in your toolchain to perform at task, even if in this case it's outsourcing cognitive load. For a subscription company, well, as long as the subscription is active, you get to outsource some of the cognitive load. When Anthropic's CEO says that white color jobs will disappear, he means that he is selling Enterprise subscriptions, and that companies will inevitably buy it.
- IX-103 1y ago
  It's only a matter of time before AI becomes a commodity. The open source models are just a generation behind the proprietary ones and they're almost good enough for most users. Even if we're somehow limited to using proprietary models, since all of these "AIs" are based on natural language so you can practically hot swap the LLMs. Any company banking on selling any service other than AI hosting is going to be incredibly disappointed. The only thing that could stop this commodification is some sort of vendor lock-in, but that looks to be technically challenging.
  - Andrex 1y ago
    Windows gaming finally falling to desktop Linux, in terms of tech and mindshare among enthusiasts, proves to me that given a sufficiently large timescale open solutions tend to always win against a proprietary ones. Companies just can't seem to stay focused on their own core competencies after a few decades. On the other hand, even when open projects "die" they can be resurrected ad infinitum. Just my gut feeling but it seems like closed wins out big in the short term, but open wins in the end. Not applicable to everything I know.
    - sorensen12 1y ago
      I’m not sure I agree. Windows still has 95% market share in Steam’s hardware report. And even the modest gains that Linux has seen in this space have been as much a result of the efforts of a few small companies who have financial interests in undermining Microsoft’s monopoly as it has been a display of grassroots enthusiasm for open ecosystems.
le-mark 1y ago
[flagged]
- advael 1y ago
  People heavily invested in AI, obviously. We have an economy that's heavily driven by investor perception, and while "AI is taking jobs" sounds bad for workers or humanity as a whole, it can still be a sales pitch for investing in AI
- CoastalCoder 1y ago
  Please don't parody regional accents to imply stupidity.
  - dgfitz 1y ago
    Pretty confident it’s from South Park: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goobacks https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goobacks If I’m wrong I’ll accept that. If I’m right nope we learned a valuable lesson about making the worst assumptions about strangers in the internet.
    - lovich 1y ago
      I identified it as a South Park reference although the reference in question was parodying a country accent imo. As someone who grew up in the country however, fuck em
    - fragmede 1y ago
      Ah yes, South Park, a TV show known for its sensitivity towards difficult topics. Quoting someone else being douchy just means you're douchy and unoriginal, it doesn't make you not a douche simply because someone else said it and you're copying them. You're still choosing to say those things.
  - dghlsakjg 1y ago
    It’s a direct quote from an episode of South Park. In the episode they aren’t making fun of a regional accent, they are making fun of an affected accent from certain classes. I’m from the area of Colorado where the episode takes place. There is no regional accent for Colorado.
g42gregory 1y ago
My challenge here is that every time I see “The Atlantic” or “The New York Times”, I can’t shake the feeling that it’s got to be a paid advertisement or some influence piece by a special interest group. I am not sure what to make of the articles that appear in those places anymore.
- ipnon 1y ago
  They are the party mouthpieces of the Democrats. It’s not useful as an empirical analysis or philosophical exercise. But it is useful as a declaration of belief for a certain cohort of American elites. So the revealed news is really that the Democrats will add “we must weaken or break up Big Token to increase youth employment” to their midterm and presidential platform. Whether this is sound macroeconomic policy is beside the point.
- OhioMan2943 1y ago
  They are the mouthpiece of the empire- but they aren't promoting products- they're promoting the dissolution of social and communal values and trying to erase the idea of intellectualism- the nyt casually, the atlantic explicitly, and the new yorker very covertly- it shows the powers that really run america have a deep ambivalence towards it and will likely hop to the next centre of prosperity when they get bored. The american experiment is over because they decided it to be. How weak and sad your country has become. And yeah I've seen they are the first to jump on ai anti intellectualism, for the reasons i've stated
  - epohs 1y ago
    Which social and communal values, specifically, do you think The NY Times and the New Yorker are promoting the dissolution of?
    - estearum 1y ago
      You can't expect reactionaries to have any specific thoughts or for their beliefs to be founded on any particular facts or (real) historical events, like the COVID discussion below. It's vibes all the way down.
BoredPositron 1y ago
Meh... just rehashing what he said before. The paper itself is fundamentally flawed, examining only a minuscule portion of the job market. If we step back and look at Europe's struggling economies over recent decades, we see that economic downturns disproportionately affect young people. Greece serves as the poster child, followed by Spain and Italy. In Germany alone, we've lost 50,000 jobs in manual labor heavy industries (mainly automotive) this past year. We're also seeing a 60% decline in apprenticeships for labor intensive roles at DAX companies that aren't even AI affected yet. AI has become a convenient scapegoat for a faltering economy driven by geopolitical tensions, protectionism and unqualified leadership in the world's largest economies. Roaring 20s indeed.
- causal 1y ago
  I also have yet to see anyone meaningfully differentiate between "AI is taking jobs" and "AI hype is causing stupid executive decisions" and even "AI hype is sucking up all the capital that would normally go towards hiring".
dr_kiszonka 1y ago
What are those "augmentative" jobs that fresh CS grads can transition to?
ants_everywhere 1y ago
There's a sizable overlap between the anti-AI movement (e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/antiai/ https://www.reddit.com/r/antiai/) and self-identified socialists. One thing that confuses me is that the anti-AI movement has adopted several talking points saying that nobody wants AI. (e.g. nobody wants it, the AI companies are pushing it on us, management is pushing it on us, it just creates low quality slop, the demand is fake, etc). But if there's no demand, then there's no threat to jobs. On the other hand if there is a threat to jobs then there must be demand (since it competes with human labor in the job market). I'm not sure why they're taking this particular tactic, but it's going to lead to strange comment sections where people won't know how to stay on message as it becomes clearer that AI is impacting the labor force. A lot of people intuitively imagine that to compete with humans there's some sort of 1:1 exchange ratio. But initially the calculus will be something like a 10 team with plus AI performs about on par with a 12 person team (or whatever the details work out to). So we will see AI impacting job numbers well before AI can do your entire job.
gerdesj 1y ago
Trends take time to work out. "AI" dives in and disrupts and then it turns out that AI isn't too I. The disrupt phase where HR dumps staff based on dubious promises and directions from above takes a few months. The gradual re-hiring takes way longer than the dumping phase and will not trigger thresholds. I've spent quite a while with "AI". LLMs do have a use but dumping staff is not one of the best ideas I've seen. I get that a management team are looking for trimmings but AI isn't the I they are looking for. In my opinion (MD of a small IT focused company) LLMs are a better slide rule. I have several slide rules and calculators and obviously a shit load of computers. Mind you my slide rules can't access the internet, on the other hand my slide rules always work, without internets or power.
wewewedxfgdf 1y ago
Interest rates have way more impact.
farai89 1y ago
I doubt the whole narrative is true, it may just be hope that we do not need to hire because we will be able to do it with AI. But reality outside of software and tech is very different. I work in an organisation that heavily pushing AI and even with that push, a typical employee is still not utilising it fully, unprepared and expecting training from the employer. There is also a disconnect over connecting org data to these tools and between developers and cyber teams.
yowlingcat 1y ago
I don't get how interest rates is given at best a cursory phrase when ZIRP regime ending is one of the biggest macro events of the past several decades. Seems like it would deserve more of a spotlight.
jjk166 1y ago
Any economic data from between 2020 and 2025 should be tossed in the garbage. We will have no idea what affect AI has or hasn't had until AI has been available outside of the extremely confounded current circumstances. Tell me how employment looks after the next recession when the after effects of the pandemic, rapid inflation, interest rate unpredictability, and tariff whiplash are hopefully all behind us.
- non_aligned 1y ago
  And the data for the two decades before that should be tossed out because of the global housing crisis, the sovereign debt crisis, and all the reverberations from that. And the data for the two decades before that obviously needs to be tossed out because of the one-off nature of the dot-com boom, the dot-com crash, 9/11, and so on. And before that... point is, you don't get clean data in economics. There's always something big going on, there are no double-blind trials to run, etc. It's called the dismal science for a reason. But that doesn't make it useless.
  - jjk166 1y ago
    If your only dataset is 2008 to 2010, yeah your conclusions are almost certainly garbage. Likewise if your dataset is 1999 to 2002, or just the year 1987. There will always be something going on, but there won't always be this specific thing going on, and if 100% of your data comes from during one specific crisis (nonetheless multiple concurrent crises), then it is 100% useless. Even with longer periods of data, reconcilliation with longer trends is technically challenging. We've had enough recessions to correct for them in our data, but until we've had a half dozen global pandemics you can't use pandemic data in your analysis.
mugivarra69 1y ago
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cyberax 1y ago
My experience: we're hiring for an AI engineer position and for a frontend developer position (and yes, we posted our positions here on Hackernews). We have a stream of cookie-cutter candidates. As if they are clones of each other, it's uncanny. They typically have a BS degree in some foreign university, then a CS Masters' in the US, experience with robotics, then several years of experience in large companies. And they completely fold during in-person coding tasks. Like, not being able to explain the difference between DFS and BFS (depth/breadth-first search). Or being able to write a simple custom metric and train a network in Pytorch. And a similar story for the frontend developer position. We now literally have to add more filters to not get inundated by underqualified candidates. These filters will make it harder for beginners to even _get_ to the resume review stage. No conclusions from me, but something's been broken in the CS jobs market for a while.
- ipnon 1y ago
  With the size of context windows now it'd be economical to dump all the resumes into an LLM and query the pool this way.
drob518 1y ago
Well, that’s the makings of revolution.
jamii 1y ago
I made a stupid simple model where hiring in all age brackets rose slowly until 2021 and then fell slowly. That produces very similar looking graphs, because the many engineers that were hired at the peak move up the demographic curve over time. Normalizing the graph to 2022 levels, as the paper seems to do, hides the fact that the actual hiring ratios didn't change at all. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1z0l0rNebCTVWLk77_7HAwVzL7QtTjlrllAMH2lxhnes/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1z0l0rNebCTVWLk77_7HA...
- juxtaposicion 1y ago
  I'm not sure I understand. Your model shows that different group buckets (eg 20-24yo vs 25-29yo) peak at different years (in your figure, 2022 vs 2024) despite being driven by the same dynamics. Is that expected? I (naively?) expected the same groups to rise, fall and have peaks at the same times.
  - jamii 1y ago
    One of the dynamics is that people get older so they move into different buckets. We can make the model way simpler to make it clearer. Say in 2020 we hired 1000 20-24yo, 1000 25-29yo etc and then we didn't hire anyone since then. That was five years ago, so now we have 0 20-24yo, 1000 25-29yo, 1000 30-34yo etc and 1000 retirees who don't show up in the graph. Each individual year we hired the exact same number of people in each age bracket, and yet we still end up with fewer young people total whenever hiring goes down, because all the people that got hired during the big hiring spike are now older.
    - juxtaposicion 1y ago
      Got it, thanks! Yeah, so it makes sense that any age-bucketing like this would have a similar effect
- tangotaylor 1y ago
  Wow, that's hilarious. So essentially hiring could be identical across all age groups, but due to a glitch in the analysis (young people don't stay young, who knew?), it appears that younger people are losing jobs more than the rest.
casey2 1y ago
I'd wager that vast resources being spent in one very niche subfield is what's hurting job creation from young people. Aside from this there simply doesn't exist another mechanism in which AI can meaningfully affect employment in the long term.
pr3d4t0ralien 1y ago
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whateveracct 1y ago
Short term thinking. Yes, maybe those jobs are replaceable. But how do you train the next gen of seniors?
- jagged-chisel 1y ago
  Not their (the companies, managers, executives) problem. You come in knowing your job, or they move to the next name on the list. Education is an externality.
- papascrubs 1y ago
  The year is 2030: The junior engineers of the Adeptus Mechanicus stand in a circle around the holy monitor, chanting prayers to the Omnissiah. Their arcane books and lore guide the machine spirit, ensuring the correct holy words of blessing are entered into the holy prompt. Petitioning the machine spirit for its most truthful, secure holy answers. Oh wait, wrong distopian future.
tuveson 1y ago
Programming in a structured high-level language like C is much more productive than programming in assembly. Programming in a managed language with GC can be more productive still. The creation of package managers and the widespread availability of open-source repos means developers don't need to write as much from scratch. The creation of search engines and Stack Overflow did (and still do) much of the useful things that people use AI for (boilerplate, debugging obscure error messages). Machines have gotten exponentially faster for the last several decades. This means devs need to spend less time optimizing code. And the time to compile and run speeds up, meaning you can prototype things faster. Why is it, that somehow none of these inarguable improvements to the speed and efficiency of development haven't lead to a a massive decrease in the number of developers? If we take it as axiomatic that AI significantly improves productivity, why, for the first time in history, does that not result in more programming jobs?
- cgio 1y ago
  None of the improvements of the past you outline were advertised as capable of replicating agency. They were sold as tools. Note that I am not making any claim about actual capability for agency, there’s other people more qualified than me to discuss this. Regardless factuality of ability to replace people, this is how it’s sold and arguably also how it’s bought. This gives the view that it has impact on jobs more weight.
  - throwaway0123_5 1y ago
    Also I think it is plausible (if not likely) that LLMs reduce the demand for other kinds of software. They're (relatively) general purpose and can handle many tasks that previously would've needed bespoke software (and a team of people to create/maintain it).
- fennecfoxy 1y ago
  In some ways developing and working with a high level but less efficient language for velocity is actually a vast improvement, imo. Take node.js for example, devs can just sling code out as fast as they can and shit gets done. Then the node.js core devs can optimise certain paths/features after the fact to negate many of the efficiency problems. However it does annoy me that what this has meant is that many of my colleagues don't know anything about memory management, debugging, or any other more traditional concepts, so we see bloat & OOMs over time that need to be resolved.
dataviz1000 1y ago
Young people from where? I’m in South American and the young people here are earning much more than their parents earn but 1/3 what software engineers earn in San Francisco writing software.
next_xibalba 1y ago
Don't underestimate the effect of Elon nuking the Twitter employee base when he acquired the company. All the predictions were that Twitter would die. It hasn't. That sent a powerful message to the other leaders of tech companies: "You can do just as much with far fewer people" / "Most of your employees aren't doing needle moving work". Shortly thereafter, Zuck announced layoffs at Meta. These new attitudes towards headcount have cascaded down from the top-tier tech companies down through the ecosystem of companies.
- jpalawaga 1y ago
  except they laid off of a lot of trust and safety and marketing, and twitter has never been the same in that regard. eng—has twitter really changed much since acquisition? it seems to me like twitter had really great eng to begin with. keeping the lights on is much different from building new product.
  - next_xibalba 1y ago
    Even if I cede all of your points, if I'm Zuck or Sundar or Satya, etc. I might think "Well, I'm not going to nuke 80% of the head count, but I definitely could layoff 10-20% and slow way down on hiring."
nemo44x 1y ago
Tax code changes & interest rate changes have been unfavorable. Secondly “learn to code” and vastly lowered CS standards have churned out a lot of young developers that are unskilled, much like in the .com bust. Lastly AI which at best has completely shut the unskilled out.
jaza 1y ago
I started university (in Australia) in 2004, not long after the dot com crash. CS enrolment rates were low, kids were getting scared off due to perceived lack of jobs. As a result, there was a shortage of grad talent (companies were already ramping up hiring again by 2004). I got a grad job just fine, in 2008, and I've never been short of work since. So my advice to high school kids of 2025: right now is the perfect time to enrol in CS. 5 years from now, the AI hype will be over, and employers will be short on grads.
- pizzly 1y ago
  This time is different. A fact right now is that software engineers now can orchestrate LLMs and agents to write software. The role of software engineers who do this is quality control, compliance, software architecture and some out of the box thinking for when LLMs do not cut it. What makes you think advances in AI wont take care of these tasks that LLMs do not do well currently? My point is once these tasks are taken care off a CS graduate won't be doing tasks that they learnt to do in their degrees. What people need to learn is how to think of customers needs in abstract ways and communicate this to AI and judge the output in a similar way someone judges a painting.
  - chii 1y ago
    > CS graduate won't be doing tasks that they learnt to do in their degrees how is that different from the previous decade(s)? How often do you invert a redblack tree in your daily programming/engineering job? A CS degree is a degree for thinking computationally, using mathematics as a basis. It's got some science too (aka, use evidence and falsifiability to work out truths and not rely on pure intuition). It's got some critical thinking attached, if your university is any good at making undergraduate courses. A CS degree is not a boot camp, nor is it meant to make you ready for a job. While i did learn how to use git at uni, it was never required nor asked - it was purely my own curiosity, which a CS degree is meant to foster.
    - hnfong 1y ago
      The original comment advised people to enroll in CS to capture the potential shortage of CS grads in the workforce. You’re saying no people shouldn’t be doing CS to make themselves ready for a job. The comment you replied to also takes a similar stance, ie no CS doesn’t make people ready for a job. You might think you’re disagreeing with the parent comment but in fact you’re disagreeing with the top level comment.
egl2020 1y ago
Lots of apparently unexplored alternative explanations. In times of uncertainty, you don't hire unless you need to. Another junior developer or customer service agent can be delayed, and youngsters in the labor force are most exposed to this. But if you need a home health aide, you probably don't have a lot of choice: somebody has to change grandma's diapers. Tariffs top my list of uncertainties for businesses, but interest rates are a close second.
zoeey 1y ago
Several teams around me stopped hiring juniors over the past couple of years. It’s not that the newcomers aren’t good, it’s just that no one has time to train them. AI showed up at just the right moment to offer a convenient excuse, and companies are happy to save on the cost of mentoring. But long term, this feels like borrowing from the future. Without someone to train, there’s no one ready to step up later.
epa 1y ago
Maybe its the secret recession?
throwaway984393 1y ago
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kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
Researchers need to project the pre-Covid hiring rates and omit the subsequent overhiring boom to credibly report on any believable loss in jobs. Dropping personnel who should never have been hired to begin with is a return to normal, not a new concerning trend. Start by showing the data from at least 2015 onward rather than lying with statistics using charts starting in 2021 for maximum drama.
la64710 1y ago
AI taking jobs is the biggest bullshit and hype the world has ever seen that been pushed by the likes of Salesforce etc to tell their customers: Look out AI product is so good that we used it ourselves to cut our own workforce. And inside the company walls they whisper to each other : our AI product is such crap that it is really useless and the only way to sell it is to credit our AI for tha layoff and hiring freeze we are doing anyway.
mattigames 1y ago
Yeah we the people at silicon valley really care about young people job prospects of course, yeah, who would ever even doubt that.
some_guy_nobel 1y ago
I would expect something more convincing for such a (seemingly) popular article of this title. Seems like a relatively straightforward difference-in-differences or synthetic control could be applied to show something convinving, but this is just some dude's opinions as 'evidence'.
TimSolar 1y ago
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pevansgreenwood 1y ago
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rvz 1y ago
If we don't solve this by 2030, This and including the projected 10% increase in unemployment in the same year will give us another crash. That is what true "AGI" is.
Lerc 1y ago
By what mechanism can you distinguish a decline from one cause compared to another? I could understand if, given enough time for all of the factors involved to occilate that you could pick out a signal, but that's not the data that exists right now. Surely the only way to identify the first time instance of a cause of decline could only by accumulating a count of clear instances where the cause occurred and measuring those as a proportion of other cases.
tamimio 1y ago
I don't think it's AI primarily, but rather AI is being used as a justification and a blame, and what's a better blame than this new trend that will last years and nothing can be done about it? I think it's just companies' greed, another excuse to lower the wages more and/or use ones who are ok with lower wages. It also has to do with procurement that's already using AI to process applications, with all the negative impacts this will have. I also did notice something when it comes to the job market: mostly those who are suffering are men, not women. I initially thought maybe because of the nature of the jobs, but that wasn't the case. Looking around on LinkedIn, a lot of women are doing product/project management jobs, analytics, business-related roles, even HR and procurement aren't impacted, and I have yet to see a single woman personally or online that was let go because of AI, even jobs in legal work, administration work -none of them are impacted that much. Meanwhile, I personally know several engineers (not software engineers) who are jobless with years of experience, and a LOT of software programmers too! I was discussing this with a friend and he also brought up a new term, "boomers' harems," as in, managers who are mostly old men prefer to hire young women now, and he did support his claim with many examples of fresh graduate girls that are working as engineers in aerospace or similar industries already, and their male classmates are still looking around. So in conclusion, while AI does have an impact, personally if I would quantify it, it probably won't exceed 25% of the issue. Other factors make up the rest, but everyone is distracted by AI for all sorts of reasons.
- gizajob 1y ago
  Boomer harems lol that’s a new one on me but undoubtedly a thing. My whole career in the UK I’ve noticed a similar thing in HR harems - in many places, particularly recruitment companies but it’s common everywhere, 90%-100% of the HR staff are women who then employ more and more women over men while having a generally poor understanding of the requirements for a role. I can’t help but feel like a group of women will have a natural disposition for adding extra women rather than men, while prioritising communication and networking over competencies like creative thinking, problem solving, generalism, and self-starting.
  - datadrivenangel 1y ago
aishot 1y ago
what I hate about it the most is, all AI company CEO constantly deny the fact that at least 50% of the jobs will be gone
Animats 1y ago
It's striking that the decline in hiring started when ChatGPT was first demoed, but wasn't really good enough to do much useful. If it wasn't working now, though, we would see those graphs going back up.
gngoo 1y ago
Yes no shit.
threwawhy 1y ago
AI has destroyed salaries and it is destroying jobs. The problem AI actually solves is wages. Why? Because perfection is the enemy of the good. Anyone who still believes AI is not destroying jobs is delusional.
zkmon 1y ago
There are other factors that drive employment of young workforce, which don't have much to do with knowledge or skills. These are sort of blue-collar jobs within IT. There is a lot of low-level drudgery work which is currently outsourced or assigned to non-employees (mostly young) in most companies. For example, the IT support and maintenance is mostly done outside of the West. This works requires a lot of back and forth. Don't think AI taking over this area. Also, some work is assigned to young workers to spread the accountability and risk ownership. Not sure if you can hold AI as accountable as humans. Also, young workers are generally preferred for their agility, flexibility and ability to work hard. There were easier to exploit and if they were unmarried, they won't mind giving all of their time and attention to work for less pay. I used to work in teams that stayed overnight at office to complete projects. Young people are also very cohesive and they team up well. So, looking at the situation purely from a knowledge perspective may not give the full picture.
lispisok 1y ago
It's not AI replacing jobs. There is a hiring downturn due to economic conditions (reaction to covid over-hiring and subsequent interest increases) and the people on the bottom of the ladder get bumped off.
PeterStuer 1y ago
For a startup, I now can solo it with the help of AI far beyond what was possible a few years ago. This does not mean I otherwise would have hired a few juniors. More likely I would not have taken that business beyond the idea stage. But direct massacres I can personally observe are in translation, copywriting and illustration. Yes, a good person can do better, but for a majority of cases AI has already become "good enough". Then there is an onslought from just non-AI automation, in e.g. retail and finsncial services. This had been building for over a decade, but the pandemic lockdows exponentially accelerated it.
- fmbb 1y ago
  It’s not ”good enough” from the consumers’ perspective. Only from the owners’.
  - zwnow 1y ago
    Like AI slop always looks or sounds the same... Generated videos/images are uncanny. Text is really easy to identify too and reads boring. AI is missing character.
    - hyperadvanced 1y ago
      On the thread of copywriting/publishing, my wife works in the field. She recently has had trouble with authors submitting low quality material - vague, nonsensical, lacking voice. I told her it sounded like AI and sure enough it was. I don’t blame her because she’s pretty offline. But the point stands that basically no one wants this crap. I don’t want your “one pager” that GPT pooped out, I want you to sit down and compose the problem in a digestible way, one that makes me think and one that shows that YOU have thought about it.
    - hnfong 1y ago
      You can 100% identify the AI slop that you identify.
ausssssie 1y ago
> For automative occupations, a lot of it is software engineering, auditing, and accounting, where there are well-defined workflows and LLMs are good at doing one-off tasks without a lot of feedback. For augmentative cases, you’re looking at more complex or managerial roles. Nope coding is definitely augmentive for Sep 2025 and before. Maybe more so than managing.
palmfacehn 1y ago
Even if we take the empirical claims from highly partisan sources at face value, obvious axiomatic problems remain. AI employment doom, like other forms of neoluddism is predicated on a zero-sum view of economics. As an example, consider the claim, "Steam shovel adoption is destroying entry level jobs in ditch digging" Yes, we want more productive technologies to be used where applicable. We want workers to specialize and become more productive with less hours worked. This isn't destructive at all. Framing it as such is either deliberately misleading or demonstrates a misunderstanding of basic econ.
Jean-Papoulos 1y ago
Looking at the "overall" graph they provide, it's clear that jobs as a whole have flatlined since 22, and even non-exposed jobs have had a growth rate hugely reduced. If we disregard the existence of AI, it would be easy to assume this is just the regular economic slowdown impacting younger people more than older ones. I don't see any correlation work done to isolate the source, especially as a lot of the "ai-exposed" work is also very much exposed to how much money is flowing in.
spwa4 1y ago
Seems to me like the jobs disappeared in reaction to the extremely obvious: a certain president causing a crisis to get himself a tax cut, the latest in a very long series of government decisions to make labor extremely unattractive for the private sector. AI is an excuse, nothing more. And I mean both Macron and Trump. AI is not even remotely close to the point where it can replace a human working for you, that's just not it. Everybody keeps screaming "NOT YET", and perhaps that's true, but either case, it's not currently true. However, economic conditions are so that companies now want to not hire, because price rises due to tariffs mean much less spending happening, with the outlook steeply downward. It will very mean widely spread layoffs soon. The first to suffer are new entrants to the job market and the close-to-pension near-the-exit people as well, but let's not kid ourselves: they will hardly be the only ones. The irony is that to me, this seems to be the reverse of what people think they see: AI is a clear investment target at the moment. It's being accused of killing jobs, but reality? It's one of the few clear investment targets. It is a portion of the economy that is entirely opposing the general trend. AI is not just not causing of firings, but actually is putting a break on the firings (by providing jobs funded by investment). It's a huge positive for the economy at the moment, and I bet it's a huge positive for jobs at the moment. Like most investments, the gains it promises have barely materialized right now: it's promising to replace people but it isn't. Frankly, the only other large investment target I see is weapons. And, while AI can be used in weapons, it's still leagues better than making actual weapons in my book. Nobody is literally blowing off anyone's head by firing an AI model at them. I find this an obvious insight once you look at what companies are actually doing: they're not killing jobs and providing the same services. They're killing jobs and providing less services, for less money, to try to survive. If AI was replacing people, they'd be providing more service for less money. Money is the problem here. Money is artificial, entirely a decision of society. Where is the money going? Look at the stock market: it certainly isn't going to investors (look at an EU stock market, outside of weapons manufacturers) And there's the key, fundamentally, businesses' desire to replace people is not a desire of business. It's a government decision. A tax decision. A very large portion of government income is income tax of various kind. People-based taxes. This means: you generate revenue from the means of production, capital (ie. "a factory"), input goods, and people's labor? It's people's labor that is taxed. Everything else is actually tax-exempt. Capital is free (you can spend 100% of your investor's money on buildings, no tax, assuming you follow standard practice). Input goods are free (VAT/Sales tax exempt, you don't even have to pay it initially). You want to keep more of your company's revenue? I don't think enough people realize this: but you lose a LOT more on the people than on anything else. In fact you only lose on people in some sense (because capital and input goods can at least theoretically be sold or more likely subleased for similar value as you got them for, they're "free", or only historically low interest is required). You almost only pay the government for the privilege of getting labor from someone else. In France, the actual tax is over 70%, if you measure it fully. By that I mean: let's say I pay you $100. Any tax, patronal (employer tax), income tax, insurance, pension (which are all government), import tax, VAT, ... is all to be paid from the $100. You like the product my company makes. You buy all you can from it, you spend all of that $100 on my product. How much do I see on my bank account? $28.7, by my last count. That amount, by the way, is then taxed at 40% before it goes into my bank account, so it's comfortably under $20. The $28.7 is what I could reinvest into my company (and need to buy the input goods in the first place). Even this is not counting many forms of tax that are effectively mandatory for everyone, such as rental tax, garbage tax, park tax ... In other words, if I didn't have to pay any tax at all, I wouldn't bat an eye to have your work done by 3 or even 4 people, as that would be a much better deal. I'd be looking for extra services people would pay for and provide them. Now I get that government is necessary, but we're paying for government services in the west by artificially increasing the cost of labor 500%. That is where tax comes from. There's other taxes, but they're perhaps not rounding errors, but obviously it's not what I'm worried about. And you are complaining that CEO's, or AI, or greed, or ... is costing jobs? No. The fact that in at least one view something like 80% of all efforts (all "economic value", mostly labor) in France is just keeping the government running, nothing more, that is making it critical for the private sector to avoid using labor, to avoid providing jobs like the plague. Oh, and of course, then the government allows foreign (read: US) companies to come in and "use contractors", in other words: to not pay labor tax (Uber, Deliveroo, ...), which they of course don't allow for French companies. And then, because the government is never happy with a big disaster unless it grows into a nice huge well-fed catastrophe, government makes it really hard to stop spending on people, so over hiring is a huge, extremely expensive, mistake. 100-person companies go bankrupt due to 5 unnecessary hires at the wrong time. I get that this is people's lives we're talking about, but given that the government gets 80%+ of the value of people's labor, I feel like it's perfectly reasonable to ask the government to take care of these people. Of course, they don't, not well. Of course, it's "companies' greed" that gets blamed for all the effects. Truth is this just isn't true, frankly not even at huge companies like Total. Or, to put it differently, if party A's greed is not even 20% of the total, and B demands over 80%, I feel like a healthy amount of blame needs to go to party B.
tangotaylor 1y ago
I'd be interested to see more discussion on Section 174, how engineer salaries suddenly triggered a higher tax bill in 2022. https://qz.com/tech-layoffs-tax-code-trump-section-174-microsoft-meta-1851783502 https://qz.com/tech-layoffs-tax-code-trump-section-174-micro... Did Section 174 changes accelerate tech job losses? It's unclear from the paper because they only look at the data excluding tech firms, not only tech firms. I want to see cause-and-effect: the cause being tax changes, the effect being tech firm layoffs, but they don't analyze the effect.
shadowvoxing 1y ago
In Canada, mass immigration is creating high unemployment for young people. Don't be so quick to blame AI when government policies are to blame. https://www.kingstrust.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/TKTC-Deloitte-Report-Failure-to-Launch-Final-1.pdf https://www.kingstrust.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/TKTC-De...
tim333 1y ago
Part of the job downturn may be due to AI, not in the obvious way of LLMs doing peoples jobs but due to the money allocation: >Companies will spend $375 billion globally in 2025 on A.I. infrastructure, the investment bank UBS estimates. (nyt) which means they have less money to hire and train recruits.

351 points by duck 1y ago

charcircuit 1y ago

This article continues to propagate the misconception that young is the same thing as inexperienced.

dataexec 1y ago
We can assume the two are so strongly correlated that it's not worth it to differentiate. Even though many exceptions exist.
- charcircuit 1y ago
  I don't think it's true at all. Considering it only takes 2 to 3 years to rack up the 10,000 hours to "master" something, young people can get very good at a lot of things. The biggest barrier in my opinion are child labor laws that get in the way of people getting experience.
  - iammrpayments 1y ago
    If you do something 80 hours per week for 2 years it totals 8320 hours? This is far from average behavior even if you have nothing else to do except coding.
    - brazukadev 1y ago
      Yes. That is why we have many 18 years old better at programming than fresh graduates. Teenagers have a lot of free time to code.
      - mrheosuper 1y ago
        I will be extremely concerned if my teenage boy spending >10 hours everyday, in 2 years, just sitting in front of computer screen.
  - notTooFarGone 1y ago
    The audacity to paint child labor laws as a "barrier for experience"... Children can work open source and rack up experience there. This is like the most humane way in any job ever to get experience as a minor.
    - charcircuit 1y ago
      In practice they will not just do open source and people will exploit them for free work since there are significant barriers to access employers able to pay market rate. Even open source itself can potentially be exploitative due to being free work. While open source may be okay for coding, there are other skills which may not be so easy to do from your own home. In practice they will not just do open source and people will exploit them for free work
  - lelanthran 1y ago
    > I don't think it's true at all. Considering it only takes 2 to 3 years to rack up the 10,000 hours to "master" something, young people can get very good at a lot of things. They can, if they practice with feedback 8 hours a day. Typically, young people, as a group, are not famous for practicing something 8 hours a day. This means, for the group as a whole, it is true.
programjames 1y ago
I think you are referring to > The strategic thinking that goes into longer-horizon tasks may be something LLMs aren’t as good at, which aligns with why entry-level workers are more affected than experienced workers. I think the article is talking in generalities, so on average entry-level software engineers have less experience with long-horizon tasks (e.g. months-long development), though there are definitely the exceptions that prove this rule.

TuringNYC 1y ago

How does one explain the drop starting January 2023 (esp for things like Customer Service Rep, which is an NLP-heavy task) when most corporations didnt even start LLM/NLP pilots until mid/late 2023? I skimmed thru the 100+ page paper but didnt see an explanation for this strange leading effect. SWE figures dropped mid-2022 (almost magically in line with interest rate hikes) and LLM-copilots werent introduced for another year. The paper notes they did an adjustment for the end of ZIRP. I dont know enough econometrics to understand whether this adjustment was sufficient, but the chart doesnt make sense since the labor efforts seem to be leading the actual technology by over a year or more. From informal surveys, LLM-copilot usage didnt become widespread until late 2023 to mid 2024, certainly not widespread enough to cause macro labor effects in mid-2022.

thrawa8387336 1y ago
Coordination, plain and simple.
- TuringNYC 1y ago
  Could you please explain more. Very interested in anything that explains the massive hole in the timeline.
  - thrawa8387336 1y ago
    This is a second hand anecdote but someone commented here or on X, that basically he was on a cruise and overheard two heads of HR of 2 big Co's talking to each other about shenanigans. Would not be the craziest considering that AI has to make a ROI. Even if it's not up there yet to do so organically. If you annihilate the entry labor market, then after some time, you have no choice but to use AI because there is no one remaining with the skills. AI is lower than entry level -> No one is hiring new grads -> There is no new talent being developed -> use AI for everything!
    - cactusplant7374 1y ago
      > This is a second hand anecdote but someone commented here or on X, that basically he was on a cruise and overheard two heads of HR of 2 big Co's talking to each other about shenanigans. I have no idea what this means.

esafak 1y ago

Discussed earlier in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45052423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45052423

dang 1y ago
Thanks! Macroexpanded: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45052423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45052423 - Aug 2025 (629 comments)

phyzome 1y ago

Skimming this, I'm not sure why it couldn't be explained by the layoffs we had a couple years ago, which were primarily at tech companies (which are indeed more exposed to LLMs) and probably hit junior devs more.

iJohnDoe 1y ago
Not wrong. Also want to point out the continued layoffs at Microsoft, Intel, etc.

throwmeaway222 1y ago

[flagged]

tasty_freeze 1y ago
Do you really think that companies were hiring that many unqualified people for DEI reasons? Just about every time the subject came up there were people saying it was just lip service and theater -- put a DEI statement on your company's public-facing webpage and pretend they actually did anything.
- leetrout 1y ago
  Maybe. I had two different hiring managers in two different companies explicitly tell me and others to hire women or PoC. Yes it was illegal. No one cares.
  - ajsnigrutin 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - nomel 1y ago
      > why AfD is on the rise Except for the 6 that just died, right before a local election [1]. [1] https://www.thetimes.com/world/europe/article/germany-afd-candidates-die-election-2025-q05fsnjj9 https://www.thetimes.com/world/europe/article/germany-afd-ca...
      - humpty-d 1y ago
        No mention that 2 candidates from other parties died in the run up. Or that it's out of 20,000+ individuals contesting various seats. No mention that they are mostly 59+ years old with preexisting health conditions. Luckily it gives us the most critical bit of info we could ask for, that Musk tweeted "!!" In summary this article is shit.

redwood 1y ago

Does the ADP data include international employees in lower cost geos?

swayvil 1y ago

As individuals less work is a good thing obviously. But as a society less work is a bad thing. Perverse.

senectus1 1y ago
As individuals less work is a good thing obviously. But as a society less productivity is a bad thing. I think the concept that AI sellers are trying to push is that we can work less and be more productive. Not sure its there yet :-P

resters 1y ago

Demand will shift to AI-literate knowledge workers whose productivity will be increased.

iJohnDoe 1y ago

A lot of CEOs are saying do more with less. Basically they are saying, “If there are any requests to hire additional people the first thing I ask them is if any AI tools have been tried first.” Then every 2-bit president, leader, manager, CEO out there regurgitates the same thing. So yes, companies want to save money and do more with leas. It certainly won’t help job seekers or the economy.

jampa 1y ago

I think not hiring juniors is a tragedy of the commons situation. It started before the AI boom, during COVID. It's not tax-related as people claim here, since this phenomenon is not US-only. The ZIRP era made companies hire people as if there was no tomorrow, and companies started "poaching" engineers from others, including juniors. I saw some interns with 2 years of experience getting offers as seniors. I had friends being paid to attend boot camp. Then everyone realized they were training junior engineers who would quickly get offers from other companies as “Senior" and leave. So companies stopped hiring them.

causal 1y ago
Also AI hype is sucking all capital out of traditional hiring

whatever1 1y ago

Software engineering is in correction mode since 2022, right after the Covid highs. AI is just the facade for job cuts. Zuck has been doing “the year of efficiency” for years now.

foxfired 1y ago

We need to reframe it. At this point, what we call "AI" is not a technology, but a subscription company. A technology is a tool you can adopt in your toolchain to perform at task, even if in this case it's outsourcing cognitive load. For a subscription company, well, as long as the subscription is active, you get to outsource some of the cognitive load. When Anthropic's CEO says that white color jobs will disappear, he means that he is selling Enterprise subscriptions, and that companies will inevitably buy it.

IX-103 1y ago
It's only a matter of time before AI becomes a commodity. The open source models are just a generation behind the proprietary ones and they're almost good enough for most users. Even if we're somehow limited to using proprietary models, since all of these "AIs" are based on natural language so you can practically hot swap the LLMs. Any company banking on selling any service other than AI hosting is going to be incredibly disappointed. The only thing that could stop this commodification is some sort of vendor lock-in, but that looks to be technically challenging.
- Andrex 1y ago
  Windows gaming finally falling to desktop Linux, in terms of tech and mindshare among enthusiasts, proves to me that given a sufficiently large timescale open solutions tend to always win against a proprietary ones. Companies just can't seem to stay focused on their own core competencies after a few decades. On the other hand, even when open projects "die" they can be resurrected ad infinitum. Just my gut feeling but it seems like closed wins out big in the short term, but open wins in the end. Not applicable to everything I know.
  - sorensen12 1y ago
    I’m not sure I agree. Windows still has 95% market share in Steam’s hardware report. And even the modest gains that Linux has seen in this space have been as much a result of the efforts of a few small companies who have financial interests in undermining Microsoft’s monopoly as it has been a display of grassroots enthusiasm for open ecosystems.

le-mark 1y ago

[flagged]

advael 1y ago
People heavily invested in AI, obviously. We have an economy that's heavily driven by investor perception, and while "AI is taking jobs" sounds bad for workers or humanity as a whole, it can still be a sales pitch for investing in AI
CoastalCoder 1y ago
Please don't parody regional accents to imply stupidity.
- dgfitz 1y ago
  Pretty confident it’s from South Park: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goobacks https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goobacks If I’m wrong I’ll accept that. If I’m right nope we learned a valuable lesson about making the worst assumptions about strangers in the internet.
  - lovich 1y ago
    I identified it as a South Park reference although the reference in question was parodying a country accent imo. As someone who grew up in the country however, fuck em
  - fragmede 1y ago
    Ah yes, South Park, a TV show known for its sensitivity towards difficult topics. Quoting someone else being douchy just means you're douchy and unoriginal, it doesn't make you not a douche simply because someone else said it and you're copying them. You're still choosing to say those things.
- dghlsakjg 1y ago
  It’s a direct quote from an episode of South Park. In the episode they aren’t making fun of a regional accent, they are making fun of an affected accent from certain classes. I’m from the area of Colorado where the episode takes place. There is no regional accent for Colorado.

g42gregory 1y ago

My challenge here is that every time I see “The Atlantic” or “The New York Times”, I can’t shake the feeling that it’s got to be a paid advertisement or some influence piece by a special interest group. I am not sure what to make of the articles that appear in those places anymore.

ipnon 1y ago
They are the party mouthpieces of the Democrats. It’s not useful as an empirical analysis or philosophical exercise. But it is useful as a declaration of belief for a certain cohort of American elites. So the revealed news is really that the Democrats will add “we must weaken or break up Big Token to increase youth employment” to their midterm and presidential platform. Whether this is sound macroeconomic policy is beside the point.
OhioMan2943 1y ago
They are the mouthpiece of the empire- but they aren't promoting products- they're promoting the dissolution of social and communal values and trying to erase the idea of intellectualism- the nyt casually, the atlantic explicitly, and the new yorker very covertly- it shows the powers that really run america have a deep ambivalence towards it and will likely hop to the next centre of prosperity when they get bored. The american experiment is over because they decided it to be. How weak and sad your country has become. And yeah I've seen they are the first to jump on ai anti intellectualism, for the reasons i've stated
- epohs 1y ago
  Which social and communal values, specifically, do you think The NY Times and the New Yorker are promoting the dissolution of?
  - estearum 1y ago
    You can't expect reactionaries to have any specific thoughts or for their beliefs to be founded on any particular facts or (real) historical events, like the COVID discussion below. It's vibes all the way down.

BoredPositron 1y ago

Meh... just rehashing what he said before. The paper itself is fundamentally flawed, examining only a minuscule portion of the job market. If we step back and look at Europe's struggling economies over recent decades, we see that economic downturns disproportionately affect young people. Greece serves as the poster child, followed by Spain and Italy. In Germany alone, we've lost 50,000 jobs in manual labor heavy industries (mainly automotive) this past year. We're also seeing a 60% decline in apprenticeships for labor intensive roles at DAX companies that aren't even AI affected yet. AI has become a convenient scapegoat for a faltering economy driven by geopolitical tensions, protectionism and unqualified leadership in the world's largest economies. Roaring 20s indeed.

causal 1y ago
I also have yet to see anyone meaningfully differentiate between "AI is taking jobs" and "AI hype is causing stupid executive decisions" and even "AI hype is sucking up all the capital that would normally go towards hiring".

dr_kiszonka 1y ago

What are those "augmentative" jobs that fresh CS grads can transition to?

ants_everywhere 1y ago

There's a sizable overlap between the anti-AI movement (e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/antiai/ https://www.reddit.com/r/antiai/) and self-identified socialists. One thing that confuses me is that the anti-AI movement has adopted several talking points saying that nobody wants AI. (e.g. nobody wants it, the AI companies are pushing it on us, management is pushing it on us, it just creates low quality slop, the demand is fake, etc). But if there's no demand, then there's no threat to jobs. On the other hand if there is a threat to jobs then there must be demand (since it competes with human labor in the job market). I'm not sure why they're taking this particular tactic, but it's going to lead to strange comment sections where people won't know how to stay on message as it becomes clearer that AI is impacting the labor force. A lot of people intuitively imagine that to compete with humans there's some sort of 1:1 exchange ratio. But initially the calculus will be something like a 10 team with plus AI performs about on par with a 12 person team (or whatever the details work out to). So we will see AI impacting job numbers well before AI can do your entire job.

gerdesj 1y ago

Trends take time to work out. "AI" dives in and disrupts and then it turns out that AI isn't too I. The disrupt phase where HR dumps staff based on dubious promises and directions from above takes a few months. The gradual re-hiring takes way longer than the dumping phase and will not trigger thresholds. I've spent quite a while with "AI". LLMs do have a use but dumping staff is not one of the best ideas I've seen. I get that a management team are looking for trimmings but AI isn't the I they are looking for. In my opinion (MD of a small IT focused company) LLMs are a better slide rule. I have several slide rules and calculators and obviously a shit load of computers. Mind you my slide rules can't access the internet, on the other hand my slide rules always work, without internets or power.

wewewedxfgdf 1y ago

Interest rates have way more impact.

farai89 1y ago

I doubt the whole narrative is true, it may just be hope that we do not need to hire because we will be able to do it with AI. But reality outside of software and tech is very different. I work in an organisation that heavily pushing AI and even with that push, a typical employee is still not utilising it fully, unprepared and expecting training from the employer. There is also a disconnect over connecting org data to these tools and between developers and cyber teams.

yowlingcat 1y ago

I don't get how interest rates is given at best a cursory phrase when ZIRP regime ending is one of the biggest macro events of the past several decades. Seems like it would deserve more of a spotlight.

jjk166 1y ago

Any economic data from between 2020 and 2025 should be tossed in the garbage. We will have no idea what affect AI has or hasn't had until AI has been available outside of the extremely confounded current circumstances. Tell me how employment looks after the next recession when the after effects of the pandemic, rapid inflation, interest rate unpredictability, and tariff whiplash are hopefully all behind us.

non_aligned 1y ago
And the data for the two decades before that should be tossed out because of the global housing crisis, the sovereign debt crisis, and all the reverberations from that. And the data for the two decades before that obviously needs to be tossed out because of the one-off nature of the dot-com boom, the dot-com crash, 9/11, and so on. And before that... point is, you don't get clean data in economics. There's always something big going on, there are no double-blind trials to run, etc. It's called the dismal science for a reason. But that doesn't make it useless.
- jjk166 1y ago
  If your only dataset is 2008 to 2010, yeah your conclusions are almost certainly garbage. Likewise if your dataset is 1999 to 2002, or just the year 1987. There will always be something going on, but there won't always be this specific thing going on, and if 100% of your data comes from during one specific crisis (nonetheless multiple concurrent crises), then it is 100% useless. Even with longer periods of data, reconcilliation with longer trends is technically challenging. We've had enough recessions to correct for them in our data, but until we've had a half dozen global pandemics you can't use pandemic data in your analysis.

mugivarra69 1y ago

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cyberax 1y ago

My experience: we're hiring for an AI engineer position and for a frontend developer position (and yes, we posted our positions here on Hackernews). We have a stream of cookie-cutter candidates. As if they are clones of each other, it's uncanny. They typically have a BS degree in some foreign university, then a CS Masters' in the US, experience with robotics, then several years of experience in large companies. And they completely fold during in-person coding tasks. Like, not being able to explain the difference between DFS and BFS (depth/breadth-first search). Or being able to write a simple custom metric and train a network in Pytorch. And a similar story for the frontend developer position. We now literally have to add more filters to not get inundated by underqualified candidates. These filters will make it harder for beginners to even _get_ to the resume review stage. No conclusions from me, but something's been broken in the CS jobs market for a while.

ipnon 1y ago
With the size of context windows now it'd be economical to dump all the resumes into an LLM and query the pool this way.

drob518 1y ago

Well, that’s the makings of revolution.

jamii 1y ago

I made a stupid simple model where hiring in all age brackets rose slowly until 2021 and then fell slowly. That produces very similar looking graphs, because the many engineers that were hired at the peak move up the demographic curve over time. Normalizing the graph to 2022 levels, as the paper seems to do, hides the fact that the actual hiring ratios didn't change at all. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1z0l0rNebCTVWLk77_7HAwVzL7QtTjlrllAMH2lxhnes/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1z0l0rNebCTVWLk77_7HA...

juxtaposicion 1y ago
I'm not sure I understand. Your model shows that different group buckets (eg 20-24yo vs 25-29yo) peak at different years (in your figure, 2022 vs 2024) despite being driven by the same dynamics. Is that expected? I (naively?) expected the same groups to rise, fall and have peaks at the same times.
- jamii 1y ago
  One of the dynamics is that people get older so they move into different buckets. We can make the model way simpler to make it clearer. Say in 2020 we hired 1000 20-24yo, 1000 25-29yo etc and then we didn't hire anyone since then. That was five years ago, so now we have 0 20-24yo, 1000 25-29yo, 1000 30-34yo etc and 1000 retirees who don't show up in the graph. Each individual year we hired the exact same number of people in each age bracket, and yet we still end up with fewer young people total whenever hiring goes down, because all the people that got hired during the big hiring spike are now older.
  - juxtaposicion 1y ago
    Got it, thanks! Yeah, so it makes sense that any age-bucketing like this would have a similar effect
tangotaylor 1y ago
Wow, that's hilarious. So essentially hiring could be identical across all age groups, but due to a glitch in the analysis (young people don't stay young, who knew?), it appears that younger people are losing jobs more than the rest.

casey2 1y ago

I'd wager that vast resources being spent in one very niche subfield is what's hurting job creation from young people. Aside from this there simply doesn't exist another mechanism in which AI can meaningfully affect employment in the long term.

pr3d4t0ralien 1y ago

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whateveracct 1y ago

Short term thinking. Yes, maybe those jobs are replaceable. But how do you train the next gen of seniors?

jagged-chisel 1y ago
Not their (the companies, managers, executives) problem. You come in knowing your job, or they move to the next name on the list. Education is an externality.
papascrubs 1y ago
The year is 2030: The junior engineers of the Adeptus Mechanicus stand in a circle around the holy monitor, chanting prayers to the Omnissiah. Their arcane books and lore guide the machine spirit, ensuring the correct holy words of blessing are entered into the holy prompt. Petitioning the machine spirit for its most truthful, secure holy answers. Oh wait, wrong distopian future.

tuveson 1y ago

Programming in a structured high-level language like C is much more productive than programming in assembly. Programming in a managed language with GC can be more productive still. The creation of package managers and the widespread availability of open-source repos means developers don't need to write as much from scratch. The creation of search engines and Stack Overflow did (and still do) much of the useful things that people use AI for (boilerplate, debugging obscure error messages). Machines have gotten exponentially faster for the last several decades. This means devs need to spend less time optimizing code. And the time to compile and run speeds up, meaning you can prototype things faster. Why is it, that somehow none of these inarguable improvements to the speed and efficiency of development haven't lead to a a massive decrease in the number of developers? If we take it as axiomatic that AI significantly improves productivity, why, for the first time in history, does that not result in more programming jobs?

cgio 1y ago
None of the improvements of the past you outline were advertised as capable of replicating agency. They were sold as tools. Note that I am not making any claim about actual capability for agency, there’s other people more qualified than me to discuss this. Regardless factuality of ability to replace people, this is how it’s sold and arguably also how it’s bought. This gives the view that it has impact on jobs more weight.
- throwaway0123_5 1y ago
  Also I think it is plausible (if not likely) that LLMs reduce the demand for other kinds of software. They're (relatively) general purpose and can handle many tasks that previously would've needed bespoke software (and a team of people to create/maintain it).
fennecfoxy 1y ago
In some ways developing and working with a high level but less efficient language for velocity is actually a vast improvement, imo. Take node.js for example, devs can just sling code out as fast as they can and shit gets done. Then the node.js core devs can optimise certain paths/features after the fact to negate many of the efficiency problems. However it does annoy me that what this has meant is that many of my colleagues don't know anything about memory management, debugging, or any other more traditional concepts, so we see bloat & OOMs over time that need to be resolved.

dataviz1000 1y ago

Young people from where? I’m in South American and the young people here are earning much more than their parents earn but 1/3 what software engineers earn in San Francisco writing software.

next_xibalba 1y ago

Don't underestimate the effect of Elon nuking the Twitter employee base when he acquired the company. All the predictions were that Twitter would die. It hasn't. That sent a powerful message to the other leaders of tech companies: "You can do just as much with far fewer people" / "Most of your employees aren't doing needle moving work". Shortly thereafter, Zuck announced layoffs at Meta. These new attitudes towards headcount have cascaded down from the top-tier tech companies down through the ecosystem of companies.

jpalawaga 1y ago
except they laid off of a lot of trust and safety and marketing, and twitter has never been the same in that regard. eng—has twitter really changed much since acquisition? it seems to me like twitter had really great eng to begin with. keeping the lights on is much different from building new product.
- next_xibalba 1y ago
  Even if I cede all of your points, if I'm Zuck or Sundar or Satya, etc. I might think "Well, I'm not going to nuke 80% of the head count, but I definitely could layoff 10-20% and slow way down on hiring."

nemo44x 1y ago

Tax code changes & interest rate changes have been unfavorable. Secondly “learn to code” and vastly lowered CS standards have churned out a lot of young developers that are unskilled, much like in the .com bust. Lastly AI which at best has completely shut the unskilled out.

jaza 1y ago

I started university (in Australia) in 2004, not long after the dot com crash. CS enrolment rates were low, kids were getting scared off due to perceived lack of jobs. As a result, there was a shortage of grad talent (companies were already ramping up hiring again by 2004). I got a grad job just fine, in 2008, and I've never been short of work since. So my advice to high school kids of 2025: right now is the perfect time to enrol in CS. 5 years from now, the AI hype will be over, and employers will be short on grads.

pizzly 1y ago
This time is different. A fact right now is that software engineers now can orchestrate LLMs and agents to write software. The role of software engineers who do this is quality control, compliance, software architecture and some out of the box thinking for when LLMs do not cut it. What makes you think advances in AI wont take care of these tasks that LLMs do not do well currently? My point is once these tasks are taken care off a CS graduate won't be doing tasks that they learnt to do in their degrees. What people need to learn is how to think of customers needs in abstract ways and communicate this to AI and judge the output in a similar way someone judges a painting.
- chii 1y ago
  > CS graduate won't be doing tasks that they learnt to do in their degrees how is that different from the previous decade(s)? How often do you invert a redblack tree in your daily programming/engineering job? A CS degree is a degree for thinking computationally, using mathematics as a basis. It's got some science too (aka, use evidence and falsifiability to work out truths and not rely on pure intuition). It's got some critical thinking attached, if your university is any good at making undergraduate courses. A CS degree is not a boot camp, nor is it meant to make you ready for a job. While i did learn how to use git at uni, it was never required nor asked - it was purely my own curiosity, which a CS degree is meant to foster.
  - hnfong 1y ago
    The original comment advised people to enroll in CS to capture the potential shortage of CS grads in the workforce. You’re saying no people shouldn’t be doing CS to make themselves ready for a job. The comment you replied to also takes a similar stance, ie no CS doesn’t make people ready for a job. You might think you’re disagreeing with the parent comment but in fact you’re disagreeing with the top level comment.

egl2020 1y ago

Lots of apparently unexplored alternative explanations. In times of uncertainty, you don't hire unless you need to. Another junior developer or customer service agent can be delayed, and youngsters in the labor force are most exposed to this. But if you need a home health aide, you probably don't have a lot of choice: somebody has to change grandma's diapers. Tariffs top my list of uncertainties for businesses, but interest rates are a close second.

zoeey 1y ago

Several teams around me stopped hiring juniors over the past couple of years. It’s not that the newcomers aren’t good, it’s just that no one has time to train them. AI showed up at just the right moment to offer a convenient excuse, and companies are happy to save on the cost of mentoring. But long term, this feels like borrowing from the future. Without someone to train, there’s no one ready to step up later.

epa 1y ago

Maybe its the secret recession?

throwaway984393 1y ago

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kevin_thibedeau 1y ago

Researchers need to project the pre-Covid hiring rates and omit the subsequent overhiring boom to credibly report on any believable loss in jobs. Dropping personnel who should never have been hired to begin with is a return to normal, not a new concerning trend. Start by showing the data from at least 2015 onward rather than lying with statistics using charts starting in 2021 for maximum drama.

la64710 1y ago

AI taking jobs is the biggest bullshit and hype the world has ever seen that been pushed by the likes of Salesforce etc to tell their customers: Look out AI product is so good that we used it ourselves to cut our own workforce. And inside the company walls they whisper to each other : our AI product is such crap that it is really useless and the only way to sell it is to credit our AI for tha layoff and hiring freeze we are doing anyway.

mattigames 1y ago

Yeah we the people at silicon valley really care about young people job prospects of course, yeah, who would ever even doubt that.

some_guy_nobel 1y ago

I would expect something more convincing for such a (seemingly) popular article of this title. Seems like a relatively straightforward difference-in-differences or synthetic control could be applied to show something convinving, but this is just some dude's opinions as 'evidence'.

TimSolar 1y ago

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pevansgreenwood 1y ago

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rvz 1y ago

If we don't solve this by 2030, This and including the projected 10% increase in unemployment in the same year will give us another crash. That is what true "AGI" is.

Lerc 1y ago

By what mechanism can you distinguish a decline from one cause compared to another? I could understand if, given enough time for all of the factors involved to occilate that you could pick out a signal, but that's not the data that exists right now. Surely the only way to identify the first time instance of a cause of decline could only by accumulating a count of clear instances where the cause occurred and measuring those as a proportion of other cases.

tamimio 1y ago

I don't think it's AI primarily, but rather AI is being used as a justification and a blame, and what's a better blame than this new trend that will last years and nothing can be done about it? I think it's just companies' greed, another excuse to lower the wages more and/or use ones who are ok with lower wages. It also has to do with procurement that's already using AI to process applications, with all the negative impacts this will have. I also did notice something when it comes to the job market: mostly those who are suffering are men, not women. I initially thought maybe because of the nature of the jobs, but that wasn't the case. Looking around on LinkedIn, a lot of women are doing product/project management jobs, analytics, business-related roles, even HR and procurement aren't impacted, and I have yet to see a single woman personally or online that was let go because of AI, even jobs in legal work, administration work -none of them are impacted that much. Meanwhile, I personally know several engineers (not software engineers) who are jobless with years of experience, and a LOT of software programmers too! I was discussing this with a friend and he also brought up a new term, "boomers' harems," as in, managers who are mostly old men prefer to hire young women now, and he did support his claim with many examples of fresh graduate girls that are working as engineers in aerospace or similar industries already, and their male classmates are still looking around. So in conclusion, while AI does have an impact, personally if I would quantify it, it probably won't exceed 25% of the issue. Other factors make up the rest, but everyone is distracted by AI for all sorts of reasons.

gizajob 1y ago
Boomer harems lol that’s a new one on me but undoubtedly a thing. My whole career in the UK I’ve noticed a similar thing in HR harems - in many places, particularly recruitment companies but it’s common everywhere, 90%-100% of the HR staff are women who then employ more and more women over men while having a generally poor understanding of the requirements for a role. I can’t help but feel like a group of women will have a natural disposition for adding extra women rather than men, while prioritising communication and networking over competencies like creative thinking, problem solving, generalism, and self-starting.
- datadrivenangel 1y ago

aishot 1y ago

what I hate about it the most is, all AI company CEO constantly deny the fact that at least 50% of the jobs will be gone

Animats 1y ago

It's striking that the decline in hiring started when ChatGPT was first demoed, but wasn't really good enough to do much useful. If it wasn't working now, though, we would see those graphs going back up.

gngoo 1y ago

Yes no shit.

threwawhy 1y ago

AI has destroyed salaries and it is destroying jobs. The problem AI actually solves is wages. Why? Because perfection is the enemy of the good. Anyone who still believes AI is not destroying jobs is delusional.

zkmon 1y ago

There are other factors that drive employment of young workforce, which don't have much to do with knowledge or skills. These are sort of blue-collar jobs within IT. There is a lot of low-level drudgery work which is currently outsourced or assigned to non-employees (mostly young) in most companies. For example, the IT support and maintenance is mostly done outside of the West. This works requires a lot of back and forth. Don't think AI taking over this area. Also, some work is assigned to young workers to spread the accountability and risk ownership. Not sure if you can hold AI as accountable as humans. Also, young workers are generally preferred for their agility, flexibility and ability to work hard. There were easier to exploit and if they were unmarried, they won't mind giving all of their time and attention to work for less pay. I used to work in teams that stayed overnight at office to complete projects. Young people are also very cohesive and they team up well. So, looking at the situation purely from a knowledge perspective may not give the full picture.

lispisok 1y ago

It's not AI replacing jobs. There is a hiring downturn due to economic conditions (reaction to covid over-hiring and subsequent interest increases) and the people on the bottom of the ladder get bumped off.

PeterStuer 1y ago

For a startup, I now can solo it with the help of AI far beyond what was possible a few years ago. This does not mean I otherwise would have hired a few juniors. More likely I would not have taken that business beyond the idea stage. But direct massacres I can personally observe are in translation, copywriting and illustration. Yes, a good person can do better, but for a majority of cases AI has already become "good enough". Then there is an onslought from just non-AI automation, in e.g. retail and finsncial services. This had been building for over a decade, but the pandemic lockdows exponentially accelerated it.

fmbb 1y ago
It’s not ”good enough” from the consumers’ perspective. Only from the owners’.
- zwnow 1y ago
  Like AI slop always looks or sounds the same... Generated videos/images are uncanny. Text is really easy to identify too and reads boring. AI is missing character.
  - hyperadvanced 1y ago
    On the thread of copywriting/publishing, my wife works in the field. She recently has had trouble with authors submitting low quality material - vague, nonsensical, lacking voice. I told her it sounded like AI and sure enough it was. I don’t blame her because she’s pretty offline. But the point stands that basically no one wants this crap. I don’t want your “one pager” that GPT pooped out, I want you to sit down and compose the problem in a digestible way, one that makes me think and one that shows that YOU have thought about it.
  - hnfong 1y ago
    You can 100% identify the AI slop that you identify.

ausssssie 1y ago

> For automative occupations, a lot of it is software engineering, auditing, and accounting, where there are well-defined workflows and LLMs are good at doing one-off tasks without a lot of feedback. For augmentative cases, you’re looking at more complex or managerial roles. Nope coding is definitely augmentive for Sep 2025 and before. Maybe more so than managing.

palmfacehn 1y ago

Even if we take the empirical claims from highly partisan sources at face value, obvious axiomatic problems remain. AI employment doom, like other forms of neoluddism is predicated on a zero-sum view of economics. As an example, consider the claim, "Steam shovel adoption is destroying entry level jobs in ditch digging" Yes, we want more productive technologies to be used where applicable. We want workers to specialize and become more productive with less hours worked. This isn't destructive at all. Framing it as such is either deliberately misleading or demonstrates a misunderstanding of basic econ.

Jean-Papoulos 1y ago

Looking at the "overall" graph they provide, it's clear that jobs as a whole have flatlined since 22, and even non-exposed jobs have had a growth rate hugely reduced. If we disregard the existence of AI, it would be easy to assume this is just the regular economic slowdown impacting younger people more than older ones. I don't see any correlation work done to isolate the source, especially as a lot of the "ai-exposed" work is also very much exposed to how much money is flowing in.

spwa4 1y ago

Seems to me like the jobs disappeared in reaction to the extremely obvious: a certain president causing a crisis to get himself a tax cut, the latest in a very long series of government decisions to make labor extremely unattractive for the private sector. AI is an excuse, nothing more. And I mean both Macron and Trump. AI is not even remotely close to the point where it can replace a human working for you, that's just not it. Everybody keeps screaming "NOT YET", and perhaps that's true, but either case, it's not currently true. However, economic conditions are so that companies now want to not hire, because price rises due to tariffs mean much less spending happening, with the outlook steeply downward. It will very mean widely spread layoffs soon. The first to suffer are new entrants to the job market and the close-to-pension near-the-exit people as well, but let's not kid ourselves: they will hardly be the only ones. The irony is that to me, this seems to be the reverse of what people think they see: AI is a clear investment target at the moment. It's being accused of killing jobs, but reality? It's one of the few clear investment targets. It is a portion of the economy that is entirely opposing the general trend. AI is not just not causing of firings, but actually is putting a break on the firings (by providing jobs funded by investment). It's a huge positive for the economy at the moment, and I bet it's a huge positive for jobs at the moment. Like most investments, the gains it promises have barely materialized right now: it's promising to replace people but it isn't. Frankly, the only other large investment target I see is weapons. And, while AI can be used in weapons, it's still leagues better than making actual weapons in my book. Nobody is literally blowing off anyone's head by firing an AI model at them. I find this an obvious insight once you look at what companies are actually doing: they're not killing jobs and providing the same services. They're killing jobs and providing less services, for less money, to try to survive. If AI was replacing people, they'd be providing more service for less money. Money is the problem here. Money is artificial, entirely a decision of society. Where is the money going? Look at the stock market: it certainly isn't going to investors (look at an EU stock market, outside of weapons manufacturers) And there's the key, fundamentally, businesses' desire to replace people is not a desire of business. It's a government decision. A tax decision. A very large portion of government income is income tax of various kind. People-based taxes. This means: you generate revenue from the means of production, capital (ie. "a factory"), input goods, and people's labor? It's people's labor that is taxed. Everything else is actually tax-exempt. Capital is free (you can spend 100% of your investor's money on buildings, no tax, assuming you follow standard practice). Input goods are free (VAT/Sales tax exempt, you don't even have to pay it initially). You want to keep more of your company's revenue? I don't think enough people realize this: but you lose a LOT more on the people than on anything else. In fact you only lose on people in some sense (because capital and input goods can at least theoretically be sold or more likely subleased for similar value as you got them for, they're "free", or only historically low interest is required). You almost only pay the government for the privilege of getting labor from someone else. In France, the actual tax is over 70%, if you measure it fully. By that I mean: let's say I pay you $100. Any tax, patronal (employer tax), income tax, insurance, pension (which are all government), import tax, VAT, ... is all to be paid from the $100. You like the product my company makes. You buy all you can from it, you spend all of that $100 on my product. How much do I see on my bank account? $28.7, by my last count. That amount, by the way, is then taxed at 40% before it goes into my bank account, so it's comfortably under $20. The $28.7 is what I could reinvest into my company (and need to buy the input goods in the first place). Even this is not counting many forms of tax that are effectively mandatory for everyone, such as rental tax, garbage tax, park tax ... In other words, if I didn't have to pay any tax at all, I wouldn't bat an eye to have your work done by 3 or even 4 people, as that would be a much better deal. I'd be looking for extra services people would pay for and provide them. Now I get that government is necessary, but we're paying for government services in the west by artificially increasing the cost of labor 500%. That is where tax comes from. There's other taxes, but they're perhaps not rounding errors, but obviously it's not what I'm worried about. And you are complaining that CEO's, or AI, or greed, or ... is costing jobs? No. The fact that in at least one view something like 80% of all efforts (all "economic value", mostly labor) in France is just keeping the government running, nothing more, that is making it critical for the private sector to avoid using labor, to avoid providing jobs like the plague. Oh, and of course, then the government allows foreign (read: US) companies to come in and "use contractors", in other words: to not pay labor tax (Uber, Deliveroo, ...), which they of course don't allow for French companies. And then, because the government is never happy with a big disaster unless it grows into a nice huge well-fed catastrophe, government makes it really hard to stop spending on people, so over hiring is a huge, extremely expensive, mistake. 100-person companies go bankrupt due to 5 unnecessary hires at the wrong time. I get that this is people's lives we're talking about, but given that the government gets 80%+ of the value of people's labor, I feel like it's perfectly reasonable to ask the government to take care of these people. Of course, they don't, not well. Of course, it's "companies' greed" that gets blamed for all the effects. Truth is this just isn't true, frankly not even at huge companies like Total. Or, to put it differently, if party A's greed is not even 20% of the total, and B demands over 80%, I feel like a healthy amount of blame needs to go to party B.

tangotaylor 1y ago

I'd be interested to see more discussion on Section 174, how engineer salaries suddenly triggered a higher tax bill in 2022. https://qz.com/tech-layoffs-tax-code-trump-section-174-microsoft-meta-1851783502 https://qz.com/tech-layoffs-tax-code-trump-section-174-micro... Did Section 174 changes accelerate tech job losses? It's unclear from the paper because they only look at the data excluding tech firms, not only tech firms. I want to see cause-and-effect: the cause being tax changes, the effect being tech firm layoffs, but they don't analyze the effect.

shadowvoxing 1y ago

In Canada, mass immigration is creating high unemployment for young people. Don't be so quick to blame AI when government policies are to blame. https://www.kingstrust.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/TKTC-Deloitte-Report-Failure-to-Launch-Final-1.pdf https://www.kingstrust.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/TKTC-De...

tim333 1y ago

Part of the job downturn may be due to AI, not in the obvious way of LLMs doing peoples jobs but due to the money allocation: >Companies will spend $375 billion globally in 2025 on A.I. infrastructure, the investment bank UBS estimates. (nyt) which means they have less money to hire and train recruits.