9 ms·

I analyzed 180M jobs to see what jobs AI is replacing today

200 points by AznHisoka 1y ago

kode95 1y ago
I found this interesting: "Still, despite all the hype about how AI coding tools will replace software engineers, software engineering is still one of the most secure jobs you can have today, relative to most other white-collar jobs."
- batchfile 1y ago
  This makes sense to me. Until Software Engineers have automated away all the other jobs with AI & software they'll be safe. That's going to take a long time. Replacing software engineers with AI only affects the bottom line of software companies. Companies are usually fine with increasing the bottom line if they can exponentially increase the top line. I think software engineers will provide that capability for at least the next 10-15 years.
  - sixhobbits 1y ago
    I think that's an over-simplistic view - at the moment there are many, many software engineers hired by companies who are betting on AI being madly profitable. If those expectations change, we could see more cascading layoffs, which will mean those engineers will go looking at more traditional places like banks, which means they'll stop hiring, which means it'll be harder to someone who is looking for a new job to find one, even though not all jobs have yet been automated.
    - geodel 1y ago
      True, besides actual software engineering is small part of overall IT/computer related work. There are far more analysts, managers(project, program, IT, agile etc), QA, operations and so on. So engineers who employers think are capable of leveraging AI and do 20 s/w engineer worth of work with 5 people will remain in demand for time being. Even without outright layoffs one can see how fast leverage of average IT engineer is disappearing. After 20 years of experience my value or feedback matters less than when I was 4 years into paid job. And it has far less to with AI so far. Most custom work of past is just a library, component or framework to use. And those are mandated to be used as it much easier to hire/replace teams to work on those. Now It may be always be true to have reusable components created but growth of IT industry kept people employed in ever greater numbers. However now it seems to be reaching limit. Leaving aside highly visible layoffs by US tech giants, growth is fading in countries like India with huge IT offshoring workforce. There are millions upon millions jobless fresh graduates waiting to get jobs with some IT degree.
      - chairmansteve 1y ago
        "There are millions upon millions jobless fresh graduates waiting to get jobs with some IT degree". Quality of those graduates is not always great. A talented and passionate SWE will always make a good living.
- 9rx 1y ago
  At the end of the day, "AI" is just another programming language, albeit one that is much more accessible to the layman. When using AI, you become a software engineer. So it stands to reason that software engineering jobs are strong. But what about pay? Elevator operator jobs have never been more prevalent, but increased accessibility to the layman pushed the price to zero.
  - dylan604 1y ago
    > When using AI, you become a software engineer. No. You do not. It may make you a developer, at best. I don't even call my self a software engineer, because I'm not. I'm a self taught coder that has spent 25+ years gaining experience, but I've never graduated from a school with any kind on engineering degree. I started CSE way back in the 90s, but stopped because life got in the way. Maybe you're joking, but you just know people actually feel this way. They have no idea the difference of a coder and an SWE, and flippant comments don't help
    - 9rx 1y ago
      > but I've never graduated from a school with any kind on engineering degree. So? Per the dictionary, engineer is clearly defined as: A person who designs, builds, or maintains machines, structures, or systems. There is no mention of school or having an engineering degree. It has always been a bit debatable if software fits into machine, structure, or system, granted, but we generally have come to agree that it does. And per the context of discussion, we've already established that it does for the sake of discussion. On that understanding, designing/building/maintaining a system in "LLM code" instead of C++ code is fundamentally no different. You're likely confusing engineer with Professional Engineer™, but that's something else entirely. That obviously has nothing to do with anything that we're talking about here.
  - eMPee584 1y ago
    At the end of this day.. and of the next. But at some point, the tool will "suddenly" turn into a versatile agent, and that time might be a lot sooner than most expect (c.f. "exponential growth surprise factor"...)
  - 1y ago
- empath75 1y ago
  Did the invention of compilers eliminate the need for programmers or make them more productive and valuable? LLM coding is really not in the most abstract sense any different from compiling a higher level language to a lower level language.
  - stuffn 1y ago
    Certainly the jobs that were around for bespoke compilers were eliminated with the unification of compilers (GCC, Microsoft Visual C++). How many of those people transitioned to other roles I don't know. But the number of compiler jobs has been declining forever at this point.
  - mywittyname 1y ago
    > LLM coding is really not in the most abstract sense any different from compiling a higher level language to a lower level language. Hard disagree here. Anecdotally, know a few people who can't write a Java program that will compile, who can leverage ChatGPT to produce functional websites. A good friend of mine ChatGPTed his way into a masters degree that involved a lot of coding. A good 97% of his degree was done by AI, and the other 3% was me helping him troubleshoot he couldn't get AI to solve. LLM is vastly different from a compiler/translator. Despite the joke, you can't just fire up Python with import website and have a functional website. But you can basically do that with LLMs, which will then add features as requested. It's not perfect, nor guaranteed to be functional, but it is quite a bit more capable than a compiler is for such tasks. At my work, the sales guys are using AI tools to rapidly prototype features on our website with prospects. While it doesn't do all the work, it can produce useful HTML templates that the front-end team can make functional.
- saghm 1y ago
  It's funny, almost every conversation I have about the fact that I work as a software engineer with new people I meet nowadays seems to include them asking if I'm worried about AI stealing my job. Maybe it's something that people ask everyone nowadays regardless of what industry they work in, but at least as far as I can tell, the type of work I do doesn't seem in any apparent danger of being replaced by AI any time soon.
  - philipwhiuk 1y ago
    I assume that they think SWEs have a better grasp on it than non-tech folk.
  - baq 1y ago
    as of today that's probably true, but if the labs manage to keep increasing the 50% time horizon (defined by METR as 'the length of tasks (measured by how long they take human professionals) that it can complete autonomously with 50% probability') at the current pace, it might not be for long. Exponentials are hard enough to forecast if you kinda sorta know the parameters, and we don't have that comfort today.
    - moneywoes 1y ago
      sorry, new to this, any helpful links on what metr is?
      - pmg101 1y ago
        https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-complete-long-tasks/ https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-com...
  - jeffbee 1y ago
    It's because journalists are still big mad that the internet wrecked the newspaper business, therefore the news constantly reports lies about how the tech industry is collapsing. The more news you watch and the less personal contact you have with the industry, the more likely you are to believe that techies are jumping out of office windows in despair (hi, Mom).
- moneywoes 1y ago
  what about amount of churn in software engineering?
- wongarsu 1y ago
  There is a lot of induced demand in software engineering. We are still in the realm where cheaper software means that people want more and more complex software. And that demand increase is more than enough to offset any efficiency increases Meanwhile the amount of accounting that has to be done is pretty inelastic. Whenever accounting gets more efficient you just reduce the number of accountants instead of doing more accounting Creative is somewhere in between. Not completely static demand, but not extremely elastic either. The healthy rise in postings for creative directors indicates that the cost reduction has lead to more art being done, but the increase in demand isn't big enough to offset the job losses in the rank and file positions
edoceo 1y ago
I've got AI doing my taxes. It's saved me both bookkeeping and CPA costs.
- moneywoes 1y ago
  which model? what is your workflow like
  - edoceo 1y ago
    Flipping between GPTs and Gemini. Mostly having it help with interpretation of instructions and giving direction to find that data in my books. Stuff my CPA did. Help me categorize an expense (easy). And I had it make a web-form for all the data entry to produce the necessary PDFs.
svnt 1y ago
Completely absent is quantity of jobs. If e.g. ml engineer job postings go +40% from 200 to 280 and writer job postings go -50% (over two years) from 20000 to 10000, then we have a better idea of the impact. Without those data this report isn’t really quantifying impact on “180M jobs.”
- the_arun 1y ago
  Also decline in Security engineer by 0.35% doesn't make sense by conventional wisdom. Shouldn't it be increasing due to increased demand for security in all ai integrations?
  - raesene9 1y ago
    I wouldn't be surprised by a drop in security postings. Quite a few companies view security as an "overhead" so the siren call of reducing that overhead by introducing AI is a thing. Also for a lot of jobs in security it's pretty hard to measure how well it's being done, so if the AI based solutions are worse, that might not show up for a while
    - zingababba 1y ago
      People are sleeping on AI in sec, lots of lazy sec engs and architects going to be SoL sooner rather than later.
      - Ekaros 1y ago
        I could easily see those just running tool and then printing report being replaced by script running the tool and passing results to LLM and then sending report. And probably more useless architects.
    - monero-xmr 1y ago
      Security products and practitioners are the classic snake oil salesmen. They are actually sales and marketing roles for help closing deals by emphasizing some security aspect. True security comes from general IT practices followed by engineers themselves.
ramon156 1y ago
Such an interesting thing! I wonder why mobile engineer is down 5%. Maybe companies are moving to React Native / Flutter / Tauri / Electron ? Maybe Apps are less of a priority now? I'm not familiar in this industry so someone help me out here
- Simulacra 1y ago
  It depends on a lot of things, a lot of mobile development has shifted overseas, and this report only focuses on US jobs. I can't tell if this is from domestic AI, or outsourcing that uses AI.
- tppiotrowski 1y ago
  My experience using Claude code is that it's excellent at React/React Native and because apps are mostly a View layer the consequences of bad "vibes" are less far reaching.
smokel 1y ago
> First, let’s establish our benchmark: job postings dropped 8% in 2025 compared to the same period in 2024. Indeed reported a 7.3% year-over-year decline for US jobs recently, so this was a good sanity check, and told me that my data most likely was comprehensive. Doesn't this also suggest that the job market is in such an unusual state, that any further analysis makes little or no sense?
- B56b 1y ago
  Why would that be?
- Brendinooo 1y ago
  Yeah, I was wondering something similar, especially because there was a huge surge in tech job hiring during the pandemic, and part of the story from 2020-2025 is the industry regressing back to the trendline before then. Some people say the rise of ChatGPT (in what, 2023?) is part of that but I'm not convinced.
  - staplers 1y ago
    I suspect much of the data is influenced by speculative firing/rehiring as c-suites are exploring what they can actually skimp on and what they cannot.
jillesvangurp 1y ago
I've been getting lots of value out of AI coding tools; especially in the last few months. My assessment is that this will lead to more work to do, not less. It's not a zero sum game. More of what I do is baby sitting AIs. But together we do more than me with my team before. It will reflect in my hiring decisions as well. I want people that can do this responsibly (are able to tell good from bad code, are able to think for themselves, are able to get stuff done). My observation so far is that micromanaging AIs still sucks
- moneywoes 1y ago
  to play devils advocate when a company is faced with increasing pnl ( reducing headcount) or trying new ideas why won't they take the former since it is guaranteed
  - ETH_start 1y ago
    There's a ceiling on how much you can increase profit just by substituting existing human roles with compute. At some point you need to expand the workforce to raise profits further. And businesses are definitely willing to take risks for the potential of massively scaling up profits. The "risks" here being a larger workforce combined with more compute.
- georgeburdell 1y ago
  Yes, my observation so far is that management is less judicious with what projects we take on, not that we can get by with fewer people.
chaostheory 1y ago
Demand for senior leadership, like director and VP positions, is likely growing because the boomers are retiring.
trashb 1y ago
I wonder what the numbers look like if you compare pre-pandemic to now. To me it feels like during the pandemic companies found out they can fire a lot of people without a lot of backlash as long as they have a weak excuse. I feel like AI taking over jobs is such an excuse, especially considering creative jobs and the layers that are supposedly being replaced by AI in the article they call it "Creative roles that “execute” ".
moneywoes 1y ago
what does engineering look like if you remove ml engineer?
moneywoes 1y ago
how does one move from backend to ml engineer
moralestapia 1y ago
>180M jobs I doubt they have this data. I highly doubt they have this data.
- AznHisoka 1y ago
  OP here. You're right to be skeptical, there's an API here if you want to see a sample of the data: https://docs.bloomberry.com/reference/get_signals-jobs-json#/ https://docs.bloomberry.com/reference/get_signals-jobs-json#...
  - moralestapia 1y ago
    Thanks! Great data source. It's just that 180M seemed a bit high. 10x more than this one (also yours): https://bloomberry.com/blog/how-ai-is-disrupting-the-tech-job-market-data-from-20m-job-postings/ https://bloomberry.com/blog/how-ai-is-disrupting-the-tech-jo... Btw. I'm not arguing about the quality of your posts, which I consider really good :).
    - moralestapia 1y ago
      Back after 1 day. I did the homework. I analyzed the data, only ~100M job postings. There's a lot of repetition (some jobs are posted as much as >10 times). The actual number of real, unique jobs in there should be on the order of 10M and I'm being generous.
  - xtracto 1y ago
    Hey, I liked the analysis thanks! Any reason why you removed SDRs, Account Executives and similar Sales related roles? I would love to see how that compares to the data you do present. Thanks for sharing your work.
    - AznHisoka 1y ago
      The short answer is because I ran out of time :) but I will definitely do some analysis on sales jobs, and either add it to the post or make a new one
shagie 1y ago
Comparing US job openings from 2024 to 2025 seems to be selective. Is the job in sudden decline? Or a reset to a norm? Or is the decline something that has been happening over even a longer timeframe? Taking two years and drawing conclusions from those two years seems to miss larger pictures - especially when the mess of Covid and the pandemic years and that job market is mixed in with this. Yea, that's half a decade back but companies are still trying to figure out how much staff they need where. Photography? Yes, that's likely been impacted. Compare https://web.archive.org/web/20230124085038/https://www.bls.gov/ooh/media-and-communication/photographers.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20230124085038/https://www.bls.g... and https://www.bls.gov/ooh/media-and-communication/photographers.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/media-and-communication/photographer... and the rate of growth has changed. However I'll also draw attention to the estimates that there's only a few thousand open positions with that classification each year. This includes self employed stock photographers and artists - corporate photographers have been a hard thing to get for a much longer timeframe (I looked into it a little bit back in '09). Additionally, artistic photography is impacted by the amount of money that regular people are willing to spend at art festivals and the like - that's gone down irrespective of AI.
- rdsubhas 1y ago
  A few more steps (<< post-covid << covid << zero interest-rate << ...) to understand that there is no reliable baseline for this use case. This subset is not perfect, but good enough.
- GenerWork 1y ago
  I agree with this. I'm a product designer, and apparently there's "only" been a decrease in job postings of 2.6%. That doesn't seem bad, however in late 2022 through all of 2023 people were getting canned left and right and the market was incredibly tough. Can't really have big decreases when you're near the bottom of the hole.
adamzwasserman 1y ago
I perform a different analysis, focused more on the type of blue collar jobs that most people believe are the prime candidates for AI/robotic job replacement: https://emusings.substack.com/p/is-automation-going-to-eat-your-job https://emusings.substack.com/p/is-automation-going-to-eat-y...
- frm88 1y ago
  You switch from global automation to US car manufacturing in the first paragraph without a even a line break, basically equating them. The first graph you show is missing the corresponding table from the source which shows the exact opposite of what you have stated: the workforce had been steadily increasing until ~2019 and is in decline since then. Not massively but still it contradicts what you stated. Next you switch to Korea and the wage increase without aligning a corresponding price increase or adjust for inflation. Then you switch to the history on the industrial revolution. At that point I gave up because I know the point you are trying to make and I can see, you adjusted your samples to match that point.
  - adamzwasserman 1y ago
    I go where I have data. If you have additional data, I would be grateful for it and I will amend my article.
Epa095 1y ago
There is no causality analysis here, and really no justification for why AI is the reason for these job losses. An alternative explanation is the tariffs.
- malshe 1y ago
  Same is true for sustainability related jobs. Given the backlash first from Texas, Florida, and other red states and now from the Trump administration, it is not at all surprising that these jobs are in decline. AI has nothing to do with it.
sitzkrieg 1y ago
using job listings as input instantaneously garbage in/garbage out this experiment
ricardobeat 1y ago
The decline in frontend engineering jobs matches my personal impression from the past year. Smaller companies can do a lot with vibe coding alone, while larger companies can multiply their FE team productivity without making any new hires. Frontend code can be very repetitive / labour intensive, I bet that has made this more attainable than for other layers in the stack. Most mistakes in UI code are also easily corrected and have a very tiny impact radius.
- estimator7292 1y ago
  Yeah, I've found LLMs to be pretty decent at frontend stuff. I got a new job recently and my main task has been overhauling a Claude generated app into something functional. The backend is an unsalvageable disaster, but the frontend is actually pretty good. Which is great for me because I suck at UIs. I think if you have a solid backend already in place, an LLM can produce a pretty functional frontend with far less effort to fix up.
  - hylaride 1y ago
    I think that has more to do with the fact that JS is the most popular language in the world, especially available code to train LLMs on. Backend code is far less likely to be available because it's more likely to be closed source and is spread over many languages (Java, Python, C#, JS, Ruby, Go, PHP...).
alecco 1y ago
AI is taking jobs but for a different reason. Big Tech is in an AI race so they will shrink their staff or move jobs to India as much as possible to free capital for GPU datacenters. To hell with the consequences. Meta, Alphabet, and Oracle are even issuing almost $60 billions in bonds. Unheard of.
- spprashant 1y ago
  I am curious to see if jobs are actually moving offshore. Is there any data suggesting this? I was under the impression Big Tech is cutting jobs across the board, all regions.
  - alecco 1y ago
    Microsoft announces US $3bn investment over two years in India https://news.microsoft.com/en-in/microsoft-announces-us-3bn-investment-over-two-years-in-india-cloud-and-ai-infrastructure-to-accelerate-adoption-of-ai-skilling-and-innovation/ https://news.microsoft.com/en-in/microsoft-announces-us-3bn-... (Jan 2025) Google announces $15B investment in AI hub in India https://apnews.com/article/google-artificial-intelligence-visakhapatnam-modi-pichai-ba8fd50e11e41bbdb72097dd10262283 https://apnews.com/article/google-artificial-intelligence-vi... (3 weeks ago) [Indian] ex-Accenture CTO named Google Cloud’s Chief Product https://www.hindustantimes.com/trending/us/who-is-karthik-narain-sundar-pichai-welcomes-ex-accenture-cto-as-google-cloud-s-chief-product-and-business-officer-101761020362017.html https://www.hindustantimes.com/trending/us/who-is-karthik-na... (last week) (a lot of people speculate they named an Indian Accenture guy to move as much as possible to India) Big Tech giants defy US-India trade tensions, record strongest 12-month headcount growth in India in 3 years https://www.moneycontrol.com/technology/big-tech-giants-defy-us-india-trade-tensions-record-strongest-12-month-headcount-growth-in-india-in-3-years-article-13506803.html https://www.moneycontrol.com/technology/big-tech-giants-defy... (September) https://www.reuters.com/world/india/openai-launch-first-india-office-new-delhi-this-year-2025-08-22/ https://www.reuters.com/world/india/openai-launch-first-indi... https://www.anthropic.com/news/expanding-global-operations-to-india https://www.anthropic.com/news/expanding-global-operations-t... ...
    - 1y ago
adverbly 1y ago
> While I acknowledge not all job postings result in a hire, and some are ‘ghost jobs’, since I was comparing the relative growth in job titles, this didn’t seem like a big issue to me. Uhhh... That's a very big issue. In addition, there is also a glaringly obvious analysis error here related to layoffs/attrition. No offence but is this analysis vibe analyzed or something? All this is actually measuring is how the number of job listings in a specific industry have changed globally. That's not the same thing as "what jobs AI is replacing" at all! Like nurses decreasing 11%. There is 0% chance that AI is disrupting nurses. If anything, nursing is probably in more demand due to continual aging. It might just be that fewer people are quitting because of covid being over. The total number of nurses might be going up still! Are we just upvoting anything with AI in the title now? HN used to be pretty respectful of scientific methods. The methodology section here just reads like personal resume filler for showing that you can use AI. I mean I get it and I admire the hustle, but the quality here is pretty lacking overall. https://bloomberry.com/blog/i-analyzed-180m-jobs-to-see-what-jobs-ai-is-actually-replacing-today/#methodology https://bloomberry.com/blog/i-analyzed-180m-jobs-to-see-what...
y-c-o-m-b 1y ago
Would be cool to see cybersecurity covered here as well. I find it interesting how the machine learning engineer is exploding, but every engineer I talk to about it suggests these positions are mostly doing non-productive "bullshit" work and not really contributing much (arguably this applies to many tech jobs). Obviously that's anecdotal and probably not the real story, but it does seem like "machine learning engineer" is a broad term and probably doesn't tell the full story in itself.
shirro 1y ago
The US is in a recession when the AI bubble is taken out. So obviously jobs are in decline. Machine learning hires are up because there are billions of dollars in circular financing. While consumers are generally receptive to assistive machine learning like speech recognition, translation, limited auto-complete I think there is a huge backlash towards it being used to generate content and as far as I know all the major AI companies are losing huge amounts of money with every transaction. I am sure AI is being widely used as a reason for staff reductions but the reality is more likely sales are down, costs are up and head count is too high for current business requirements.
insane_dreamer 1y ago
This is part of the picture, but in terms of impact one also needs to look at this in terms of absolute numbers not just percentages. Two job positions can both drop by 10% and in one case it represents 100,000 jobs and in the other case 500,000 jobs.
ezhrv 1y ago
> I developed a taxonomy of 650 distinct, normalized job titles (graphics designer, nurse, etc) O’NET taxonomy is better for this task, IMHO.

200 points by AznHisoka 1y ago

I found this interesting: "Still, despite all the hype about how AI coding tools will replace software engineers, software engineering is still one of the most secure jobs you can have today, relative to most other white-collar jobs."

batchfile 1y ago
This makes sense to me. Until Software Engineers have automated away all the other jobs with AI & software they'll be safe. That's going to take a long time. Replacing software engineers with AI only affects the bottom line of software companies. Companies are usually fine with increasing the bottom line if they can exponentially increase the top line. I think software engineers will provide that capability for at least the next 10-15 years.
- sixhobbits 1y ago
  I think that's an over-simplistic view - at the moment there are many, many software engineers hired by companies who are betting on AI being madly profitable. If those expectations change, we could see more cascading layoffs, which will mean those engineers will go looking at more traditional places like banks, which means they'll stop hiring, which means it'll be harder to someone who is looking for a new job to find one, even though not all jobs have yet been automated.
  - geodel 1y ago
    True, besides actual software engineering is small part of overall IT/computer related work. There are far more analysts, managers(project, program, IT, agile etc), QA, operations and so on. So engineers who employers think are capable of leveraging AI and do 20 s/w engineer worth of work with 5 people will remain in demand for time being. Even without outright layoffs one can see how fast leverage of average IT engineer is disappearing. After 20 years of experience my value or feedback matters less than when I was 4 years into paid job. And it has far less to with AI so far. Most custom work of past is just a library, component or framework to use. And those are mandated to be used as it much easier to hire/replace teams to work on those. Now It may be always be true to have reusable components created but growth of IT industry kept people employed in ever greater numbers. However now it seems to be reaching limit. Leaving aside highly visible layoffs by US tech giants, growth is fading in countries like India with huge IT offshoring workforce. There are millions upon millions jobless fresh graduates waiting to get jobs with some IT degree.
    - chairmansteve 1y ago
      "There are millions upon millions jobless fresh graduates waiting to get jobs with some IT degree". Quality of those graduates is not always great. A talented and passionate SWE will always make a good living.
9rx 1y ago
At the end of the day, "AI" is just another programming language, albeit one that is much more accessible to the layman. When using AI, you become a software engineer. So it stands to reason that software engineering jobs are strong. But what about pay? Elevator operator jobs have never been more prevalent, but increased accessibility to the layman pushed the price to zero.
- dylan604 1y ago
  > When using AI, you become a software engineer. No. You do not. It may make you a developer, at best. I don't even call my self a software engineer, because I'm not. I'm a self taught coder that has spent 25+ years gaining experience, but I've never graduated from a school with any kind on engineering degree. I started CSE way back in the 90s, but stopped because life got in the way. Maybe you're joking, but you just know people actually feel this way. They have no idea the difference of a coder and an SWE, and flippant comments don't help
  - 9rx 1y ago
    > but I've never graduated from a school with any kind on engineering degree. So? Per the dictionary, engineer is clearly defined as: A person who designs, builds, or maintains machines, structures, or systems. There is no mention of school or having an engineering degree. It has always been a bit debatable if software fits into machine, structure, or system, granted, but we generally have come to agree that it does. And per the context of discussion, we've already established that it does for the sake of discussion. On that understanding, designing/building/maintaining a system in "LLM code" instead of C++ code is fundamentally no different. You're likely confusing engineer with Professional Engineer™, but that's something else entirely. That obviously has nothing to do with anything that we're talking about here.
- eMPee584 1y ago
  At the end of this day.. and of the next. But at some point, the tool will "suddenly" turn into a versatile agent, and that time might be a lot sooner than most expect (c.f. "exponential growth surprise factor"...)
- 1y ago
empath75 1y ago
Did the invention of compilers eliminate the need for programmers or make them more productive and valuable? LLM coding is really not in the most abstract sense any different from compiling a higher level language to a lower level language.
- stuffn 1y ago
  Certainly the jobs that were around for bespoke compilers were eliminated with the unification of compilers (GCC, Microsoft Visual C++). How many of those people transitioned to other roles I don't know. But the number of compiler jobs has been declining forever at this point.
- mywittyname 1y ago
  > LLM coding is really not in the most abstract sense any different from compiling a higher level language to a lower level language. Hard disagree here. Anecdotally, know a few people who can't write a Java program that will compile, who can leverage ChatGPT to produce functional websites. A good friend of mine ChatGPTed his way into a masters degree that involved a lot of coding. A good 97% of his degree was done by AI, and the other 3% was me helping him troubleshoot he couldn't get AI to solve. LLM is vastly different from a compiler/translator. Despite the joke, you can't just fire up Python with import website and have a functional website. But you can basically do that with LLMs, which will then add features as requested. It's not perfect, nor guaranteed to be functional, but it is quite a bit more capable than a compiler is for such tasks. At my work, the sales guys are using AI tools to rapidly prototype features on our website with prospects. While it doesn't do all the work, it can produce useful HTML templates that the front-end team can make functional.
saghm 1y ago
It's funny, almost every conversation I have about the fact that I work as a software engineer with new people I meet nowadays seems to include them asking if I'm worried about AI stealing my job. Maybe it's something that people ask everyone nowadays regardless of what industry they work in, but at least as far as I can tell, the type of work I do doesn't seem in any apparent danger of being replaced by AI any time soon.
- philipwhiuk 1y ago
  I assume that they think SWEs have a better grasp on it than non-tech folk.
- baq 1y ago
  as of today that's probably true, but if the labs manage to keep increasing the 50% time horizon (defined by METR as 'the length of tasks (measured by how long they take human professionals) that it can complete autonomously with 50% probability') at the current pace, it might not be for long. Exponentials are hard enough to forecast if you kinda sorta know the parameters, and we don't have that comfort today.
  - moneywoes 1y ago
    sorry, new to this, any helpful links on what metr is?
    - pmg101 1y ago
      https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-complete-long-tasks/ https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-com...
- jeffbee 1y ago
  It's because journalists are still big mad that the internet wrecked the newspaper business, therefore the news constantly reports lies about how the tech industry is collapsing. The more news you watch and the less personal contact you have with the industry, the more likely you are to believe that techies are jumping out of office windows in despair (hi, Mom).
moneywoes 1y ago
what about amount of churn in software engineering?
wongarsu 1y ago
There is a lot of induced demand in software engineering. We are still in the realm where cheaper software means that people want more and more complex software. And that demand increase is more than enough to offset any efficiency increases Meanwhile the amount of accounting that has to be done is pretty inelastic. Whenever accounting gets more efficient you just reduce the number of accountants instead of doing more accounting Creative is somewhere in between. Not completely static demand, but not extremely elastic either. The healthy rise in postings for creative directors indicates that the cost reduction has lead to more art being done, but the increase in demand isn't big enough to offset the job losses in the rank and file positions

edoceo 1y ago

I've got AI doing my taxes. It's saved me both bookkeeping and CPA costs.

moneywoes 1y ago
which model? what is your workflow like
- edoceo 1y ago
  Flipping between GPTs and Gemini. Mostly having it help with interpretation of instructions and giving direction to find that data in my books. Stuff my CPA did. Help me categorize an expense (easy). And I had it make a web-form for all the data entry to produce the necessary PDFs.

svnt 1y ago

Completely absent is quantity of jobs. If e.g. ml engineer job postings go +40% from 200 to 280 and writer job postings go -50% (over two years) from 20000 to 10000, then we have a better idea of the impact. Without those data this report isn’t really quantifying impact on “180M jobs.”

the_arun 1y ago
Also decline in Security engineer by 0.35% doesn't make sense by conventional wisdom. Shouldn't it be increasing due to increased demand for security in all ai integrations?
- raesene9 1y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised by a drop in security postings. Quite a few companies view security as an "overhead" so the siren call of reducing that overhead by introducing AI is a thing. Also for a lot of jobs in security it's pretty hard to measure how well it's being done, so if the AI based solutions are worse, that might not show up for a while
  - zingababba 1y ago
    People are sleeping on AI in sec, lots of lazy sec engs and architects going to be SoL sooner rather than later.
    - Ekaros 1y ago
      I could easily see those just running tool and then printing report being replaced by script running the tool and passing results to LLM and then sending report. And probably more useless architects.
  - monero-xmr 1y ago
    Security products and practitioners are the classic snake oil salesmen. They are actually sales and marketing roles for help closing deals by emphasizing some security aspect. True security comes from general IT practices followed by engineers themselves.

ramon156 1y ago

Such an interesting thing! I wonder why mobile engineer is down 5%. Maybe companies are moving to React Native / Flutter / Tauri / Electron ? Maybe Apps are less of a priority now? I'm not familiar in this industry so someone help me out here

Simulacra 1y ago
It depends on a lot of things, a lot of mobile development has shifted overseas, and this report only focuses on US jobs. I can't tell if this is from domestic AI, or outsourcing that uses AI.
tppiotrowski 1y ago
My experience using Claude code is that it's excellent at React/React Native and because apps are mostly a View layer the consequences of bad "vibes" are less far reaching.

smokel 1y ago

> First, let’s establish our benchmark: job postings dropped 8% in 2025 compared to the same period in 2024. Indeed reported a 7.3% year-over-year decline for US jobs recently, so this was a good sanity check, and told me that my data most likely was comprehensive. Doesn't this also suggest that the job market is in such an unusual state, that any further analysis makes little or no sense?

B56b 1y ago
Why would that be?
Brendinooo 1y ago
Yeah, I was wondering something similar, especially because there was a huge surge in tech job hiring during the pandemic, and part of the story from 2020-2025 is the industry regressing back to the trendline before then. Some people say the rise of ChatGPT (in what, 2023?) is part of that but I'm not convinced.
- staplers 1y ago
  I suspect much of the data is influenced by speculative firing/rehiring as c-suites are exploring what they can actually skimp on and what they cannot.

jillesvangurp 1y ago

I've been getting lots of value out of AI coding tools; especially in the last few months. My assessment is that this will lead to more work to do, not less. It's not a zero sum game. More of what I do is baby sitting AIs. But together we do more than me with my team before. It will reflect in my hiring decisions as well. I want people that can do this responsibly (are able to tell good from bad code, are able to think for themselves, are able to get stuff done). My observation so far is that micromanaging AIs still sucks

moneywoes 1y ago
to play devils advocate when a company is faced with increasing pnl ( reducing headcount) or trying new ideas why won't they take the former since it is guaranteed
- ETH_start 1y ago
  There's a ceiling on how much you can increase profit just by substituting existing human roles with compute. At some point you need to expand the workforce to raise profits further. And businesses are definitely willing to take risks for the potential of massively scaling up profits. The "risks" here being a larger workforce combined with more compute.
georgeburdell 1y ago
Yes, my observation so far is that management is less judicious with what projects we take on, not that we can get by with fewer people.

chaostheory 1y ago

Demand for senior leadership, like director and VP positions, is likely growing because the boomers are retiring.

trashb 1y ago

I wonder what the numbers look like if you compare pre-pandemic to now. To me it feels like during the pandemic companies found out they can fire a lot of people without a lot of backlash as long as they have a weak excuse. I feel like AI taking over jobs is such an excuse, especially considering creative jobs and the layers that are supposedly being replaced by AI in the article they call it "Creative roles that “execute” ".

moneywoes 1y ago

what does engineering look like if you remove ml engineer?

moneywoes 1y ago

how does one move from backend to ml engineer

moralestapia 1y ago

>180M jobs I doubt they have this data. I highly doubt they have this data.

AznHisoka 1y ago
OP here. You're right to be skeptical, there's an API here if you want to see a sample of the data: https://docs.bloomberry.com/reference/get_signals-jobs-json#/ https://docs.bloomberry.com/reference/get_signals-jobs-json#...
- moralestapia 1y ago
  Thanks! Great data source. It's just that 180M seemed a bit high. 10x more than this one (also yours): https://bloomberry.com/blog/how-ai-is-disrupting-the-tech-job-market-data-from-20m-job-postings/ https://bloomberry.com/blog/how-ai-is-disrupting-the-tech-jo... Btw. I'm not arguing about the quality of your posts, which I consider really good :).
  - moralestapia 1y ago
    Back after 1 day. I did the homework. I analyzed the data, only ~100M job postings. There's a lot of repetition (some jobs are posted as much as >10 times). The actual number of real, unique jobs in there should be on the order of 10M and I'm being generous.
- xtracto 1y ago
  Hey, I liked the analysis thanks! Any reason why you removed SDRs, Account Executives and similar Sales related roles? I would love to see how that compares to the data you do present. Thanks for sharing your work.
  - AznHisoka 1y ago
    The short answer is because I ran out of time :) but I will definitely do some analysis on sales jobs, and either add it to the post or make a new one

shagie 1y ago

Comparing US job openings from 2024 to 2025 seems to be selective. Is the job in sudden decline? Or a reset to a norm? Or is the decline something that has been happening over even a longer timeframe? Taking two years and drawing conclusions from those two years seems to miss larger pictures - especially when the mess of Covid and the pandemic years and that job market is mixed in with this. Yea, that's half a decade back but companies are still trying to figure out how much staff they need where. Photography? Yes, that's likely been impacted. Compare https://web.archive.org/web/20230124085038/https://www.bls.gov/ooh/media-and-communication/photographers.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20230124085038/https://www.bls.g... and https://www.bls.gov/ooh/media-and-communication/photographers.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/media-and-communication/photographer... and the rate of growth has changed. However I'll also draw attention to the estimates that there's only a few thousand open positions with that classification each year. This includes self employed stock photographers and artists - corporate photographers have been a hard thing to get for a much longer timeframe (I looked into it a little bit back in '09). Additionally, artistic photography is impacted by the amount of money that regular people are willing to spend at art festivals and the like - that's gone down irrespective of AI.

rdsubhas 1y ago
A few more steps (<< post-covid << covid << zero interest-rate << ...) to understand that there is no reliable baseline for this use case. This subset is not perfect, but good enough.
GenerWork 1y ago
I agree with this. I'm a product designer, and apparently there's "only" been a decrease in job postings of 2.6%. That doesn't seem bad, however in late 2022 through all of 2023 people were getting canned left and right and the market was incredibly tough. Can't really have big decreases when you're near the bottom of the hole.

adamzwasserman 1y ago

I perform a different analysis, focused more on the type of blue collar jobs that most people believe are the prime candidates for AI/robotic job replacement: https://emusings.substack.com/p/is-automation-going-to-eat-your-job https://emusings.substack.com/p/is-automation-going-to-eat-y...

frm88 1y ago
You switch from global automation to US car manufacturing in the first paragraph without a even a line break, basically equating them. The first graph you show is missing the corresponding table from the source which shows the exact opposite of what you have stated: the workforce had been steadily increasing until ~2019 and is in decline since then. Not massively but still it contradicts what you stated. Next you switch to Korea and the wage increase without aligning a corresponding price increase or adjust for inflation. Then you switch to the history on the industrial revolution. At that point I gave up because I know the point you are trying to make and I can see, you adjusted your samples to match that point.
- adamzwasserman 1y ago
  I go where I have data. If you have additional data, I would be grateful for it and I will amend my article.

Epa095 1y ago

There is no causality analysis here, and really no justification for why AI is the reason for these job losses. An alternative explanation is the tariffs.

malshe 1y ago
Same is true for sustainability related jobs. Given the backlash first from Texas, Florida, and other red states and now from the Trump administration, it is not at all surprising that these jobs are in decline. AI has nothing to do with it.

sitzkrieg 1y ago

using job listings as input instantaneously garbage in/garbage out this experiment

ricardobeat 1y ago

The decline in frontend engineering jobs matches my personal impression from the past year. Smaller companies can do a lot with vibe coding alone, while larger companies can multiply their FE team productivity without making any new hires. Frontend code can be very repetitive / labour intensive, I bet that has made this more attainable than for other layers in the stack. Most mistakes in UI code are also easily corrected and have a very tiny impact radius.

estimator7292 1y ago
Yeah, I've found LLMs to be pretty decent at frontend stuff. I got a new job recently and my main task has been overhauling a Claude generated app into something functional. The backend is an unsalvageable disaster, but the frontend is actually pretty good. Which is great for me because I suck at UIs. I think if you have a solid backend already in place, an LLM can produce a pretty functional frontend with far less effort to fix up.
- hylaride 1y ago
  I think that has more to do with the fact that JS is the most popular language in the world, especially available code to train LLMs on. Backend code is far less likely to be available because it's more likely to be closed source and is spread over many languages (Java, Python, C#, JS, Ruby, Go, PHP...).

alecco 1y ago

AI is taking jobs but for a different reason. Big Tech is in an AI race so they will shrink their staff or move jobs to India as much as possible to free capital for GPU datacenters. To hell with the consequences. Meta, Alphabet, and Oracle are even issuing almost $60 billions in bonds. Unheard of.

spprashant 1y ago
I am curious to see if jobs are actually moving offshore. Is there any data suggesting this? I was under the impression Big Tech is cutting jobs across the board, all regions.
- alecco 1y ago
  Microsoft announces US $3bn investment over two years in India https://news.microsoft.com/en-in/microsoft-announces-us-3bn-investment-over-two-years-in-india-cloud-and-ai-infrastructure-to-accelerate-adoption-of-ai-skilling-and-innovation/ https://news.microsoft.com/en-in/microsoft-announces-us-3bn-... (Jan 2025) Google announces $15B investment in AI hub in India https://apnews.com/article/google-artificial-intelligence-visakhapatnam-modi-pichai-ba8fd50e11e41bbdb72097dd10262283 https://apnews.com/article/google-artificial-intelligence-vi... (3 weeks ago) [Indian] ex-Accenture CTO named Google Cloud’s Chief Product https://www.hindustantimes.com/trending/us/who-is-karthik-narain-sundar-pichai-welcomes-ex-accenture-cto-as-google-cloud-s-chief-product-and-business-officer-101761020362017.html https://www.hindustantimes.com/trending/us/who-is-karthik-na... (last week) (a lot of people speculate they named an Indian Accenture guy to move as much as possible to India) Big Tech giants defy US-India trade tensions, record strongest 12-month headcount growth in India in 3 years https://www.moneycontrol.com/technology/big-tech-giants-defy-us-india-trade-tensions-record-strongest-12-month-headcount-growth-in-india-in-3-years-article-13506803.html https://www.moneycontrol.com/technology/big-tech-giants-defy... (September) https://www.reuters.com/world/india/openai-launch-first-india-office-new-delhi-this-year-2025-08-22/ https://www.reuters.com/world/india/openai-launch-first-indi... https://www.anthropic.com/news/expanding-global-operations-to-india https://www.anthropic.com/news/expanding-global-operations-t... ...
  - 1y ago

adverbly 1y ago

> While I acknowledge not all job postings result in a hire, and some are ‘ghost jobs’, since I was comparing the relative growth in job titles, this didn’t seem like a big issue to me. Uhhh... That's a very big issue. In addition, there is also a glaringly obvious analysis error here related to layoffs/attrition. No offence but is this analysis vibe analyzed or something? All this is actually measuring is how the number of job listings in a specific industry have changed globally. That's not the same thing as "what jobs AI is replacing" at all! Like nurses decreasing 11%. There is 0% chance that AI is disrupting nurses. If anything, nursing is probably in more demand due to continual aging. It might just be that fewer people are quitting because of covid being over. The total number of nurses might be going up still! Are we just upvoting anything with AI in the title now? HN used to be pretty respectful of scientific methods. The methodology section here just reads like personal resume filler for showing that you can use AI. I mean I get it and I admire the hustle, but the quality here is pretty lacking overall. https://bloomberry.com/blog/i-analyzed-180m-jobs-to-see-what-jobs-ai-is-actually-replacing-today/#methodology https://bloomberry.com/blog/i-analyzed-180m-jobs-to-see-what...

y-c-o-m-b 1y ago

Would be cool to see cybersecurity covered here as well. I find it interesting how the machine learning engineer is exploding, but every engineer I talk to about it suggests these positions are mostly doing non-productive "bullshit" work and not really contributing much (arguably this applies to many tech jobs). Obviously that's anecdotal and probably not the real story, but it does seem like "machine learning engineer" is a broad term and probably doesn't tell the full story in itself.

shirro 1y ago

The US is in a recession when the AI bubble is taken out. So obviously jobs are in decline. Machine learning hires are up because there are billions of dollars in circular financing. While consumers are generally receptive to assistive machine learning like speech recognition, translation, limited auto-complete I think there is a huge backlash towards it being used to generate content and as far as I know all the major AI companies are losing huge amounts of money with every transaction. I am sure AI is being widely used as a reason for staff reductions but the reality is more likely sales are down, costs are up and head count is too high for current business requirements.

insane_dreamer 1y ago

This is part of the picture, but in terms of impact one also needs to look at this in terms of absolute numbers not just percentages. Two job positions can both drop by 10% and in one case it represents 100,000 jobs and in the other case 500,000 jobs.

ezhrv 1y ago

> I developed a taxonomy of 650 distinct, normalized job titles (graphics designer, nurse, etc) O’NET taxonomy is better for this task, IMHO.