6 ms·

Tech jobs are getting demolished in ways not seen since 2008

66 points by elsewhen 7mo ago

deadbabe 7mo ago
Crazy that the job you hold in tech right now, might be the last tech job you ever hold. Cherish it.
- lich_king 7mo ago
  I mean this with respect, but if this is your sincere worldview, I'd suggest you step outside the tech news bubble a bit more. There are some white collar jobs, possibly including many software engineers, that are at risk from gen AI. I guess there's some delicious irony in that, given that not long ago, we've been telling blue-collar workers to deal with economic shifts and learn to code. But short of some LessWrong fanfic about self-assembling nanobot AGI doomsday, there's plenty of other things for humans to do for a living.
  - testbjjl 7mo ago
    I think the GP and many conflate tech jobs and relative high paying jobs. If you remove high paying from your filters you’ll get more results. Many have not accounted for that. Like most things, if you don’t own the means of production or income generation, your salary is just a loan. Once you’re out and can’t get back in and lose the things you’ve acquired it becomes more clear. The upside, we then start to treat one another better and can see more clearly how most were never actually in the club. After civil disruption comes better policy, historically.
- romaaeterna 7mo ago
  That will always be true for some individuals. But the sector isn't going away. Everyone is retooling right now and it's hard to tell what this generation of AI is even going to do to jobs. I strongly suspect that the companies that manage the retooling most successfully will be hiring more people not less.
abuani 7mo ago
I'm surprised the article or the source for it didn't dive deeper into the impact the changes to H1B have had on the tech job numbers. Mind you I'm not trying to argue for or against them, but I find it hard to believe the changes aren't contributing at least a small amount to the drop. The other thing not mentioned is the impact on the end for ZIRP. Every tech company with a pulse over hired such a staggering amount during the pandemic. It's not surprising these companies are returning to reality and not hiring back to the same levels.
- the_real_cher 7mo ago
  Its impossible to ignore when a company laysoff thousands but then has thousands if verifiable H1Bs in the H1B logs. I agree with you. I'm not arguing for or against it. I do think leaving it out of the conversation is a willful choice and blaming job loss solely on AI is becoming propaganda at this point.
  - alephnerd 7mo ago
    Employees on work visas are the first and easiest employees to lay off because we don't see our insurance premiums rise when laying them off (it's what most of us did early during COVID). And now with the $100K fees we have no incentive to hire most employees on a work visa anyhow. Hear that sound? It's the sound of GCCs opening in Poland, Romania, Israel, and India with those employees who were on work visas in the US now in charge. If you remain in a major tech hub like the Bay or NYC where you are close to early stage capital, you are secure as it gives you a density of established and early stage employers which makes job hunting easier. If you are in an inshoring hub like Atlanta, RTP, Denver, Minneapolis, or Pittsburg you're in big trouble. If you are remote first and lack a network of friends and colleagues in the Bay and NYC who can personally vouch and refer you for roles at their companies you're in big trouble. If you are a bootcamp grad, you are also in trouble so get the cheapest online degree you can that forces you to take a real algorithms and systems programming class. Edit: can't reply > The matter of fact nature of your reply sounds highly, personally anecdotal. Given the confluence of moving parts from AI and policy/politics alone, let alone potential regional instability and the effects on US financial markets, it’s really impossible to speak to the next quarter, let alone year/years. Not saying your prediction is not correct, but few are Well, duh. This is an anonymous forum, not a research paper. That said, I am speaking from my personal experience, and a couple of other decisionmakers on HN have also voiced similar sentiments on here. It's free advice - take or don't. It's not my problem. To quote Buck Strickland, "I ain't yo daddy".
nemo44x 7mo ago
We went from “how can AI be useful to me” to “how can I be useful to AI”. Or headed that way.
- rramadass 7mo ago
  Very nicely worded! Everybody needs to think about how they can become the "human in the loop" in any AI based system. Whether we like it or not, all companies are looking to be AI primary and Human secondary with the only limiting factor being cost.
  - testbjjl 7mo ago
    I just agreed to my first terms of engagement with a company to do this very thing. There is strong demand for enabling SMB, especially tech adjacent businesses to do and know more for less. The job loses in the coming quarters will not be limited to technology. Personally I think governments will force higher taxes on AI companies driving up the cost of tokens exponentially sooner than later. Paying a politician to pass favorable legislation becomes more difficult when their constituents are in food lines. Not impossible, but difficult. The best solution I think is good leadership. We don’t have that at the moment. That’s not just a “Trump thing,” though his open grift and dishonesty is really dangerous, we need leaders who can see and understand the moving parts and make decisions that benefit us all.
  - nemo44x 7mo ago
    It’s very uncomfortable. But yes, need to figure out how you differentiate and create extreme value with AI.
sakopov 7mo ago
I remember going to school for computer science back in 2004 and literally everyone around me thought I was an idiot. I worked a part time shift at a grocery store and 2 of my coworkers were CS grads without any job offers. Then in 2008 I graduated and the financial market collapsed. My first real programming job paid less than my grocery store job but I was happy I had my foot in the door. I don't remember when the market picked up but I don't think the layoffs were as drawn out as they are today. At least back than you kinda new why everyone was on a hiring freeze. Today there are so many economic factors and a massively disrupting technology that it feels messier than ever before.
- jemmyw 7mo ago
  Why did they think you were an idiot? I graduated in 2004 and I don't recall anyone thinking a CS degree was a bad idea.
  - tforcram 7mo ago
    The dot-com bubble/crash had just happened and a lot of non-tech folks thought it would never come back. I remember telling my uncle I was going to intern at Amazon around 2005/6 and him asking me in all seriousness, "aren't they bankrupt?"
  - sakopov 7mo ago
    Perhaps your experience varied with zip code, but in the area where I lived at the time, the perception was that software industry was in a decline and acquiring a degree in the field seemed like a dubious bet. Maybe the sentiment was different if you were in the Bay area.
    - jemmyw 7mo ago
      I was in the UK. The effects of the dot com bubble did extend there but I think we had a very different view on it.
wepple 7mo ago
Extensive discussion on this recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47278426 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47278426 (This looks like a BI rehash of that topic)
650 7mo ago
We are only slowing growth after a big jump in hiring during COVID 2020-2022... these attention grabbing slop headlines are junk news. "We’ve lost 50k jobs last two years after decades of adding 100k+ every year including the pandemic highs of 300k+ per year. Total employment remains way above 2000s, 2008 and 2020 unlike the title suggests." See the thread here for more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47278426 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47278426 "Business Insider" is a waste of time in my opinion.
gaigalas 7mo ago
I got my first big job in 2008. Fond memories of that time!
- shermantanktop 7mo ago
  I did well through the 2000 and 2008 crashes. Well, lost my job in 2000 but got an upgrade in 4 months. Looking backward it looks like everyone suffered during these crashes, but in fact many individuals did fine or even benefited from the realignments.
bryanlarsen 7mo ago
2008 & 2020 were bad for tech jobs, but 2002 was worse, in my experience. 2026 feels a lot more like 2002 than 2008.
jmyeet 7mo ago
It has been the dream of the wealthy to eliminate labor since at least the Industrial Revolution (and probably much longer). Workers are annoying. You have to pay them. They demand things like time off and safe working conditions. They hurt profits. Through the 20th century we saw increased automation that displaced so-caleld blue collar workers who were repeatedly told "get better skills" like this was somehow their fault. In 2000 we had the dot-com crash that saw massive unemployment in the tech sector. A lot of these people left the industry and never came back. The software engineer to plumber pipeline was a real thing. 2008 saw a crash that eliminated entry-level jobs in many white-collar fields that never came back. This decimated the millenials who did the right thing, went to college and accurred massive debt and then found there were no jobs for them so ended up as baristas, working at Walmart or, ultimately, doing gig work. And now in the mid-2020s, the tech people who told people to do computer science in college are now seeing automation come for their jobs. And now it's somehow an emergency worth addressing. Weird. The core problem is that if the wealthy succeed and replace all the workers, who will buy their products? How will society survive if people don't have jobs? The only growth area is healthcare because you need everyone from orderlies to surgeons, at least until automation comes for those jobs too. This is why I think we're headed for systemic collapse. The flood waters keep rising and we're running out of high ground to retreat to.
- kakacik 7mo ago
  > the tech people who told people to do computer science in college are now seeing automation come for their jobs. And now it's somehow an emergency worth addressing. You are in tech mostly forum, is it really that hard to grok why we discuss this more than other professions? Most folks out there are just happy with llms that they do a better search or help them do bureaucracy more efficiently and don't bother with it further.
  - jmyeet 7mo ago
    Therein lies the problem with hyper-individualism. It's not a virtue. It's just selfish. And short-sighted. It's the basis of First They Came [1]. It's even worse for tech people because tech fundamentally is about systems. Society is a system. The reaons some of us care so much about how the least of us are affected by these changes is because the fabric of society depends on so many people and it hurts all of us when society falls apart. You don't have to be disabled to care about disabled rights, for example, because everybody is one incident away from being disabled. Just look at long Covid. This isn't some Darwinian game where the "strong" "win". Or at least it doesn't have to be. [1]: https://hmd.org.uk/resource/first-they-came-by-pastor-martin-niemoller/ https://hmd.org.uk/resource/first-they-came-by-pastor-martin...
hiremelocally 7mo ago
New roles at my FAANG company are mostly outside HCOL areas, and often outside the US. It's not just outsourcing. These roles have real hiring standards, are getting real work for real teams, and they're remote. Outsourcing feels different this time because it's not some offshore contract team; it's full-time company stuff. Makes me wonder if it's just because WFH proved it works, so why not hire from Krakow? Edit: US policies towards H-1Bs and attitudes towards immigration add to this.
- alephnerd 7mo ago
  > Makes me wonder if it's just because WFH proved it works, so why not hire from Krakow? As someone in the room when those decisions were/are made, pretty much. Additionally, when the COVID recession began (before the stimulus package) most employers were laying off employees on work visas or giving them the option to open and expand offices in their home country. A lot of senior Indian and Polish Googlers took the offer, and that's how you saw the massive Google expansion in India and Poland over the past few years. Additionally, the Indian, Polish, Israeli, Romanian, and other governments are giving massive subsidizes to attract GCCs, while states like NC and GA which used to offer subsidizes to open offices in RTP became much less responsive and inefficient due to domestic politics (turns out it's easier for local politicans to be elected on culture war topics instead of tech hub expansion). I can pick up a phone right now and get connected with senior bureaucrats in Czechia, Poland, and even the UK and India in a day if I offer to open a $20M R&D hub - most US states don't do that anymore. Edit: can't reply > For better or for worse, the most desirable places in the US not only refuse to participate in the race to the bottom anymore Absolutely, but tbf, you don't really need subsidizes to attract business in an already established hub becuase the ecosystem already exists and the risks and mitigation strategies are well understood. A subsidy helps when I am entering a new or unknown ecosystem to mitigate risk. Additionally, local governments in the major hubs like NYC (even under Mamdani) and SF are fairly responsive to business needs and requests. This is why I keep harping that in the world we live in today, American SWEs need to live in the major tech hubs because the density of employers and opportunities is significant, which reduces risks of becoming structurally unemployed as a SWE.
  - 7mo ago
asmodeuslucifer 7mo ago
I'm going to repurpose a quote I saw from a 'distinguished' (old) science fiction writer, I can't remember who. I know writers who have stopped selling, but I don't know any writers who have stopped writing.
pllbnk 7mo ago
I have this thought experiment. If my employer suggested to pay me 5 year's worth of salary if I could successfully replace myself with an AI. I would be pretty happy to take the money and run. However, I don't see any realistic way to do it just yet.

66 points by elsewhen 7mo ago

deadbabe 7mo ago

Crazy that the job you hold in tech right now, might be the last tech job you ever hold. Cherish it.

lich_king 7mo ago
I mean this with respect, but if this is your sincere worldview, I'd suggest you step outside the tech news bubble a bit more. There are some white collar jobs, possibly including many software engineers, that are at risk from gen AI. I guess there's some delicious irony in that, given that not long ago, we've been telling blue-collar workers to deal with economic shifts and learn to code. But short of some LessWrong fanfic about self-assembling nanobot AGI doomsday, there's plenty of other things for humans to do for a living.
- testbjjl 7mo ago
  I think the GP and many conflate tech jobs and relative high paying jobs. If you remove high paying from your filters you’ll get more results. Many have not accounted for that. Like most things, if you don’t own the means of production or income generation, your salary is just a loan. Once you’re out and can’t get back in and lose the things you’ve acquired it becomes more clear. The upside, we then start to treat one another better and can see more clearly how most were never actually in the club. After civil disruption comes better policy, historically.
romaaeterna 7mo ago
That will always be true for some individuals. But the sector isn't going away. Everyone is retooling right now and it's hard to tell what this generation of AI is even going to do to jobs. I strongly suspect that the companies that manage the retooling most successfully will be hiring more people not less.

abuani 7mo ago

I'm surprised the article or the source for it didn't dive deeper into the impact the changes to H1B have had on the tech job numbers. Mind you I'm not trying to argue for or against them, but I find it hard to believe the changes aren't contributing at least a small amount to the drop. The other thing not mentioned is the impact on the end for ZIRP. Every tech company with a pulse over hired such a staggering amount during the pandemic. It's not surprising these companies are returning to reality and not hiring back to the same levels.

the_real_cher 7mo ago
Its impossible to ignore when a company laysoff thousands but then has thousands if verifiable H1Bs in the H1B logs. I agree with you. I'm not arguing for or against it. I do think leaving it out of the conversation is a willful choice and blaming job loss solely on AI is becoming propaganda at this point.
- alephnerd 7mo ago
  Employees on work visas are the first and easiest employees to lay off because we don't see our insurance premiums rise when laying them off (it's what most of us did early during COVID). And now with the $100K fees we have no incentive to hire most employees on a work visa anyhow. Hear that sound? It's the sound of GCCs opening in Poland, Romania, Israel, and India with those employees who were on work visas in the US now in charge. If you remain in a major tech hub like the Bay or NYC where you are close to early stage capital, you are secure as it gives you a density of established and early stage employers which makes job hunting easier. If you are in an inshoring hub like Atlanta, RTP, Denver, Minneapolis, or Pittsburg you're in big trouble. If you are remote first and lack a network of friends and colleagues in the Bay and NYC who can personally vouch and refer you for roles at their companies you're in big trouble. If you are a bootcamp grad, you are also in trouble so get the cheapest online degree you can that forces you to take a real algorithms and systems programming class. Edit: can't reply > The matter of fact nature of your reply sounds highly, personally anecdotal. Given the confluence of moving parts from AI and policy/politics alone, let alone potential regional instability and the effects on US financial markets, it’s really impossible to speak to the next quarter, let alone year/years. Not saying your prediction is not correct, but few are Well, duh. This is an anonymous forum, not a research paper. That said, I am speaking from my personal experience, and a couple of other decisionmakers on HN have also voiced similar sentiments on here. It's free advice - take or don't. It's not my problem. To quote Buck Strickland, "I ain't yo daddy".

nemo44x 7mo ago

We went from “how can AI be useful to me” to “how can I be useful to AI”. Or headed that way.

rramadass 7mo ago
Very nicely worded! Everybody needs to think about how they can become the "human in the loop" in any AI based system. Whether we like it or not, all companies are looking to be AI primary and Human secondary with the only limiting factor being cost.
- testbjjl 7mo ago
  I just agreed to my first terms of engagement with a company to do this very thing. There is strong demand for enabling SMB, especially tech adjacent businesses to do and know more for less. The job loses in the coming quarters will not be limited to technology. Personally I think governments will force higher taxes on AI companies driving up the cost of tokens exponentially sooner than later. Paying a politician to pass favorable legislation becomes more difficult when their constituents are in food lines. Not impossible, but difficult. The best solution I think is good leadership. We don’t have that at the moment. That’s not just a “Trump thing,” though his open grift and dishonesty is really dangerous, we need leaders who can see and understand the moving parts and make decisions that benefit us all.
- nemo44x 7mo ago
  It’s very uncomfortable. But yes, need to figure out how you differentiate and create extreme value with AI.

sakopov 7mo ago

I remember going to school for computer science back in 2004 and literally everyone around me thought I was an idiot. I worked a part time shift at a grocery store and 2 of my coworkers were CS grads without any job offers. Then in 2008 I graduated and the financial market collapsed. My first real programming job paid less than my grocery store job but I was happy I had my foot in the door. I don't remember when the market picked up but I don't think the layoffs were as drawn out as they are today. At least back than you kinda new why everyone was on a hiring freeze. Today there are so many economic factors and a massively disrupting technology that it feels messier than ever before.

jemmyw 7mo ago
Why did they think you were an idiot? I graduated in 2004 and I don't recall anyone thinking a CS degree was a bad idea.
- tforcram 7mo ago
  The dot-com bubble/crash had just happened and a lot of non-tech folks thought it would never come back. I remember telling my uncle I was going to intern at Amazon around 2005/6 and him asking me in all seriousness, "aren't they bankrupt?"
- sakopov 7mo ago
  Perhaps your experience varied with zip code, but in the area where I lived at the time, the perception was that software industry was in a decline and acquiring a degree in the field seemed like a dubious bet. Maybe the sentiment was different if you were in the Bay area.
  - jemmyw 7mo ago
    I was in the UK. The effects of the dot com bubble did extend there but I think we had a very different view on it.

wepple 7mo ago

Extensive discussion on this recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47278426 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47278426 (This looks like a BI rehash of that topic)

650 7mo ago

We are only slowing growth after a big jump in hiring during COVID 2020-2022... these attention grabbing slop headlines are junk news. "We’ve lost 50k jobs last two years after decades of adding 100k+ every year including the pandemic highs of 300k+ per year. Total employment remains way above 2000s, 2008 and 2020 unlike the title suggests." See the thread here for more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47278426 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47278426 "Business Insider" is a waste of time in my opinion.

gaigalas 7mo ago

I got my first big job in 2008. Fond memories of that time!

shermantanktop 7mo ago
I did well through the 2000 and 2008 crashes. Well, lost my job in 2000 but got an upgrade in 4 months. Looking backward it looks like everyone suffered during these crashes, but in fact many individuals did fine or even benefited from the realignments.

bryanlarsen 7mo ago

2008 & 2020 were bad for tech jobs, but 2002 was worse, in my experience. 2026 feels a lot more like 2002 than 2008.

jmyeet 7mo ago

It has been the dream of the wealthy to eliminate labor since at least the Industrial Revolution (and probably much longer). Workers are annoying. You have to pay them. They demand things like time off and safe working conditions. They hurt profits. Through the 20th century we saw increased automation that displaced so-caleld blue collar workers who were repeatedly told "get better skills" like this was somehow their fault. In 2000 we had the dot-com crash that saw massive unemployment in the tech sector. A lot of these people left the industry and never came back. The software engineer to plumber pipeline was a real thing. 2008 saw a crash that eliminated entry-level jobs in many white-collar fields that never came back. This decimated the millenials who did the right thing, went to college and accurred massive debt and then found there were no jobs for them so ended up as baristas, working at Walmart or, ultimately, doing gig work. And now in the mid-2020s, the tech people who told people to do computer science in college are now seeing automation come for their jobs. And now it's somehow an emergency worth addressing. Weird. The core problem is that if the wealthy succeed and replace all the workers, who will buy their products? How will society survive if people don't have jobs? The only growth area is healthcare because you need everyone from orderlies to surgeons, at least until automation comes for those jobs too. This is why I think we're headed for systemic collapse. The flood waters keep rising and we're running out of high ground to retreat to.

kakacik 7mo ago
> the tech people who told people to do computer science in college are now seeing automation come for their jobs. And now it's somehow an emergency worth addressing. You are in tech mostly forum, is it really that hard to grok why we discuss this more than other professions? Most folks out there are just happy with llms that they do a better search or help them do bureaucracy more efficiently and don't bother with it further.
- jmyeet 7mo ago
  Therein lies the problem with hyper-individualism. It's not a virtue. It's just selfish. And short-sighted. It's the basis of First They Came [1]. It's even worse for tech people because tech fundamentally is about systems. Society is a system. The reaons some of us care so much about how the least of us are affected by these changes is because the fabric of society depends on so many people and it hurts all of us when society falls apart. You don't have to be disabled to care about disabled rights, for example, because everybody is one incident away from being disabled. Just look at long Covid. This isn't some Darwinian game where the "strong" "win". Or at least it doesn't have to be. [1]: https://hmd.org.uk/resource/first-they-came-by-pastor-martin-niemoller/ https://hmd.org.uk/resource/first-they-came-by-pastor-martin...

hiremelocally 7mo ago

New roles at my FAANG company are mostly outside HCOL areas, and often outside the US. It's not just outsourcing. These roles have real hiring standards, are getting real work for real teams, and they're remote. Outsourcing feels different this time because it's not some offshore contract team; it's full-time company stuff. Makes me wonder if it's just because WFH proved it works, so why not hire from Krakow? Edit: US policies towards H-1Bs and attitudes towards immigration add to this.

alephnerd 7mo ago
> Makes me wonder if it's just because WFH proved it works, so why not hire from Krakow? As someone in the room when those decisions were/are made, pretty much. Additionally, when the COVID recession began (before the stimulus package) most employers were laying off employees on work visas or giving them the option to open and expand offices in their home country. A lot of senior Indian and Polish Googlers took the offer, and that's how you saw the massive Google expansion in India and Poland over the past few years. Additionally, the Indian, Polish, Israeli, Romanian, and other governments are giving massive subsidizes to attract GCCs, while states like NC and GA which used to offer subsidizes to open offices in RTP became much less responsive and inefficient due to domestic politics (turns out it's easier for local politicans to be elected on culture war topics instead of tech hub expansion). I can pick up a phone right now and get connected with senior bureaucrats in Czechia, Poland, and even the UK and India in a day if I offer to open a $20M R&D hub - most US states don't do that anymore. Edit: can't reply > For better or for worse, the most desirable places in the US not only refuse to participate in the race to the bottom anymore Absolutely, but tbf, you don't really need subsidizes to attract business in an already established hub becuase the ecosystem already exists and the risks and mitigation strategies are well understood. A subsidy helps when I am entering a new or unknown ecosystem to mitigate risk. Additionally, local governments in the major hubs like NYC (even under Mamdani) and SF are fairly responsive to business needs and requests. This is why I keep harping that in the world we live in today, American SWEs need to live in the major tech hubs because the density of employers and opportunities is significant, which reduces risks of becoming structurally unemployed as a SWE.
- 7mo ago

asmodeuslucifer 7mo ago

I'm going to repurpose a quote I saw from a 'distinguished' (old) science fiction writer, I can't remember who. I know writers who have stopped selling, but I don't know any writers who have stopped writing.

pllbnk 7mo ago

I have this thought experiment. If my employer suggested to pay me 5 year's worth of salary if I could successfully replace myself with an AI. I would be pretty happy to take the money and run. However, I don't see any realistic way to do it just yet.