8 ms·

The tech jobs bust is real. Don't blame AI (yet)

118 points by andsoitis 7mo ago

downrightmike 7mo ago
The only reason to blame AI is that it doesn't live up to promises, so corps are betting that scale will solve the problem. So datacenter after datacenter wants to be built in areas that can't supply them water/power. And that money sink is causing the layoffs. If AI really helped like it expected to, you would grab any dev you could so that you could have a army of 100x devs. Humans are still cheaper for the real costs. Augmented humans are on average a few percentage points better.
- mountainofdeath 7mo ago
  The same thing was said about the crazy build-out of fiber and telecommunications infrastructure. That infrastructure did prove useful but it took about 10-20 years before that was the case. It took 4G becoming broadly available and the ensuing increase of mobile devices to use at least of the overbuilt network capacity.
  - HerbManic 7mo ago
    While I get this stream of thought, the major difference is that the internal hardware will age much faster than the core infrastructure. The real question is, how much of these build out costs is the center itself and the hardware within. That fiber build out will last for decades, a Blackwell GPU, not so much.
    - wmf 7mo ago
      I could be wrong but it seems like in the case of a crash no one will be buying new GPUs and thus the existing ones could hold their value longer. Of course that value will no longer be massively inflated by bubble FOMO.
      - irishcoffee 7mo ago
        It isn’t about holding value, the cards are going to burn up. If they don’t, in 5 years one could run a rack of 4 cards at home at an affordable rate. Either the cards become affordable again and the datacenter is useless, or they don’t, and nobody can fucking afford to rent them.
        wmf 7mo ago
        GPUs definitely have higher failure rates than CPUs but I'm not sure what the absolute rates will turn out to be. If 10% of GPUs die within 5 years that's very high but also probably economically fine. If 50% die that's a disaster.
        irishcoffee 7mo ago
        Sorry, I meant at some point the current cards in he data centers will be obsolete, financially. They’ll be sold on the secondary market. Buying 8 h200s at $150 a pop will either be a real thing, or they all burn up and capex explodes again, which would be a death knell. Either way, the moat is about 7 inches wide.
      - fluoridation 7mo ago
        >in the case of a crash no one will be buying new GPUs and thus the existing ones could hold their value longer. No, because no one has any use for those monstrous GPUs outside of ML and some research projects. They can't even be dropped onto the consumer market because a SOHO is not equipped to house devices like that. The best case scenario is that the boards get dismantled and the VRAM gets salvaged for refurbishing. They've built these machines so specialized that they're essentially disposable.
        wmf 7mo ago
        There's a baseline paid demand for AI inference that can fully occupy today's GPUs (even after a crash) so there's no need to sell or scrap them.
  - bitwize 7mo ago
    The difference is that fibre is infrastructure, LLMs are an application. Who knows, maybe they will pass and leave behind that server infra, and that's where our digital consciousnesses will live once our bodies die.
    - andsoitis 7mo ago
      > The difference is that fibre is infrastructure, LLMs are an application When I zoom out, I see “token generation” as an infrastructural layer, with applications built upon it.
  - nyrikki 7mo ago
    Chalk an cheese, Wavelength Division Multiplexing took out Globalcrossing Worldcom etc… But the secondary market that grew out of it was because once it is in the ground it has a long lifespan and low upkeep costs, this is not the same thing as ultra high power density data centers. Cooling needs to be balanced with demand, they may not work for even cloud scale type loads without serious issues etc… Not that it matters, my hometown has an announced DC and it is looking more and more like it is a shill, as do several of the others in the area.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- Esophagus4 7mo ago
  > If AI really helped like it expected to, you would grab any dev you could so that you could have an army of 100x devs. This seems maybe a bit reductionist. AI will have diminishing returns because at a certain point, coding is not the bottleneck and coordination is or some other thing that hasn’t been optimized yet. The exact bottleneck seems like it depends on the organization. My theory is that in general, augmented devs are much more productive, but 100% of that gain doesn’t translate into 100% more software delivered to customers, and there is a point where coding isn’t the longest pole. But I don’t think most orgs are at that break even yet, and I think we can still get more out of engineering before we plateau.
  - andsoitis 7mo ago
    What you say is accurate. Just remember that generating code is not the only way for an engineer to amplify themselves.
0xAntonioo 7mo ago
Feels early to blame AI for most of this. A lot of it still looks like a reset from 2021-era hiring assumptions rather than actual labor replacement
- dvwcf 7mo ago
  Over hiring is one thing.. but that wouldnt be a problem if there was an endless stream of projects to take that are value creating. So the issue is not necessarily the over-hiring.. more that the large tech firms are running out of projects to take that are value-creating. Which is not surprising - the labour market in its currently state is absolutely not perfect in allocating labour. It should be noted that fixing tech debt is not necessary value-creating from a financial standpoint. What engineers think is value creating has nothing to do with what a CFO determines to be a value creating project - whose job is to maximize firm value.
  - chii 7mo ago
    The "value" creation is tied to the interest rate. When interest rates are low, even low value creation projects are viable. When rates are high, those exact same projects are no longer viable. Therefore, i would argue that the labour market is not perfectly allocating labour, but it is close enough for practical purposes.
    - dvwcf 7mo ago
      Value creation is more of a function of cash flow potential on a project than the risk-free rate, cost of equity or cost of debt. "labour market is not perfectly allocating labour, but it is close enough for practical purposes." No its not lmao. Do you even know what characteristics a 'perfect labour market' is even comprised of? Go on, surprise me.
      - plemer 7mo ago
        Isn’t it both - ROI must exceed whatever cost benchmark?
cheschire 7mo ago
Without an archive link I think 90% of these comments will be in response to the title only.
- ilc 7mo ago
  It's dead Jim.
- bookofjoe 7mo ago
  I'd happily provide one but I've had enough of being repeatedly trashed and denigrated here for posting too many archive links.
  - gerdesj 7mo ago
    You could look at your denigrators and decide: "fuck you". Internet points are strangely attractive but not vital. You can always post with another account with a bit of effort too. I understand that you are pissed off (as am I too) but debating with an army of bots, LLMs, wankers and Russians is unfortunately the status quo, quotidien. On the bright side there are lots of lovely folk hereabouts with a large thing between their ears.
    - alexchantavy 7mo ago
      > You could look at your denigrators and decide: "fuck you" That escalated quickly and I enjoyed this comment a lot
      - gerdesj 7mo ago
        Happy to oblige.
    - bookofjoe 7mo ago
      “a bit of effort” is way more than the reward
  - Uhhrrr 7mo ago
    I have only ever gotten thanks and net positive points for posting archive links.
rvz 7mo ago
When anyone asks the question: "What is AGI", it is actually this. An "abundance" of nothing else but this. It's just that the tech workers are the canaries in the coal mines for the other white collar knowledge workers. This is "AGI".
- i_love_retros 7mo ago
  Meanwhile... I had to step in and hand code lots of css today because copilot couldn't do the thing. And I had to step in and manually fix tests yesterday because copilot couldn't do the thing. Are you paid by OpenAI and/or Anthropic?
  - gbnwl 7mo ago
    Have you considered not using copilot and using Claude Code or Codex directly?
    - deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
    - i_love_retros 7mo ago
      I'm using codex latest model via copilot. Is this where you say I'm holding it wrong? Is it so hard to admit these AI tools aren't as good as they are hyped up to be?
  - rvz 7mo ago
    > Are you paid by OpenAI and/or Anthropic? No. The VCs and angel investors screaming “abundance” are the paid promoters. The problem is their “utopia of abundance” is not for us. They know the opposite is the reality (layoffs, offshoring, wage suppression and AI backlash) They built their own bunkers and moats for a reason. Because true “AGI” will bring an abundance of very angry people going after them. That is not worth being paid for by any AI lab.
AlBugdy 7mo ago
Can anyone provide historical data for "job busts" or other types of declines in tech employment, massive layoffs or hire freezes? I seem to read about something like this every few years. Would like some data to see if this trend is stronger than the previous ones or not.
- mr_00ff00 7mo ago
  Layoffs.fyi maybe? Not sure if that’s the data you are asking for
- menzoic 7mo ago
  I just put your question into GPT-5 Pro
- ethan_smith 7mo ago
  The big ones: dot-com bust (2001-2003) saw ~560k tech jobs lost per BLS, took until roughly 2007 to recover. 2008 financial crisis hit tech less hard but still significant layoffs. Then 2022-2023 saw ~260k+ layoffs tracked by layoffs.fyi, mostly at companies that had massively overhired during the ZIRP/COVID era. The current cycle feels like a continuation of that 2022-2023 correction more than a new event - hiring never really bounced back the way it did after previous downturns.
- jcranmer 7mo ago
  Here's some historical data for employment in category NAICS 5415: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IPUMN5415W200000000 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IPUMN5415W200000000. Which, NAICS 5415 definitely isn't a complete picture of tech employment, but it should give rough correlation I would hope.
omgJustTest 7mo ago
reciprocal tariffs had put the non-tech and tech economy in stasis (except for hardware for AI). they are also are better than tax breaks and will supercharge bottom lines for large corporations once reclaimed and if prices remain high. also if you want to test/force ai adoption you have to put pressure by firing some now wars will put us into further stasis or decline via increased inflation pressure.
cynicalsecurity 7mo ago
[flagged]
mchusma 7mo ago
developer jobs are up: postings ~11% YoY, tech workforce +1.9% projected for 2026, BLS 15% long-term growth. Rebound from 2024-25 lows Jevons paradox
- JoRyGu 7mo ago
  Maybe a case of really high profile companies doing RIFs while medium and smaller companies keep hiring?
- calepayson 7mo ago
  I think a big part is that the hiring market for juniors feels apocalyptic rn. Jobs may be up in aggregate but that doesn’t necessarily mean everyone’s feeling it equally.
- MeetingsBrowser 7mo ago
  Job postings are not jobs. A company can layoff 10k and post jobs for 1k and have job postings be up. Projections are useless. The past does not predict the future. BLS is useless for the same reason, amplified.
  - bootsmann 7mo ago
    Maybe if you’re at the point where you dismiss three datapoints that all disagree with your thesis without any real argument you should rethink your thesis.
    - MeetingsBrowser 7mo ago
      I don’t dismiss them because I disagree, but because they measure something tangential to the point. There is data on average software salaries and job counts. Salaries have not grown since 2021. Inflation is high in the same time period, meaning pay is substantially down over the last five years. Actual jobs are harder to measure but various sources all show swings of +\-5% each year. Salaries are down 10%, and best case scenario jobs are up 5% in that same time frame.
- 7mo ago
h4kunamata 7mo ago
It is the perfect storm, companies overhired during covid by a 1000% Then covid went away, life went back to "normal", tons of juniors everywhere who moved to IT because of WFH and the salary. Then comes AI, within the IT field, I am seeing first hand companies firing by the thousands because of AI. Only Blue collar was being affected in the past, but now is everybody, no matter of your degree, experience, you either already had a hard time or you will have. If Google Quantum computing somehow finds a massive breakthrough, we are all fu :)
jmyeet 7mo ago
So I want to talk about the Claude Mythos mega-model that had a real marketing push in the last week. Marcus Hutchins (of IWannaCry fame) posted about the economics of this [1]. The upshot here is this was a longstanding BSD bug but mostly because nobody is paying BSD bug bounties and a null-pointer dereference may induce a crash but rarely (if ever) leads to privilege escalation as buffer overflows generally do so isn't as high-priority. The estimate on the cost is $20-50k of tokens. $50k gets you a lot of developer time, upwards of 2 months. As has been stated in a bunch of threads, much smaller models could also find this bug. The defense is "they didn't" and "once you know it's there, it's easier to find" but again, nobody has been paying BSD bug bounties. Put another way: far fewer people have been looking. My point is that the economics of these models are still highly debatable. What they will do is allow you to use 1 engineer with AI tools instead of 2-4 engineers. And we've arrived at the real goal here: to reduce head counts. Why? To suppress labor costs. To get people who didn't get laid off to do more free work. In addition, AI capex is used as an excuse to cut costs ie reduce labor, for exactly the same reasons. Lastly, the threat of this happening in the near to medium future is also used to scare labor and reduce costs. Sufficiently largecompanies can't grow anymore. Their only path forward is to raise prices and redcue costs. For tech companies, labor is a significant cost. That's what's going on here. [1]: https://www.tiktok.com/@itsmarcushutchins/video/7627740073534033183 https://www.tiktok.com/@itsmarcushutchins/video/762774007353...
- xdennis 7mo ago
  > $50k gets you a lot of developer time, upwards of 2 months. God, I wish I was American sometimes...
  - yoyohello13 7mo ago
    Right up until you lose that job and get sick.
  - jmyeet 7mo ago
    You have to consider all the costs of employing someone, not just the direct compensation. Benefits, health insurance, taxes (eg employer payroll taxes), office space, equipment, various insurances, utilities, costs related to just having that person (eg HR) and so on. So even a $100k salary, which is pretty modest for a US-based engineer, the additional costs may well add another $50-100k.
cute_boi 7mo ago
AI + Outsourcing is the major reason of tech job bust. But, I think politician won't care as they are here for corporation not for the people.
- trgn 7mo ago
  > politician won't care they dont care because nobody has a real gut feel affinity for computer programmers or the work, the sort of feeling that is required to animate somebody to action. it's never been a profession with any esteem, and the field never professionalized in the past 60 years, which is a shame, because we now see the outcome.
- shimman 7mo ago
  Politicians would deeply care about a specialized highly paid workforce that was politically active, but what we have is mostly a do-nothing industry that has nearly 100% ceded to their corporate masters. I mean look at what the coal mining industry is able to get and their numbers are quite small. There's more fast food workers at Wendy's than coal miners, but something tells me that Congress doesn't care about the baconator over rolling coal. Start doing some advocacy work and this can easily change.
0xchamin 7mo ago
One of my mentor at my company got redundant exactly a year ago. He is still looking for the next role. I really feel bad.
- ghaff 7mo ago
  Post dot-com, a LOT of people basically left the industry. They may have continued on in somewhat adjacent roles but people can only afford to keep looking for the sort of employment they had for so long.
  - matheusmoreira 7mo ago
    Where did they go?
    - ghaff 7mo ago
      I'm sure you'll find a variety of answers. Often mid-management jobs in possibly tangentially related industries. Basically retired early, or pursued a hobby business, if they could afford to do so. In my case an industry analyst job for about ten years until I went back to marketing for a software company.
      - roryirvine 7mo ago
        And lots of people early in their careers never got another job at the same level again. One sysadmin I worked with ended up as a taxi driver. A core network engineer eventually retrained as a school lab technician. Two devs both spent a decade doing tech support at a call centre before bouncing out of tech altogether. Things started picking up again around 2005-6, but for a couple of years there was nothing. Much, much worse than the Great Financial Crisis or anything that's happened since.
        ghaff 7mo ago
        Yeah. I was lucky enough to connect with someone I knew in a tech job--albeit one that wasn't that great paying especially after a pay-cut at the worst of the downturn. It eventually translated into a very good end of career job but a lot of people ended up in "would you like fries with that?" positions. I had luck but it was by no means guaranteed.
temptemptemp111 7mo ago
[dead]
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
varispeed 7mo ago
Another reason is that wages don't keep up with the cost of living. For instance in the UK it makes little sense to be in IT, unless it's something boring and typing React boilerplate feels easier than stacking shelves or running deliveries.
stego-tech 7mo ago
Would really appreciate an archive link to read this, even though it appears to be another meta-analysis wrapped in a “everything will be fine” narrative from the limited previews I’ve been able to gleam and The Economist’s general lean. The problem with the tech layoffs is that it’s poisoning the well downstream. Smaller employers have repeatedly cited their layoffs as justification for abysmal, unlivable salaries, and demanding those of us looking for work suck it up and deal with it while they search for bottom-dollar unicorns. AI isn’t replacing the IT crowd outside of the expected junior roles, and even that’s starting to rebound as executives realize Juniors were how they got “white glove service” for themselves - a Senior Engineer isn’t going to wipe their ass for them, job market or not, because said Engineer’s time is infinitely better spent on literally anything else. One other thing I’ll note is that the layoffs also seem to be remnants of the Brogrammer hustle culture: tech folks were enjoying more time for themselves to grow or live life outside of work specifically thanks to a few good years of paying down technical debt with properly-staffed teams, but the grifters up top see anything less than a 9-9-6 as somehow stealing from the employer and slash accordingly. The remnants are expected to do more work for less pay, with AI tools somehow filling the gap (even though these same employers often don’t want to pay for proper tooling to maximize use of AI). This is definitely an industry downturn as those who stand to gain maximize their immediate returns. From the perspective of the C-Suite and Boards, the safest (albeit unethical) move is to betray: if AI is a bust, they’ll have made their wealth and can fuck off; if AI eliminates jobs and work, they believe their wealth will protect them in the future dystopia of their own creation. It’s in that context (“fuck you got mine”) that the broader narrative fits with the myriad of puzzle pieces out there (higher interest rates, stock pumps, circular financing, tariffs, aging population, AI, etc).
- kindawinda 7mo ago
  Would really appreciate if you made an archive link and sharing instead of complaining
  - stego-tech 7mo ago
    Says the person who came here specifically to complain instead of doing it themselves. For the record, I tried, but the archive site only had the preview cached; I suspect it’s looking for a URL identifier to bypass the paywall that I lack access to, but I can’t confirm either way from a mobile device.
mikert89 7mo ago
Two big tech FAANG jobs, org is 95% h1b engineers from china/india. Tons of resumes from american grads somehow never hit my desk, continue to interview random candidates from india with some low quality USA masters from missisipi state. Candidate has spent the last year locked in a room memorizing algorithm interview questions
- Madmallard 7mo ago
  Why are we letting tech companies in the USA do this?
  - mikert89 7mo ago
    honestly i have no idea, in some cases, they are working weekends/are hyper focused on extremely boring, somewhat manual work. some of the systems are complicated and break constantly, so they are almost just oncall fodder for manually fixing a constantly breaking high scale service
    - Ifkaluva 7mo ago
      Will these kinds of jobs survive Claude code? It sounds like exactly the job that would be easiest to automate.
      - foobarian 7mo ago
        And who gets paged when the Claude integration fails?
  - ang_cire 7mo ago
    Because we live in a techno-oligarchy now? Because the leaders of the top tech companies (by revenue) literally sat behind the President at his inauguration? Because they can afford to buy the 'right' to do what they want, and you can't, and what they want is cheaper labor who they have more control over, and H1B workers will never rock the boat because the visa is a sword hanging over their heads. Downvote all you want, it's the truth.
ang_cire 7mo ago
I think a lot of people don't see the historical trend of where investment moves around. The 90s dot-com era was driven by massive investment in e-commerce (remember that term?) businesses. It created a bubble, which then burst. When bubbles burst, investors change tack, and when investors pull back, companies turtle and do layoffs. After Y2K, investment moved on to real estate. In 2008, that bubble burst. It moved on to social media next. I would argue that bubble burst somewhat silently during COVID with the quiet deaths of Xitter and Facebook (from a standpoint of cultural relevance), and investment transitioned towards and into its current AI bubble. Investors are always going to move on once the lustre of a field has waned, and I'd hazard that we'll see investment move somewhere other than software tech next (if I had to prognosticate, I'd say it's moving into robotics/ drones).
- ikr678 7mo ago
  If inflation kicks off, it will go back into physical assets.
qwertyuiop_ 7mo ago
Nothing happens in a vacuum. "Tech companies" act in a coordinated fashion despite claiming they don't. Remote work was great until it wasn't. This is a coordinated action to shed all the mass gathered during ZIRP. Market forces is one naive explanation. But as history has shown factors extraneous to market forces are at work. This period will be written about, analyzed and diced in thousand different ways by future "thought leaders".
throwaway13337 7mo ago
Software devs lost their pricing power due to LLMs but not exactly how most people think. What's missed in understanding is 'how exactly does this functionality work for this specific case?' or 'can we implement this tiny one off feature in some legacy code base'. Both things are why you keep the guy that wrote it around. And you couldn't really replace him. Because digging into what he wrote was hard. Now, LLMs can do that stuff better than the guy that wrote it. Software devs were non-fungible. Now they're commodities. When things become commodities, they lose their value. I'm not sure why I haven't heard people talk about this aspect. It's the biggest effect on jobs.
- sebmellen 7mo ago
  While this is true to an extent, oftentimes the important context is not in the code but in the head of the writer. The code is just the fence in the Chesterton’s Fence analogy. And that is still non-fungible and will (presumably) forever be. > There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”
  - throwaway13337 7mo ago
    You're correct that it doesn't answer the why. But it answers the what, how, and allows one-off features. So the guy that wrote might (or might not) still have the edge with the why. But that's not the moat it used to be.
    - sebmellen 7mo ago
      In big companies, the why is 80% of the work. I could swear actual dev work is less than 20% of a “developer’s” job at a standard large (non-SV/FAANG/tech-first) company. The rest is holding a lot of really weird organization-specific context in your head to make the right decision.
mmmpetrichor 7mo ago
I work for a fairly big tech company, For the last 2 years, basically stopped hiring people in the US. Only hiring engineers in the India office.
atduran 7mo ago
corps do that to make stocks go up, once the quarter ends, they start hiring again
geenkeuse 7mo ago
[dead]
1vuio0pswjnm7 7mo ago
"America’s Census Bureau estimates that just 28% of firms in the San Francisco metropolitan area use AI regularly as part of their day-to-day operations. In America as a whole, adoption is much lower."
zombot 7mo ago
> Don't blame AI Some may blame AI, but the opposite is also true: The believers use the bust as "proof" that AI coding "works".
amelie0 7mo ago
[flagged]

118 points by andsoitis 7mo ago

The only reason to blame AI is that it doesn't live up to promises, so corps are betting that scale will solve the problem. So datacenter after datacenter wants to be built in areas that can't supply them water/power. And that money sink is causing the layoffs. If AI really helped like it expected to, you would grab any dev you could so that you could have a army of 100x devs. Humans are still cheaper for the real costs. Augmented humans are on average a few percentage points better.

mountainofdeath 7mo ago
The same thing was said about the crazy build-out of fiber and telecommunications infrastructure. That infrastructure did prove useful but it took about 10-20 years before that was the case. It took 4G becoming broadly available and the ensuing increase of mobile devices to use at least of the overbuilt network capacity.
- HerbManic 7mo ago
  While I get this stream of thought, the major difference is that the internal hardware will age much faster than the core infrastructure. The real question is, how much of these build out costs is the center itself and the hardware within. That fiber build out will last for decades, a Blackwell GPU, not so much.
  - wmf 7mo ago
    I could be wrong but it seems like in the case of a crash no one will be buying new GPUs and thus the existing ones could hold their value longer. Of course that value will no longer be massively inflated by bubble FOMO.
    - irishcoffee 7mo ago
      It isn’t about holding value, the cards are going to burn up. If they don’t, in 5 years one could run a rack of 4 cards at home at an affordable rate. Either the cards become affordable again and the datacenter is useless, or they don’t, and nobody can fucking afford to rent them.
      - wmf 7mo ago
        GPUs definitely have higher failure rates than CPUs but I'm not sure what the absolute rates will turn out to be. If 10% of GPUs die within 5 years that's very high but also probably economically fine. If 50% die that's a disaster.
        irishcoffee 7mo ago
        Sorry, I meant at some point the current cards in he data centers will be obsolete, financially. They’ll be sold on the secondary market. Buying 8 h200s at $150 a pop will either be a real thing, or they all burn up and capex explodes again, which would be a death knell. Either way, the moat is about 7 inches wide.
    - fluoridation 7mo ago
      >in the case of a crash no one will be buying new GPUs and thus the existing ones could hold their value longer. No, because no one has any use for those monstrous GPUs outside of ML and some research projects. They can't even be dropped onto the consumer market because a SOHO is not equipped to house devices like that. The best case scenario is that the boards get dismantled and the VRAM gets salvaged for refurbishing. They've built these machines so specialized that they're essentially disposable.
      - wmf 7mo ago
        There's a baseline paid demand for AI inference that can fully occupy today's GPUs (even after a crash) so there's no need to sell or scrap them.
- bitwize 7mo ago
  The difference is that fibre is infrastructure, LLMs are an application. Who knows, maybe they will pass and leave behind that server infra, and that's where our digital consciousnesses will live once our bodies die.
  - andsoitis 7mo ago
    > The difference is that fibre is infrastructure, LLMs are an application When I zoom out, I see “token generation” as an infrastructural layer, with applications built upon it.
- nyrikki 7mo ago
  Chalk an cheese, Wavelength Division Multiplexing took out Globalcrossing Worldcom etc… But the secondary market that grew out of it was because once it is in the ground it has a long lifespan and low upkeep costs, this is not the same thing as ultra high power density data centers. Cooling needs to be balanced with demand, they may not work for even cloud scale type loads without serious issues etc… Not that it matters, my hometown has an announced DC and it is looking more and more like it is a shill, as do several of the others in the area.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
Esophagus4 7mo ago
> If AI really helped like it expected to, you would grab any dev you could so that you could have an army of 100x devs. This seems maybe a bit reductionist. AI will have diminishing returns because at a certain point, coding is not the bottleneck and coordination is or some other thing that hasn’t been optimized yet. The exact bottleneck seems like it depends on the organization. My theory is that in general, augmented devs are much more productive, but 100% of that gain doesn’t translate into 100% more software delivered to customers, and there is a point where coding isn’t the longest pole. But I don’t think most orgs are at that break even yet, and I think we can still get more out of engineering before we plateau.
- andsoitis 7mo ago
  What you say is accurate. Just remember that generating code is not the only way for an engineer to amplify themselves.

0xAntonioo 7mo ago

Feels early to blame AI for most of this. A lot of it still looks like a reset from 2021-era hiring assumptions rather than actual labor replacement

dvwcf 7mo ago
Over hiring is one thing.. but that wouldnt be a problem if there was an endless stream of projects to take that are value creating. So the issue is not necessarily the over-hiring.. more that the large tech firms are running out of projects to take that are value-creating. Which is not surprising - the labour market in its currently state is absolutely not perfect in allocating labour. It should be noted that fixing tech debt is not necessary value-creating from a financial standpoint. What engineers think is value creating has nothing to do with what a CFO determines to be a value creating project - whose job is to maximize firm value.
- chii 7mo ago
  The "value" creation is tied to the interest rate. When interest rates are low, even low value creation projects are viable. When rates are high, those exact same projects are no longer viable. Therefore, i would argue that the labour market is not perfectly allocating labour, but it is close enough for practical purposes.
  - dvwcf 7mo ago
    Value creation is more of a function of cash flow potential on a project than the risk-free rate, cost of equity or cost of debt. "labour market is not perfectly allocating labour, but it is close enough for practical purposes." No its not lmao. Do you even know what characteristics a 'perfect labour market' is even comprised of? Go on, surprise me.
    - plemer 7mo ago
      Isn’t it both - ROI must exceed whatever cost benchmark?

cheschire 7mo ago

Without an archive link I think 90% of these comments will be in response to the title only.

ilc 7mo ago
It's dead Jim.
bookofjoe 7mo ago
I'd happily provide one but I've had enough of being repeatedly trashed and denigrated here for posting too many archive links.
- gerdesj 7mo ago
  You could look at your denigrators and decide: "fuck you". Internet points are strangely attractive but not vital. You can always post with another account with a bit of effort too. I understand that you are pissed off (as am I too) but debating with an army of bots, LLMs, wankers and Russians is unfortunately the status quo, quotidien. On the bright side there are lots of lovely folk hereabouts with a large thing between their ears.
  - alexchantavy 7mo ago
    > You could look at your denigrators and decide: "fuck you" That escalated quickly and I enjoyed this comment a lot
    - gerdesj 7mo ago
      Happy to oblige.
  - bookofjoe 7mo ago
    “a bit of effort” is way more than the reward
- Uhhrrr 7mo ago
  I have only ever gotten thanks and net positive points for posting archive links.

rvz 7mo ago

When anyone asks the question: "What is AGI", it is actually this. An "abundance" of nothing else but this. It's just that the tech workers are the canaries in the coal mines for the other white collar knowledge workers. This is "AGI".

i_love_retros 7mo ago
Meanwhile... I had to step in and hand code lots of css today because copilot couldn't do the thing. And I had to step in and manually fix tests yesterday because copilot couldn't do the thing. Are you paid by OpenAI and/or Anthropic?
- gbnwl 7mo ago
  Have you considered not using copilot and using Claude Code or Codex directly?
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - i_love_retros 7mo ago
    I'm using codex latest model via copilot. Is this where you say I'm holding it wrong? Is it so hard to admit these AI tools aren't as good as they are hyped up to be?
- rvz 7mo ago
  > Are you paid by OpenAI and/or Anthropic? No. The VCs and angel investors screaming “abundance” are the paid promoters. The problem is their “utopia of abundance” is not for us. They know the opposite is the reality (layoffs, offshoring, wage suppression and AI backlash) They built their own bunkers and moats for a reason. Because true “AGI” will bring an abundance of very angry people going after them. That is not worth being paid for by any AI lab.

AlBugdy 7mo ago

Can anyone provide historical data for "job busts" or other types of declines in tech employment, massive layoffs or hire freezes? I seem to read about something like this every few years. Would like some data to see if this trend is stronger than the previous ones or not.

mr_00ff00 7mo ago
Layoffs.fyi maybe? Not sure if that’s the data you are asking for
menzoic 7mo ago
I just put your question into GPT-5 Pro
ethan_smith 7mo ago
The big ones: dot-com bust (2001-2003) saw ~560k tech jobs lost per BLS, took until roughly 2007 to recover. 2008 financial crisis hit tech less hard but still significant layoffs. Then 2022-2023 saw ~260k+ layoffs tracked by layoffs.fyi, mostly at companies that had massively overhired during the ZIRP/COVID era. The current cycle feels like a continuation of that 2022-2023 correction more than a new event - hiring never really bounced back the way it did after previous downturns.
jcranmer 7mo ago
Here's some historical data for employment in category NAICS 5415: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IPUMN5415W200000000 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IPUMN5415W200000000. Which, NAICS 5415 definitely isn't a complete picture of tech employment, but it should give rough correlation I would hope.

omgJustTest 7mo ago

reciprocal tariffs had put the non-tech and tech economy in stasis (except for hardware for AI). they are also are better than tax breaks and will supercharge bottom lines for large corporations once reclaimed and if prices remain high. also if you want to test/force ai adoption you have to put pressure by firing some now wars will put us into further stasis or decline via increased inflation pressure.

cynicalsecurity 7mo ago

[flagged]

mchusma 7mo ago

developer jobs are up: postings ~11% YoY, tech workforce +1.9% projected for 2026, BLS 15% long-term growth. Rebound from 2024-25 lows Jevons paradox

JoRyGu 7mo ago
Maybe a case of really high profile companies doing RIFs while medium and smaller companies keep hiring?
calepayson 7mo ago
I think a big part is that the hiring market for juniors feels apocalyptic rn. Jobs may be up in aggregate but that doesn’t necessarily mean everyone’s feeling it equally.
MeetingsBrowser 7mo ago
Job postings are not jobs. A company can layoff 10k and post jobs for 1k and have job postings be up. Projections are useless. The past does not predict the future. BLS is useless for the same reason, amplified.
- bootsmann 7mo ago
  Maybe if you’re at the point where you dismiss three datapoints that all disagree with your thesis without any real argument you should rethink your thesis.
  - MeetingsBrowser 7mo ago
    I don’t dismiss them because I disagree, but because they measure something tangential to the point. There is data on average software salaries and job counts. Salaries have not grown since 2021. Inflation is high in the same time period, meaning pay is substantially down over the last five years. Actual jobs are harder to measure but various sources all show swings of +\-5% each year. Salaries are down 10%, and best case scenario jobs are up 5% in that same time frame.
7mo ago

h4kunamata 7mo ago

It is the perfect storm, companies overhired during covid by a 1000% Then covid went away, life went back to "normal", tons of juniors everywhere who moved to IT because of WFH and the salary. Then comes AI, within the IT field, I am seeing first hand companies firing by the thousands because of AI. Only Blue collar was being affected in the past, but now is everybody, no matter of your degree, experience, you either already had a hard time or you will have. If Google Quantum computing somehow finds a massive breakthrough, we are all fu :)

jmyeet 7mo ago

So I want to talk about the Claude Mythos mega-model that had a real marketing push in the last week. Marcus Hutchins (of IWannaCry fame) posted about the economics of this [1]. The upshot here is this was a longstanding BSD bug but mostly because nobody is paying BSD bug bounties and a null-pointer dereference may induce a crash but rarely (if ever) leads to privilege escalation as buffer overflows generally do so isn't as high-priority. The estimate on the cost is $20-50k of tokens. $50k gets you a lot of developer time, upwards of 2 months. As has been stated in a bunch of threads, much smaller models could also find this bug. The defense is "they didn't" and "once you know it's there, it's easier to find" but again, nobody has been paying BSD bug bounties. Put another way: far fewer people have been looking. My point is that the economics of these models are still highly debatable. What they will do is allow you to use 1 engineer with AI tools instead of 2-4 engineers. And we've arrived at the real goal here: to reduce head counts. Why? To suppress labor costs. To get people who didn't get laid off to do more free work. In addition, AI capex is used as an excuse to cut costs ie reduce labor, for exactly the same reasons. Lastly, the threat of this happening in the near to medium future is also used to scare labor and reduce costs. Sufficiently largecompanies can't grow anymore. Their only path forward is to raise prices and redcue costs. For tech companies, labor is a significant cost. That's what's going on here. [1]: https://www.tiktok.com/@itsmarcushutchins/video/7627740073534033183 https://www.tiktok.com/@itsmarcushutchins/video/762774007353...

xdennis 7mo ago
> $50k gets you a lot of developer time, upwards of 2 months. God, I wish I was American sometimes...
- yoyohello13 7mo ago
  Right up until you lose that job and get sick.
- jmyeet 7mo ago
  You have to consider all the costs of employing someone, not just the direct compensation. Benefits, health insurance, taxes (eg employer payroll taxes), office space, equipment, various insurances, utilities, costs related to just having that person (eg HR) and so on. So even a $100k salary, which is pretty modest for a US-based engineer, the additional costs may well add another $50-100k.

cute_boi 7mo ago

AI + Outsourcing is the major reason of tech job bust. But, I think politician won't care as they are here for corporation not for the people.

trgn 7mo ago
> politician won't care they dont care because nobody has a real gut feel affinity for computer programmers or the work, the sort of feeling that is required to animate somebody to action. it's never been a profession with any esteem, and the field never professionalized in the past 60 years, which is a shame, because we now see the outcome.
shimman 7mo ago
Politicians would deeply care about a specialized highly paid workforce that was politically active, but what we have is mostly a do-nothing industry that has nearly 100% ceded to their corporate masters. I mean look at what the coal mining industry is able to get and their numbers are quite small. There's more fast food workers at Wendy's than coal miners, but something tells me that Congress doesn't care about the baconator over rolling coal. Start doing some advocacy work and this can easily change.

0xchamin 7mo ago

One of my mentor at my company got redundant exactly a year ago. He is still looking for the next role. I really feel bad.

ghaff 7mo ago
Post dot-com, a LOT of people basically left the industry. They may have continued on in somewhat adjacent roles but people can only afford to keep looking for the sort of employment they had for so long.
- matheusmoreira 7mo ago
  Where did they go?
  - ghaff 7mo ago
    I'm sure you'll find a variety of answers. Often mid-management jobs in possibly tangentially related industries. Basically retired early, or pursued a hobby business, if they could afford to do so. In my case an industry analyst job for about ten years until I went back to marketing for a software company.
    - roryirvine 7mo ago
      And lots of people early in their careers never got another job at the same level again. One sysadmin I worked with ended up as a taxi driver. A core network engineer eventually retrained as a school lab technician. Two devs both spent a decade doing tech support at a call centre before bouncing out of tech altogether. Things started picking up again around 2005-6, but for a couple of years there was nothing. Much, much worse than the Great Financial Crisis or anything that's happened since.
      - ghaff 7mo ago
        Yeah. I was lucky enough to connect with someone I knew in a tech job--albeit one that wasn't that great paying especially after a pay-cut at the worst of the downturn. It eventually translated into a very good end of career job but a lot of people ended up in "would you like fries with that?" positions. I had luck but it was by no means guaranteed.

temptemptemp111 7mo ago

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deleted 7mo ago

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varispeed 7mo ago

Another reason is that wages don't keep up with the cost of living. For instance in the UK it makes little sense to be in IT, unless it's something boring and typing React boilerplate feels easier than stacking shelves or running deliveries.

stego-tech 7mo ago

Would really appreciate an archive link to read this, even though it appears to be another meta-analysis wrapped in a “everything will be fine” narrative from the limited previews I’ve been able to gleam and The Economist’s general lean. The problem with the tech layoffs is that it’s poisoning the well downstream. Smaller employers have repeatedly cited their layoffs as justification for abysmal, unlivable salaries, and demanding those of us looking for work suck it up and deal with it while they search for bottom-dollar unicorns. AI isn’t replacing the IT crowd outside of the expected junior roles, and even that’s starting to rebound as executives realize Juniors were how they got “white glove service” for themselves - a Senior Engineer isn’t going to wipe their ass for them, job market or not, because said Engineer’s time is infinitely better spent on literally anything else. One other thing I’ll note is that the layoffs also seem to be remnants of the Brogrammer hustle culture: tech folks were enjoying more time for themselves to grow or live life outside of work specifically thanks to a few good years of paying down technical debt with properly-staffed teams, but the grifters up top see anything less than a 9-9-6 as somehow stealing from the employer and slash accordingly. The remnants are expected to do more work for less pay, with AI tools somehow filling the gap (even though these same employers often don’t want to pay for proper tooling to maximize use of AI). This is definitely an industry downturn as those who stand to gain maximize their immediate returns. From the perspective of the C-Suite and Boards, the safest (albeit unethical) move is to betray: if AI is a bust, they’ll have made their wealth and can fuck off; if AI eliminates jobs and work, they believe their wealth will protect them in the future dystopia of their own creation. It’s in that context (“fuck you got mine”) that the broader narrative fits with the myriad of puzzle pieces out there (higher interest rates, stock pumps, circular financing, tariffs, aging population, AI, etc).

kindawinda 7mo ago
Would really appreciate if you made an archive link and sharing instead of complaining
- stego-tech 7mo ago
  Says the person who came here specifically to complain instead of doing it themselves. For the record, I tried, but the archive site only had the preview cached; I suspect it’s looking for a URL identifier to bypass the paywall that I lack access to, but I can’t confirm either way from a mobile device.

mikert89 7mo ago

Two big tech FAANG jobs, org is 95% h1b engineers from china/india. Tons of resumes from american grads somehow never hit my desk, continue to interview random candidates from india with some low quality USA masters from missisipi state. Candidate has spent the last year locked in a room memorizing algorithm interview questions

Madmallard 7mo ago
Why are we letting tech companies in the USA do this?
- mikert89 7mo ago
  honestly i have no idea, in some cases, they are working weekends/are hyper focused on extremely boring, somewhat manual work. some of the systems are complicated and break constantly, so they are almost just oncall fodder for manually fixing a constantly breaking high scale service
  - Ifkaluva 7mo ago
    Will these kinds of jobs survive Claude code? It sounds like exactly the job that would be easiest to automate.
    - foobarian 7mo ago
      And who gets paged when the Claude integration fails?
- ang_cire 7mo ago
  Because we live in a techno-oligarchy now? Because the leaders of the top tech companies (by revenue) literally sat behind the President at his inauguration? Because they can afford to buy the 'right' to do what they want, and you can't, and what they want is cheaper labor who they have more control over, and H1B workers will never rock the boat because the visa is a sword hanging over their heads. Downvote all you want, it's the truth.

ang_cire 7mo ago

I think a lot of people don't see the historical trend of where investment moves around. The 90s dot-com era was driven by massive investment in e-commerce (remember that term?) businesses. It created a bubble, which then burst. When bubbles burst, investors change tack, and when investors pull back, companies turtle and do layoffs. After Y2K, investment moved on to real estate. In 2008, that bubble burst. It moved on to social media next. I would argue that bubble burst somewhat silently during COVID with the quiet deaths of Xitter and Facebook (from a standpoint of cultural relevance), and investment transitioned towards and into its current AI bubble. Investors are always going to move on once the lustre of a field has waned, and I'd hazard that we'll see investment move somewhere other than software tech next (if I had to prognosticate, I'd say it's moving into robotics/ drones).

ikr678 7mo ago
If inflation kicks off, it will go back into physical assets.

qwertyuiop_ 7mo ago

Nothing happens in a vacuum. "Tech companies" act in a coordinated fashion despite claiming they don't. Remote work was great until it wasn't. This is a coordinated action to shed all the mass gathered during ZIRP. Market forces is one naive explanation. But as history has shown factors extraneous to market forces are at work. This period will be written about, analyzed and diced in thousand different ways by future "thought leaders".

throwaway13337 7mo ago

Software devs lost their pricing power due to LLMs but not exactly how most people think. What's missed in understanding is 'how exactly does this functionality work for this specific case?' or 'can we implement this tiny one off feature in some legacy code base'. Both things are why you keep the guy that wrote it around. And you couldn't really replace him. Because digging into what he wrote was hard. Now, LLMs can do that stuff better than the guy that wrote it. Software devs were non-fungible. Now they're commodities. When things become commodities, they lose their value. I'm not sure why I haven't heard people talk about this aspect. It's the biggest effect on jobs.

sebmellen 7mo ago
While this is true to an extent, oftentimes the important context is not in the code but in the head of the writer. The code is just the fence in the Chesterton’s Fence analogy. And that is still non-fungible and will (presumably) forever be. > There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”
- throwaway13337 7mo ago
  You're correct that it doesn't answer the why. But it answers the what, how, and allows one-off features. So the guy that wrote might (or might not) still have the edge with the why. But that's not the moat it used to be.
  - sebmellen 7mo ago
    In big companies, the why is 80% of the work. I could swear actual dev work is less than 20% of a “developer’s” job at a standard large (non-SV/FAANG/tech-first) company. The rest is holding a lot of really weird organization-specific context in your head to make the right decision.

mmmpetrichor 7mo ago

I work for a fairly big tech company, For the last 2 years, basically stopped hiring people in the US. Only hiring engineers in the India office.

atduran 7mo ago

corps do that to make stocks go up, once the quarter ends, they start hiring again

geenkeuse 7mo ago

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1vuio0pswjnm7 7mo ago

"America’s Census Bureau estimates that just 28% of firms in the San Francisco metropolitan area use AI regularly as part of their day-to-day operations. In America as a whole, adoption is much lower."

zombot 7mo ago

> Don't blame AI Some may blame AI, but the opposite is also true: The believers use the bust as "proof" that AI coding "works".

amelie0 7mo ago

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