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The AI jobs apocalypse probably isn't coming anytime soon
- mono442 3mo agoIt still doesn't seem to work all that well for tasks which don't have a short feedback loop.
- moezd 3mo agoWhen manufacturing turned into electrified factories and conveyor belts, there wasn't waves of massive layoffs. And AI these days come nowhere near close to conveyor belts or electrification at scale at all. Debt cycles could fund it to a certain scale, but we don't know our priorities either: Do you fund hyperscalers? Do you fund ex-crypto miner co-location data centers? Do you fund centralized frontier model labs? Do you let everyone be able to deploy these models on any throwaway hardware? What is the best standard for model distribution? We are so far off from these discussions that AI hype these days really sounds like a couple of frat bros BSing and not knowing what to do with their Ivy League credentials and inheritance money.
- delichon 3mo ago> When manufacturing turned into electrified factories and conveyor belts, there wasn't waves of massive layoffs. And AI these days come nowhere near close to conveyor belts or electrification at scale at all. Nowhere near close, but on the high side. AI has propagated far faster, and is being adopted by a far greater proportion of businesses and individuals than electricity or conveyor belts at a similar age. AI is scaling faster than any tech in history. Exploding may be a better word choice.
- slopinthebag 3mo agoIs this not because of the internet and existing infrastructure which didn’t exist during that time?
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- SpicyLemonZest 3mo agoSure, but that doesn’t by itself mean it can’t be a problem. Maybe the macro scale effects were mitigated by a slow rollout and electrification would have caused an unemployment wave if everyone had done it at once.
- danaris 3mo agoIt's because the people making it are marketing it aggressively to other CEOs as the way they can eliminate their salary budgets and pocket them as profit, and drumming up FOMO among them so each feels that if they don't hop on the bandwagon they're going to be left in the dust by all the others.
- 650 3mo agoYou still need handholding, you can’t just give a few junior devs Claude Opus 5 and expect them to recreate Instagram in a few weeks. Frontend and backend basics sure, but security, scale, etc. need prior knowledge.
- dawnerd 3mo agoSame with design and art direction. I think we might see a temp slowdown in the workforce but companies will want to stand out again after realizing the slop machines spit out fairly cookie cutter designs.
- Roxxik 3mo agoI'd say recreating an existing website as is, is the easier task. Doing a look alike, even if the models do take some shortcuts on the way is doable right now. You have a template frontend to compare to. Now if it would scale to the number of users is a different ask and harder to validate for the models. Building something new is where they struggle most.
- XzAeRosho 3mo agoTell that to recruiters requiring leet code tests for Senior/Leadership roles. Absolutely idiotic market at the moment.
- therealdrag0 3mo agoI totally agree, but a lot of this debate comes down to the definition of apocalypse a 20% reduction in jobs will affect a huge amount of people who will fill all forums with complaints of job getting difficulty without being an apocalypse.
- AbsurdCensor 3mo agoIn tech at least in the US, there already has been a 20% reduction in jobs, because they were overhired by 200% during the pandemic. Plenty of bleed in the industry left and very little is because of AI.
- datakan 3mo agoJudging by the IT maturity of most of the companies I have worked with in the last 30 years, my guess is we're about 10-15 years from any serious changes, solely because adopting AI will require a few things. Most are running razor thin margins and wont be able to afford any of this, others have so much technical debt piled up that even if they could afford it they couldn't do anything without identifying ancient systems and then updating them. Most people I deal with still struggle with basic things. These were the types of people that couldn't program a VCR back in the 80's. Yes eventually they may get left behind but they are the majority of the population. I'm sure AI is all the rage in SV but everywhere else I go, no one gives a damn about any of this. I was just in Florida for work last week. 5 days and not one person I talked to brought AI up outside of a vendor trying to scare me about Mythos. It's just a nonissue for most people. In time maybe that changes, but I still hear people arguing about "the cloud" which was over a decade ago at this point in terms of tech trends. Expecting any of these people to understand what skills are or MD files or MCP is unrealistic. They simply don't give a fuck.
- StrauXX 3mo agoI agree with your sentiment, doing security auditing for old-school entprise and the like. I'd revise the timeline ti 3-10 years though. Eith how much AI can change productvity companies that don't adopt it will be in a tougher spot much more quickly than with new tech in the past.
- Mezzie 3mo agoWhat I'm seeing, as someone who works in a giant company but not in a tech department, is the rise of middle companies that specifically do all the hard work of organizing/wrangling the AI and providing more streamlined options that are easier to understand, with the end users giving up flexibility and freedom for ease of use. (Like the AI version of Dreamweaver, I guess would be a comparison?) Or modern no/low-code offerings. I've also seen already existing SaaS offerings integrating AI into their already existing product. How well that's going to work... I'm not sure. The economics of at least some of what I've seen is questionable (e.g. giving end users essentially unlimited token spend without passing any of the cost along), and at least one company in my field is clearly adding AI features because they're spooked that the existence of AI is damaging their moat/vendor lock in. The shift might look like 'company Y contracts with AI companies A, B, and C, and as a result does more with less and therefore needs 30% fewer people'. In theory, companies A, B, and C are creating jobs so the job numbers shift, but your point about a certain level of understanding being needed to do those new jobs definitely stands. The question is are there enough competent people to staff the middleman companies (I'd say yes specifically because entry level tech is a bloodbath atm) and how simple can these tools be made? Can they be dumbed down enough so that businesses can just buy a package from a vendor where they can give tool access to the people who can't program VCRs and trust that they won't shoot themselves in the foot? That, I don't know.
- trolleski 3mo agoBut, but... They said. Wait, did they... Lie?
- vouaobrasil 3mo agoIt sort of is though because more jobs are becoming more mechanical. In the past, I wouldn't mind being a programmer but now with all this AI the job sucks. AI may have made things more efficient but that also balances on the other side of the equation: the boss now expects more, and it's much less fun to produce more than to concentrate well on a single topic. So jobs suck more and that's harsh. Also, many jobs are being threatened, including my own. And I don't really want to get a different job, even though I will if I have to. I like my current one and I'm very specific about what I do. I will get another job but it's probably not going to be as fun. I hate AI and the people that made it.
- 1over137 3mo ago>So jobs suck more Be careful not to generalize from your job. The programmers I know do not have jobs that sound like yours.
- vouaobrasil 3mo agoThere's some truth in that but it's also a general feeling I get from browsing a lot of job boards. And I think in 10 years it's going to get worse for sure.
- birdsongs 3mo agoEh, me and most people I know are burning out fast. There's a split between the people that love to program, for the sake of it, and those that just want a well paying job. Seems like the former group is hit the hardest re: morale. The job is just not fun anymore. It's prompting and reviewing an onslaught of mass amounts of code. No more problem solving or innovation. At least, in the ways we used to. Seems like the latter group has less issues with this.
- sunnybeetroot 3mo agoWill you still hate AI when it discovers the cure for your cancer?
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- Gualdrapo 3mo agoAll I know is that trying to get a job now is being way more brutal than before. The closest thing I got this month was a scam email from an alleged "independent global senior recruiter" "currently supporting a confidential search for a company developing AI-powered digital products". The made-with-ai smell was all over the place, the company in mention allegedly was adobe, and am pretty sure they got my email from the "who wants to be hired?" posts in here.
- soupfordummies 3mo agoI wonder if we’re actually in like a shadow recession and companies are just using AI as an excuse to do layoffs or hire less. Idk there’s a lot of diff variables and it’s complicated of course, I really don’t think it’s because “AI’s taking the jobs” tho.
- shivpat23 3mo agoUnemployment rate and labor participation rate don’t support this.. probably true for software engineering but not the broader economy afaict
- irishcoffee 3mo agoUh, wat? Edit: for clarification, it’s never been worse. See link. https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/articles/labor-market-data-hits-record-135138800.html https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/articles/labor-market-data...
- Izkata 3mo agoLabor force participation rate was worse during the 2020 lockdowns and the entire recorded period before 1976: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART Unemployment rate has been going down for the past couple months, even though it was already lower than it has been for most of the period since the 70s: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE That Yahoo page mentions these as a source, but it doesn't link them, presumably because they don't match its claims. That said, both going down implies the people without jobs have stopped looking for jobs (which drops them from the unemployment rate calculation). Question then is why have they stopped and how are they getting by? Or perhaps it's the other way around, new kids entering working age and not bothering to look for a job while living off their parents, and people in retirement age who won't retire for whatever reason?
- FrustratedMonky 3mo agoThen what is causing hiring to be so low, or the layoffs? Just a soft job market in general? The economy is actually tanking, not just "AI" jobs. Did hiring managers just pump the brakes "just in case this AI thing is real". So we should see some big spike in hiring now that we know AI isn't going to do everything? Or, the actual real numbers of hiring, is for real an indicator that AI is already taking jobs, or reducing jobs. Teams of 5, can now be teams of 2 or 3.
- thinkindie 3mo agoThere are several things: * economic uncertainty (wars, energy shocks, etc) * policies chaos * end of free money (interest rates)
- jayd16 3mo agoAI has the mind share but I guess it's not hitting the bottom line enough for tech companies to grow. If anything it feels like AI has sucked the air out of the room as far as investment dollars goes.
- kakacik 3mo agoIt has been said here ad nausea - overhiring during covids, everybody was cargo culting amazon but there was only 1 amazon. Some folks were fired right when that whole charade with massive restrictions ended overnight, some were left around because times were good and money cheap. Thats over now so next waves. In many corporate places including mine, software dev team's work is maybe 20% coding, and rest is simply getting things delivered to production and maintaning existing stuff. Nothing keeps working for long if left unattended. And there always multiple layers of test envs to manage, syncing with rest of the projects, troubleshooting/bugfixing, deliveries. Llms won't help a nanometer here unless companies restructuralize their IT from ground up, firing entrenched teams/managers doing half-nothing. So ie if our team would went from 5->2, we would have 40% of the velocity, maaaybe 50%. Realistically, probably even less (since env maintenance is constant drag on productivity regardless on team's size)
- rawgabbit 3mo agoCEOs say we are in a low fire, low hire economy. They view AI as important but not transformative. https://www.conference-board.org/topics/CEO-Confidence/ https://www.conference-board.org/topics/CEO-Confidence/
- rexreed 3mo agoThere was an article in Forbes [1] that shared that it's not about jobs going away, but the steady creep of tasks being taken away from people and given to AI and automation. The point made is that AI is hollowing out jobs, leading to earlier (and often forced) retirement, the destruction of entry-level jobs, and the steady creep of winnowing out workers making things leaner. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/ronschmelzer/2026/07/14/ai-isnt-taking-every-job-its-targeting-these-workers/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/ronschmelzer/2026/07/14/ai-isnt...
- rambojohnson 3mo agofor many people it is already here...
- robotswantdata 3mo ago[flagged]
- analog31 3mo agoI suspect very few people in the tech industry understand or have experienced what office and civil service workers do. It might not be all that different than most engineering work: Organizing and arranging things, fitting things together, troubleshooting edge cases, bypassing controls to keep things working.
- rybosworld 3mo agoAgentic coding only became reasonably decent this past December. Even in tech, most organizations that have adopted the tools are still trying to understand how capable they are and how to use them. Point is it's too early to declare what the effect will be. It can take years for large organizations to change the way of doing things. The only sure-fire way to speed that up is if they suddenly start losing market-share. Otherwise, it's all herd-following and complacency in the majority of companies.
- newsomix9xl 3mo ago[dead]
- tysilva 3mo agoAt the same time, we seem to be making rapid progress year over year in capability. Competition is keeping things progressing forward at an interesting pace. It will be interesting to see what we are actually capable of 5 years from now... 10 years... There is almost definitely some job functions that are at risk and just don't know it, or haven't felt it yet.
- keeda 3mo ago> Labor productivity was, in fact, slower in the first three years of our AI era than during the information technology boom that began in the mid 1990s. That's a bit of a misleading statement, as it uses inaccurate terminology and cherrypicked comparisons. The linked chart is about labor productivity growth in those time frames, and current labor productivity is actually growing faster than projected since early 2023: See first chart here (rest of the article also worth skimming): https://aleximas.substack.com/p/what-is-the-impact-of-ai-on-productivity https://aleximas.substack.com/p/what-is-the-impact-of-ai-on-... Some economists suggest it's because of the impact of AI. Here's a study from the St Louis Fed (not quite a tech bro-pilled source I'd assume): https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2025/nov/state-generative-ai-adoption-2025 https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2025/nov/state-gen... If I may summarize my takeaway from that article: even though 50%+ of Americans currently self-report (major caveat) using AI, they use it for only 6% of work hours. This is what the recent Google study [1] called "broad but shallow use." But that still leads to 2% of work hour savings, which is a whopping 30%+ productivity boost per hour of AI used. And even with this low level of adoption, we may already be seeing the impact on labor productivity at national-level aggregate statistics! Interestingly, this is across industries. You can play with the charts here [2]. There are all kinds of caveats involved, but there are other studies that rhyme (like [1] and those listed on the substack above.) This is kind of astounding considering it's been less than 4 years since ChatGPT was released. My concern is that the impact on jobs is only beginning because 6% adoption is a very low number. I fear the impact will happen gradually, as adoption inches up... and then suddenly. [1] https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/research/understanding-the-ai-economy/ https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/research/un... (discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49020335 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49020335) [2] https://www.genaiadoptiontracker.com/ https://www.genaiadoptiontracker.com/