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Anecdotally, I (along with the rest of my team) got laid off from a big tech company at the end of January. The stated reason was "AI", although I think as we a

Anecdotally, I (along with the rest of my team) got laid off from a big tech company at the end of January. The stated reason was "AI", although I think as we all know the real reason was "we overhired in 2022". I managed to get a job by April without putting in a lot of work, though (mostly just listened to recruiters until something hit my fancy). My work experience is good, but I don't know if it's so good that I would be immune to market effects. The company that hired me is still hiring other software developers, and I was told that it took them a long time to find someone with my qualifications. (We use Claude, although so far I haven't seen a lot of AI psychosis like I have in other places.. that was also a big filter in my job search). Long story short, I think narrative of job loss is way overblown. It's more doom trolling from anthropic and openAI and their mouth pieces as far as I can tell.

deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
b112 2mo ago
It's so early game, is the real problem. My experience so far, has been that it's barely a junior dev. I've met so many in my career that think reading stackoverflow, or watching a youtube video mysteriously makes them an expert. AI reminds me of this sort. Well anyone can use (prior to AI) a simple linter and learning to code isn't that big a deal. It's learning the pitfalls, the traps, that's the issue. And so far Opus just seems to fall into them again and again. I guess the best way to put it, is that it's not an architect. I sees no big picture, and that's not really a surprise with (compared to a human) an incredibly small context window. When I'm on a project, or working with a codebase, I often have years of "context window". And I have a career of "don't do this" context window. So what I wonder is, will this be resolved? Will that awareness of larger scope be solved? If that happens, we'll be in another ballpark of competency. Some companies have massive codebases. Are these companies slowly gaining rot in those codebases, a swiss cheese effect, which eventually will result in collapse? Because I've worked where a bad hire had just this effect over time. And what I worry about isn't using Claude to speed one up, it's the DEV that uses Claude and just "meh" and submits because it passes regression + other tests, and then a manager or code reviewer uses Claude and "meh" because it's a pass too.
- ACCount37 2mo ago
  > Are these companies slowly gaining rot in those codebases? Yes! And that "yes" holds regardless of whether they use AI or not. Let's not pretend tech debt accumulation is somehow an AI problem. Some of the world's biggest companies routinely ship code that reeks of years of rot and decay.
  - layer8 2mo ago
    This is usually due to time pressure and cost. AI arguably substantially reduces that kind of pressure. I’m overall skeptical as well, but the argument about tech debt is more nuanced than your comment implies.
    - asdf88990 2mo ago
      > This is usually due to time pressure and cost. AI arguably substantially reduces that kind of pressure. This is categorically false because time and cost pressure is relative and if anything AI has exacerbated the exceptions for ROI and Turn Around time. This along with the fact that even state of the art AI tends to generate subpar (albeit working) code extremely fast and in large volume. You can see the effect of this already in the increased rate of production incidents recently. This isn’t to say that AI is useless, but the tech debt it generates is unprecedented.
    - lenkite 2mo ago
      Our production incidents have dramatically increased over last 2 years after management pushed AI. In 2023, we never failed our SLA. Now, we continuously keep failing it due to some stupid outage. There was no real change in architecture or strategy - only the adoption of AI. There have already been several high-profile AI-root-cause incidents at many companies this year. I guess we can look forward to even more deterioration in the next 2 years.
    - rudiksz 2mo ago
      AI easily generates PR's with thousands of lines. I my company there's even a directive for agents to split up their work into multiple PR's based on some arbitrary metric of files/lines changed. When one of my colleagues uses AI to "implement" something, the amount of code I need to review is much much more. If I were to do review as I am supposed to, then AI is absolutely increasing the time and effort I have to put into a change (as opposed to the person who just writes a prompts and calls it a huge productivity boost). There's the meme in programming that goes something like this "Give a programmer two lines of code to review and he'll find 20 issues. Give a programmer 500 lines to review and he's say that it looks good". At some point you simply cannot keep pace with the amount of generated code as a human.
danshipt 2mo ago
Same experience. I’m based in Western Europe.
GeoAtreides 2mo ago
>Long story short, I think narrative of job loss is way overblown. Long story short, I ate dinner so I think the narrative of people over the world being hungry is way overblown.
- nozzlegear 2mo ago
  How many studies do we need showing that AI isn't causing massive job loss before you'll believe it? This isn't the first one showing these results.
  - pjmlp 2mo ago
    I won't believe in it, because I have seen it happen in agency work. What used to be contracts for translations or asset creations for CMS projects, is now handled by the AI tooling of CMS products. The adoption of SaaS, iPaaS and serverless, meant delivery projects could be done with smaller teams. Now with iPaaS adoption of agentic workflows, and AI tooling to transform those serverless actions into MCP tools, the team sizes have been further reduced. Most agencies aren't winning enough projects to justify those that land on bench.
    - elteto 2mo ago
      I think non-software creative work has indeed been completely decimated by AI usage, particularly on the small business end. But this has been going on for a while now, I think since the image generation models got good enough to write down text with hallucinating nordic runes.
  - lazide 2mo ago
    why does massive job loss have to be due to AI?
mandeepj 2mo ago
> I managed to get a job by April without putting in a lot of work Congrats! Probably, you have the blessing of luck as well. One of my ex-colleagues got laid off and managed to find an uplevel job within a month, but another has been looking for almost 2 years now. He showed me that most of the jobs he applied to over the past two-ish years are still open, while they rejected him by saying the usual - we are moving forward with the candidates more aligned with the position.

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

b112 2mo ago

It's so early game, is the real problem. My experience so far, has been that it's barely a junior dev. I've met so many in my career that think reading stackoverflow, or watching a youtube video mysteriously makes them an expert. AI reminds me of this sort. Well anyone can use (prior to AI) a simple linter and learning to code isn't that big a deal. It's learning the pitfalls, the traps, that's the issue. And so far Opus just seems to fall into them again and again. I guess the best way to put it, is that it's not an architect. I sees no big picture, and that's not really a surprise with (compared to a human) an incredibly small context window. When I'm on a project, or working with a codebase, I often have years of "context window". And I have a career of "don't do this" context window. So what I wonder is, will this be resolved? Will that awareness of larger scope be solved? If that happens, we'll be in another ballpark of competency. Some companies have massive codebases. Are these companies slowly gaining rot in those codebases, a swiss cheese effect, which eventually will result in collapse? Because I've worked where a bad hire had just this effect over time. And what I worry about isn't using Claude to speed one up, it's the DEV that uses Claude and just "meh" and submits because it passes regression + other tests, and then a manager or code reviewer uses Claude and "meh" because it's a pass too.

ACCount37 2mo ago
> Are these companies slowly gaining rot in those codebases? Yes! And that "yes" holds regardless of whether they use AI or not. Let's not pretend tech debt accumulation is somehow an AI problem. Some of the world's biggest companies routinely ship code that reeks of years of rot and decay.
- layer8 2mo ago
  This is usually due to time pressure and cost. AI arguably substantially reduces that kind of pressure. I’m overall skeptical as well, but the argument about tech debt is more nuanced than your comment implies.
  - asdf88990 2mo ago
    > This is usually due to time pressure and cost. AI arguably substantially reduces that kind of pressure. This is categorically false because time and cost pressure is relative and if anything AI has exacerbated the exceptions for ROI and Turn Around time. This along with the fact that even state of the art AI tends to generate subpar (albeit working) code extremely fast and in large volume. You can see the effect of this already in the increased rate of production incidents recently. This isn’t to say that AI is useless, but the tech debt it generates is unprecedented.
  - lenkite 2mo ago
    Our production incidents have dramatically increased over last 2 years after management pushed AI. In 2023, we never failed our SLA. Now, we continuously keep failing it due to some stupid outage. There was no real change in architecture or strategy - only the adoption of AI. There have already been several high-profile AI-root-cause incidents at many companies this year. I guess we can look forward to even more deterioration in the next 2 years.
  - rudiksz 2mo ago
    AI easily generates PR's with thousands of lines. I my company there's even a directive for agents to split up their work into multiple PR's based on some arbitrary metric of files/lines changed. When one of my colleagues uses AI to "implement" something, the amount of code I need to review is much much more. If I were to do review as I am supposed to, then AI is absolutely increasing the time and effort I have to put into a change (as opposed to the person who just writes a prompts and calls it a huge productivity boost). There's the meme in programming that goes something like this "Give a programmer two lines of code to review and he'll find 20 issues. Give a programmer 500 lines to review and he's say that it looks good". At some point you simply cannot keep pace with the amount of generated code as a human.

danshipt 2mo ago

Same experience. I’m based in Western Europe.

GeoAtreides 2mo ago

>Long story short, I think narrative of job loss is way overblown. Long story short, I ate dinner so I think the narrative of people over the world being hungry is way overblown.

nozzlegear 2mo ago
How many studies do we need showing that AI isn't causing massive job loss before you'll believe it? This isn't the first one showing these results.
- pjmlp 2mo ago
  I won't believe in it, because I have seen it happen in agency work. What used to be contracts for translations or asset creations for CMS projects, is now handled by the AI tooling of CMS products. The adoption of SaaS, iPaaS and serverless, meant delivery projects could be done with smaller teams. Now with iPaaS adoption of agentic workflows, and AI tooling to transform those serverless actions into MCP tools, the team sizes have been further reduced. Most agencies aren't winning enough projects to justify those that land on bench.
  - elteto 2mo ago
    I think non-software creative work has indeed been completely decimated by AI usage, particularly on the small business end. But this has been going on for a while now, I think since the image generation models got good enough to write down text with hallucinating nordic runes.
- lazide 2mo ago
  why does massive job loss have to be due to AI?

mandeepj 2mo ago

> I managed to get a job by April without putting in a lot of work Congrats! Probably, you have the blessing of luck as well. One of my ex-colleagues got laid off and managed to find an uplevel job within a month, but another has been looking for almost 2 years now. He showed me that most of the jobs he applied to over the past two-ish years are still open, while they rejected him by saying the usual - we are moving forward with the candidates more aligned with the position.