Can anyone convince me this is truly an effect of AI, and not just pullback from the mass hiring during and following ZIRP in 2021-23ish? I understand either cause makes it a bad time to be a junior, but would like to hear the argument _against_ "AI is taking our jobs".
(I suspect some very junior jobs have genuinely been taken by AI, but it seems to me that the driving factor is still a return-to-mean after ZIRP).
AI is increasing the capacity of existing employees and I think we're all still discovering, everyday, better ways to leverage it even more. So when the question comes of hiring a new teammate, the value they'd bring to the table needs to be convincingly more than what I can expect to achieve alone with AI.
I think the glut is ZIRP, but the lack of recovery (or very slow pickup) is AI.
If it were 2018, I personally would have made 3 SWE hires in the last 12 months. The reason I didn't need to is because of LLMs. Not budget, not anything else. I don't think AI is so much to blame for layoffs, but I do think it is a huge component of the slow hiring. There's just less demand for coders.
It feels to me like everyone is holding their breath to see how the wholesale "AI can replace people" notion pans out. Whether it proves true or not, betting on the wrong result will hit hard so few want to go all in (outside of the companies that produce the tech itself). If there's anything "AI" has been able to ship at scale, it's uncertainty.
It’s mostly ZIRP hangover. The over hiring in those years was ludicrous.
AI is having some effect at the margins but it’s mostly an excuse.
Companies always prefer to avoid saying they are just laying people off. It can be a negative market signal to investors, which is paradoxical, since it might indicate lower growth expectations. It also creates possible exposure to lawsuits depending on the circumstances and state.
The nice thing about AI as an excuse is you can say to your investors and board “we are shedding cost but still growing and in fact our productivity is up because we are leveraging AI!”
As companies tighten their belts, they cut low performers that had been hanging around for too long anyway because:
1) cost reduction
2) companies had been lazy at getting rid of low performers when the market was hot and they didn’t need to cut (and couldn’t find better devs to replace them anyway)
3) with the market this skewed towards employers, you can replace low performers with better talent anyway because everyone’s looking
Maybe they are just calling the jobs by different names? It seems like names of roles are constantly shifting. "Data scientist" is a term that is going out of fashion.
Jobs don't have to be exclusive to a single site. Pretty much every job gets posted everywhere (usually done automatically by your HRIS/ATS software). Job boards will even scrape each other for postings. LinkedIn is notorious for this, which is why it has so many outdated listings.
We were told that "everyone needs to learn how to code", to the thunderous applause of all corporate stooges.
It is hard to tell what is really going on. No company will admit that they are firing, e.g., DEI hires from 2023. I have seen some open source CoC loudmouths being fired, but that is not enough to establish a large trend.
Those are not "tech jobs" for the most part, they are business support jobs.
Data scientist is an exception based on title, but in my experience there are a large number of people with that title who have never heard of the scientific method, let alone could apply it with any rigor.
I'm sure LLMs are taking some of these jobs, but a lot of the decrease is probably due to general cutbacks on overhead and a realization that they produce limited value.
(I suspect some very junior jobs have genuinely been taken by AI, but it seems to me that the driving factor is still a return-to-mean after ZIRP).
I think the glut is ZIRP, but the lack of recovery (or very slow pickup) is AI.
AI is just a plausible scapegoat that sounds hip.
AI is having some effect at the margins but it’s mostly an excuse.
Companies always prefer to avoid saying they are just laying people off. It can be a negative market signal to investors, which is paradoxical, since it might indicate lower growth expectations. It also creates possible exposure to lawsuits depending on the circumstances and state.
The nice thing about AI as an excuse is you can say to your investors and board “we are shedding cost but still growing and in fact our productivity is up because we are leveraging AI!”
Communication skills matter.
As companies tighten their belts, they cut low performers that had been hanging around for too long anyway because:
1) cost reduction
2) companies had been lazy at getting rid of low performers when the market was hot and they didn’t need to cut (and couldn’t find better devs to replace them anyway)
3) with the market this skewed towards employers, you can replace low performers with better talent anyway because everyone’s looking
This is the company so large, their jobs data was used in lieu of the Fed's jobs data when the gov was shut down.
It is hard to tell what is really going on. No company will admit that they are firing, e.g., DEI hires from 2023. I have seen some open source CoC loudmouths being fired, but that is not enough to establish a large trend.
Data scientist is an exception based on title, but in my experience there are a large number of people with that title who have never heard of the scientific method, let alone could apply it with any rigor.
I'm sure LLMs are taking some of these jobs, but a lot of the decrease is probably due to general cutbacks on overhead and a realization that they produce limited value.