How does one explain the drop starting January 2023 (esp for things like Customer Service Rep, which is an NLP-heavy task) when most corporations didnt even start LLM/NLP pilots until mid/late 2023? I skimmed thru the 100+ page paper but didnt see an explanation for this strange leading effect.
SWE figures dropped mid-2022 (almost magically in line with interest rate hikes) and LLM-copilots werent introduced for another year. The paper notes they did an adjustment for the end of ZIRP. I dont know enough econometrics to understand whether this adjustment was sufficient, but the chart doesnt make sense since the labor efforts seem to be leading the actual technology by over a year or more. From informal surveys, LLM-copilot usage didnt become widespread until late 2023 to mid 2024, certainly not widespread enough to cause macro labor effects in mid-2022.
The 2022 drop for SWE is easy for me to explain, and it's not on these analysts' list of factors (though I'm not an economic quant, I don't know how you could really control for it): In 2017, a tax bill was passed that cut a particular tax incentive in 2022 in an effort to be counted as "revenue neutral" despite being otherwise a massive tax cut overall. The incentive in question was a writeoff for "Research and development". This means that in 2022, it got effectively much more expensive to hire anyone who falls under that category, including developers not directly necessary for the day-to-day function of a business (hell, one might argue they would have counted anyway) and scientists of most kinds. That this hit big firms, which have a higher relative amount of R&D efforts going at a given time, first makes a lot of sense.
For customer service, my explanation is that companies literally do not care about customer service. Automated phone trees, outsourced call centers whose reps have no real power to help a customer, and poorly-made websites have been frustrating people for decades, but businesses never seem to try to compete on doing better at it. It's a cheap win with investors who want to hear about AI initiatives to lay off yet even more of this department, because it doesn't matter if the quality of service declines, there are no market or regulatory forces that are punishing this well enough to ever expect firms to stop breaking it, let alone fix it
Love this note. For those interested, this is the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017 Section 179.
For a software engineering business, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017 significantly impacted how software costs can be expensed under Section 179. While Section 179 previously allowed for the immediate expensing of many software purchases, TCJA reforms restricted this deduction primarily to "off-the-shelf" software. Custom-developed software and internal development costs are no longer eligible for Section 179 expensing and must now be capitalized and amortized.
Under the TCJA, Section 179 cannot be used for software that a company develops for itself. This includes the direct costs for the engineers, programmers, and other personnel involved in the development process.
The report not addressing this elephant in the room is a disappointing.
I think it may have been a one-two punch of §174 and the end of ZIRP.
Of note, the OBBB reinstated the ability to deduct R&D, so businesses are no longer required to capitalize and amortize R&D expenses (including software development).
I was talking about zirp in another thread and got downvoted. But yes, companies were taking out low/zero interest loans and hiring people in hopes of making 1-2% on it, which worked for awhile. It doesn't work at 4-5%, though. We can't pin our hopes to zirp anyways. But a lot of sketchy activities around investing were accomplished because of zirp.
Anecdotally I saw a post on reddit about a senior SWE in the USA who was laid off and couldn't get any interviews, with their old job outsourced to eastern Europe. And then this month the people he hadn't even got a response back from started requesting he apply for their jobs. Only one data point but the market might be coming back.
Anecdotally in the past month or so, I've started seeing a large uptick in recruiter reach-outs. I had none for the past year (aside from directly reaching out), but there have been 4 cold contacts in the last couple of weeks alone now.
As a 20 year remote employee across multiple companies...in my experience, this is true depending on one's definition of career. If you want to advance high in the company, remote is going to stifle you unless the entire company is remote. And even then something as small as skipping an offsite or keeping your cam off will stifle you. Humans like connection, apparently.
My own career progress was much slower and topped out lower than (in my enlightened opinion) much less qualified folks in office.
That said, it's a tradeoff. I -still- wouldn't move to work in office knowing this. I value my family, time, and lifestyle I'm able to afford in a place I want to be more than making tons of money.
In another 10 or 20 years I'm half sure I'll run the numbers and regret that, but so far so good.
I have been promoted while working remote, so I disagree.
I don’t have 2 different 1 hour commute blocks on my calendar. While you’re fighting traffic, I’m working. While you’re rushing through your morning routine, I’m sitting at my computer catching up on slack. While you’re finding the meeting room, I’m reading the meeting prep material. While you’re getting distracted by Sales in your open office, I’m locked in, midway through a 2 hour coding session.
It was only just reinstated, so it's probably too early to see the effects.
I also expect that despite the restoration of Section 174, companies realized that they not only overhired during ZIRP, but also that they don't actually need that headcount, given the outcome of Musk's Twitter layoffs. There were so many prognostications that Twitter would imminently implode after downsizing from ~8k to ~1.5k employees, and when these claims never came to pass, it was a wake-up call to the rest of the industry [0].
I also think it’s fashionable to have a smaller headcount these days. Historically, the dynamics of businesses encouraged rising headcounts, as ICs weren’t as valued as managers (salary caps basically, as impact for ICs is hard to measure unless you are in sales), and managers generally view headcount as a metric to career and salary growth.
So there was just this general pressure from the middle up to grow instead of paying more to existing staff or finding some other way to spend the money. After all, investors generally want you to spend the money you have access to, otherwise they’ll put it to use elsewhere.
It seems that there is external pressure right now from investors, and on to executives, to push headcounts down as there is a general feeling that good companies should be able to leverage AI to become much more efficient, and higher headcounts just burn money and bog things down. Whether or not that’s true is another question, but the perception exists.
I’m not sure if this is a fundamental change in the dynamic, or just a temporary push against it that will eventually lose steam.
> good companies should be able to leverage AI to become much more efficient
I feel like this should be a “both and” situation. AI is not a panacea. If your company has 10 good engineers and a ChatGPT subscription, and my company has 100 good engineers and a ChatGPT subscription, we are going to move considerably faster.
Until someone gets an exclusive contract with AGI, it doesn’t change things.
This isn't how it practically works though. You hit a saturation point where there's no more work to be done. There's only so much software to write, only so many ad campaigns to push, sometimes you just need to maintain, stabilize, and not iterate. If you have a problem that requires 10 engineers, 100 isn't going to speed it up. 9 women can't make a baby in 1 month and all that.
And they were right, I think. Twitter's UI has degraded. I can't see this tweet linked from the thread: https://x.com/Grady_Booch/status/1620720537805922306 - it gives me an error. It might have been deleted, but Twitter just says "something went wrong". And I don't think it's even possible to view threads anymore without logging in?
But more importantly, X has not released any substantially new features within the last 3 years. And I bet that it won't release anything new for a while, and anything they _do_ try to release will be laughably broken.
Existing features are also suffering and going unfixed. If you browse any tweet with more than a few dozen replies, loading replies takes a notable amount of time, and X very conspicuously does not load all of them. Sometimes changing reply sorting algorithms loads entirely different batches of tweets.
Besides that most basic functionality, many times notifications are not sent when the notification settings would suggest they should be. And of course, moderation has fallen by the wayside, although that's more of a policy shift than a technical failure.
> But more importantly, X has not released any substantially new features within the last 3 years.
Just on top of my head, there's the ability to write longer texts, the AI integration (that seems fairly popular in there). There was also some revenue sharing scheme where accounts can get paid for engagement. And from the point of view of management, making it impossible to view threads without login would also be a feature (as in "something we have to deliberately implement").
It's not a lot, but I don't think the pre-Musk Twitter changed even that much in the 3 year period before the acquisition.
I don't understand this thread - twitter is pretty much entirely dead, like stackoverflow - in some zombie state before getting the plug inevitably pulled in a decade or so. Its revenue halved since 2020.
Net income/profit is what matters, revenue is largely irrelevant. Your own date is a perfect example of this since Twitter somehow managed to lose a ton of money in 2020 when they did indeed see record revenue, probably owing to over-stuffed election coffers. X's user counts and EBITDA are at record levels. In 2024 it was $1.25 billion on $2.7 billion revenue, contrasted against 'old Twitter's' $0.68 billion on $5 billion revenue in 2021. [1]
Doesn't this forum periodically discuss an article[*] about profit not really mattering in the grand scheme of things? (As in, profitable and growing companies are capable of showing profit whenever they want, and conversely to show no profit if they so wish.)
I'm not sure this is true. Amazon was investing heavily in things that would be reasonably expected to yield future gains, like fulfillment centers and just broadly expanding their logistic capacity. But for Twitter? So far as I know, most of their expenses were just ongoing operational costs and which seem to have been greatly bloated owing to mismanagement.
That's due to Elon's gross mishandling of Twitter governance (e.g. demanding that the recommendation algorithm be tweaked so that literal Nazis dominate people's feeds), not due to any technical failings of the platform as a result of downsizing the engineering staff.
Twitter really is a hellscape. I was drawn in for a few days recently and started getting affected by the barrage of relentless right-wing garbage. And for those on twitter it seems like the most important information in the world when it’s just a dopamine pump of rage and fear. Easier just to switch it off and live your life in peace.
This is a thought terminating cliche, ironically about a thought terminating cliche. X does have a problem with actual, literal, antisemitic, genocidal Nazis. No funny business or stretched definitions. Nazis. Dismissing it just because of a few people going by the Nazi bar analogy risks normalizing the actual fucking Nazis we're dealing with. "Oh everyone's a Nazi to you people" is a crazy thing to say when the individual under discussion is screaming about globalist cabals of bankers ushering in white erasure. And that is who is getting algorithmically elevated on X.
Also plenty of racists and homophobes, more than I see just about anywhere else on the internet. And more wild, rabid hate surrounding trans people than I see anywhere outside of narrow, festering cesspools in wastelands like 4chan.
I believe you that there are literal Nazis on X, just as there are on every social media platform (and society in general). I despise Nazis but again I literally never see them on my feed so I find it hard to believe that this is a major problem or that the platform is boosting that content. If you're seeing a lot of Nazi content then you're probably following the wrong type of accounts.
No, in fact I block every such account I see. I go on Twitter for inspiration of various kinds, not for doomscrolling, although I recognize that that's in vogue. But the owner of the platform has been demonstrated to artificially push posts and accounts into people's timelines and notifications, particularly his own, and he has retweeted, replied to, and otherwise boosted blatantly antisemitic conspiracy theories. It's pretty well documented as something that does actually happen, and not just as some sort of algorithmic quirk.
Those changes got permanently reversed in the recent passage of the Big Beautiful Bill by a one-in-a-year reconciliation process that was able to pass with only 51 votes in the Senate with zero votes from the opposition.
Note that the reversal only applies to American software jobs, not offshore ones. So maybe tech hiring is going to pick up again soon. Those changes should've been reversed before they took effect in 2022 by the govt at the time.
What was the reasoning behind this change? Isn’t R&D something we’d encourage to be a tax write off since it reduces the cost of well.. R&D? Or is R&D not as important as I’m thinking?
It was done to try and make the bill somewhat pencil out and make the national debt increase less egregious. Everyone just assumed it would be delayed forever or reversed before it could take effect, but those negotiations failed, triggering massive waves of layoffs.
The story that I’ve heard (probably on here) is that the administration did it to make the tax bill look more balanced over the long term by phasing out that tax write-off, while giving them (or the next administration) time to reverse it before it really impacted anything. But, nobody reversed it, until this year.
I was working in Europe for a big American company, which will remain nameless, and they started shutting down most, if not all, of their European operations.
A change in the US tax code made software development amortize over 5 years in the US and over 15 years overseas. It was later changed instant deduction in the US but still 15 years for overseas. It no longer makes sense to outsource software development in many cases.
> It's a cheap win with investors who want to hear about AI initiatives to lay off yet even more of this department, because it doesn't matter if the quality of service declines, there are no market or regulatory forces that are punishing this well enough to ever expect firms to stop breaking it, let alone fix it
There's also some argument that, if people cannot get customer service to "help" they stop asking for help - driving that cost down.
And not having to remedy issues in the product = no repair/replace cost
And people are then left with only a few options, one of which... buy a replacement... which in a restricted market is a WIN because more money coming in...
And something to note - this cut has been reinstated as part of the Big Beautiful Bill. Which has passed. I think the drop in jobs between now and a year from
now atleast be separated as AI vs just interest rates. There are less confounding variables.
I've heard this complaint/observation many times and I just don't buy it. For one thing, particularly for large companies, the deduction smooths out. Yes, you can only deduct 20% of the costs this year but you're also deducting 20% from the previous year, 20% from the eyar before that and so on.
Also, the 2017 tax cuts and the recent bill have provided substantial tax cuts to these corporations too.
Usually this subject comes up where people (at least on HN) are telling people to mail their Congresspeople and Senators to get a bill passed to "fix" this and my question is always this:
"What tax cuts are you going to give back to pay for this?"
If we want to end this ridiculous IP transfer to Ireland and royalty payments to offshore profits to avoid taxes at the same time, I'm 100% on board with fixing the deductability of engineering salaries.
> Also, the 2017 tax cuts and the recent bill have provided substantial tax cuts to these corporations too.
That's just not how big companies look at their budgets, it isn't all one big pool of funds coming in and going out everything has a cost center and is accounted for individually end to end. This tax change made certain jobs suddenly 20% more expensive on paper. People in corporate finance look at these numbers and make recommendations that get implemented.
> the 2017 tax cuts and the recent bill have provided substantial tax cuts to these corporations too.
Sure, but that doesn't necessarily change the marginal cost of hiring another dev if the tax incentives have worsened.
The time value of money over 5 years is significant, especially in a fast moving industry like tech. The correlation between this change passing and tech hiring dropping is strong so I'm inclined to think there's some signal there.
You absolutely misunderstand Section 174 and you are spreading misinformation.
The only companies this affected are those right at the margins of becoming profitable. It doesn't affect new startups and it doesn't affect established businesses. And if you are at the margins of becoming profitable you have likely accumulated more than enough tax credits for all your losses.
The changes to Section 174 is not the explanation of why software engineering jobs were lost in 2022. They were lost because every company overhired from 2020-2022 and they have to absorb it given the drop in activity once the Pandemic was over.
Not entirely accurate. An unprofitable company that is acquired for its tech or team might have a huge amount of tax credits that they can’t use, but the acquiring company can. This can make an acquisition more attractive, even if the target company never made any money.
You are right that it creates residual value which might be purchased for value (probably at a discount.) However, it doesn't help the startup actually pay the bills while it operates.
Historically, the R&D payroll just wiped out same year revenue and you essentially did cash accounting. After Section 174, you had to finance the R&D by borrowing or just hiring less.
I do consulting, I'm constantly scouting clients. Right around November 2022 something very stark happened. I went from fighting off prospects with a stick, to crickets, almost over night. I deal mostly with startups and mid-size companies, nobody with insider knowledge or cutting edge interests. I can tell you that GPT was not heavily on anyone I dealt with's radar as an opportunity to reduce costs.
Some sort of cultural zeitgeist occurred, but in terms of symptoms I saw with my own eyes, I think ZIRP ending (projects getting axed) and layoffs starting (projects getting filled within ~24 hours) were huge drivers. I have no proof.
The Twitter layoffs were done in anticipation of AI. Musk knew he wanted to make X and Twitter was one entry point. The loss in twitter productivity would be made up by AI gains and the first realization of that AI was named Grok.
So there's a bit of circular causality here. AI is a cause of the Twitter layoffs, and others are arguing that the Twitter layoffs may be a cause of other labor force shrinkage. If so then the Twitter layoffs are a costly signal that AI will impact the labor force and the shrinkage downstream of them is AI related.
Is your claim that Musk, who cofounded OpenAI and started buying GPUs by the tens of thousands almost immediately after buying Twitter, and whose stated purposes in buying Twitter included AI, and who has been trying to build X since the 1990s, and who uses AI in SpaceX and Tesla, did not foresee that he would use AI on Twitter when he conducted the layoffs?
Can you walk me through your thought process here?
You're too in love with your own conclusion here. The reality is Elon's kind of an idiot who just impulsively does stuff and mostly gets away with it because money.
Elon talked shit online and then fought hard to wriggle out of buying Twitter after promising to pay the funny weed sex number for it.
And he fired employees because he's cheap and only keeps people who yes man him. You can read the complaint yourself:
Where do you think the market is going in regards to boutique firms? I've heard it mentioned but I'm not sure what counts as boutique and what that signifies for the next few years.
So if we are talking about "traditional consulting", that usually means MBB/Big Three
The value they add is their corpus of previous work to lean on and sell. And anybody at the firm can reference that. But it's always almost the junior level consultants doing the work, and a bunch of c-suites trying to manage it and sell it.
So when you work with a firm like this, you are going to get a team who has managed a similar project as yours, but it usually ends up being generic and trying to repeat past successes.
I really think that's where some of the boutique firms are being different.
Instead of just saying "here is our Lean Six Sigma team", they can say "we've got these four people who are perfect for technical implementation, and here is a project manager who has done almost exactly this before, and here is a RevOps person who has worked in your actual industry".
Maybe someone is an expert on some super obscure domain. They might not qualify for a full time consultant position at a big 3 firm, can suddenly be pulled in on projects that are their specialty.
Mostly these boutique firms can put together a more highly specialized and focused team than the prebuilt teams at a place like Bain or McKinsey.
I had the same thoughts, there are clearly indicators that the weakness in the labor market started happening before LLMs and AI took over popular discourse.
All the more reason to believe that while correlated, LLMs are certainly not the largest contributor, or even the cause of the job market weakness for young people. The more likely and simple explanation is that there are cracks forming in the economy not just in the US but globally; youth employment is struggling virtually everywhere. Can only speculate on the reasons, but delayed effects from questionable monetary and fiscal policy choices, increasing wealth gaps, tariffs, geopolitics, etc. have certainly not helped.
The Boomers are largely gone now from tech. One former manager of mine was 65 when I left, she retired a year later at 66, gone. Unfortunately, most of the roles those people held were not back-filled. The roles vanished, too.
Anecdata: I spent quite a bit of time driving around office parks in Eagan, MN. Most of them are dead--really, really dead. Vacant offices everywhere, the hotel that used to cater to business travelers is shuttered and the parking lot looks like a jungle. I can't peg exactly when all this took place because I haven't worked in that area in several years, but probably the effects of 2020, the remote work culture, and now the layoff hangover. I see a lot of people in their 50s and 60s working retail jobs right now. They often look like folks who would have been working in an office someplace.
>The paper notes they did an adjustment for the end of ZIRP. I dont know enough econometrics to understand whether this adjustment was sufficient
Looking at the paper [0], they attempted to do it by regressing the number of jobs y_{c,q,t} at company c, time t, and "AI exposure quintile" q, with separate parameters jointly controlling for company/quintile (a), company/time (b) and quintile/time (g). This is in Equation 4.1, page 15, which I have simplified here:
log(y_{c,q,t}) ~ a_{c,q} + b_{c,t} + g_{q,t}
Any time-dependent effects (e.g. end of ZIRP/Section 174) that would equally affect all jobs at the company irrespective of how much AI exposure they have should be absorbed into b.
They normalized g with respect to October 2022 and quintile 1 (least AI exposure), and plotted the results for each age group and quintile (Figure 9, page 20). There is a pronounced decline that only starts in mid-2024 for quintiles 3, 4, and 5 in the youngest age group. The plots shown in the article are misleading, and are likely primarily a reflection of ZIRP, as you say. The real meat of the paper is Figure 9.
A potential flaw of this method is that ZIRP/Section 174 may have disproportionately affected junior positions with high AI exposure, e.g. software engineers. This would not be accounted for in b and would thus be reflected in g. It would be interesting to repeat this analysis excluding software engineers and other employees subject to Section 174.
Yeah my company started stepping up outsourcing in 2023. We also started some AI projects. The AI projects haven't made much progress but the outsourcing is at an extremely advanced stage.
I personally sat in meetings in 2022 where we adjusted staffing projections in anticipation of AI efficiency. Sure some of it was "overhiring," but the reality was that those staffing goals were pre-ai. Once they were updated, that's when the layoffs started because management didn't want anyone who didn't have an AI or big data background.
Gen-AI was still extremely niche in 2022; ChatGPT didn't come out until the end of the year, on 30 November, and it was pretty much just a toy curiosity until mid-2023 when GPT-4 came out. I am very surprised that leadership at your company was seriously discussing the business impact of AI that early on.
Chat gpt wasn't considered a toy... Not sure where you got that. We were interested in what openai was going from very early given the founders' history.
It absolutely was considered a toy by most people when it debuted in late 2022. This was the era when memes abounded about how ChatGPT would dutifully answer the query "what's the world record for crossing the English Channel on foot?" [0] or "what weighs more, a pound of feathers or a kilogram of bricks?" [1]
Most people didn't start taking ChatGPT/gen-AI seriously until mid-2023, when GPT-4 became widely used.
Hacker News is not most people. Even today most non-tech people I speak to have barely touched AI. Perhaps a bit of gimmicky “ooh that’s cool” image generation or chatGPT, but nothing serious.
Warren Buffet is also not most people, yet people like him have far more to do with what actually happens on the stock market than the tens millions of retail investors.
He was certainly on top of new technology movement but signs were there the whole time.
I wasn’t aware of ChatGPT in 2022 but I was aware that we could not keep data scientists hired long term because several faangs like meta were just dropping 100% increases in salary as the opener to our people for some mega project related to machine learning based on the skill set of the people being hired
Correct. We didn't know chatgpt would be huge but we knew big data and ai were the next big thing and we're investing heavily in that space. The funding for this came from sre teams, pms, etc.
Not for people paying attention to the entire AI space. GPT wasn't the only thing going on at the time. AlphaGo was a big deal for anyone paying attention.
GitHub Copilot was out there in 2021. The "chat about anything" era hadn't really begun, but "your computer can write code for you" era was well underway. And given that said business wanted to retain the people it had with AI/big data backgrounds, strongly suggesting it isn't like a restaurant where it would be unlikely that any staff would have that kind of experience, we can reasonably assume that they are in that particular niche.
in addition to this detail I might add I can't remember the last time I had a customer service call that took place with someone stateside. It's easy to point to AI when offshoring for favorable interest rates is really the reason.
I remember the outsourcing meme was huge in the early 2000s. "Don't study CS, you'll get outsourced." Why is it only happening now? It's far from a new idea.
because 2020-2022 COVID happened and forced everything remote. world didn't end.
the offshoring boom was the 90s and 2000s, and generally ended not amazing, but now a new generation of leadership saw it could be done, and done better -- video calls to the other side of the globe work far better than in 2004, speaking from experience.
I think it's lipstick on a pig. We've seen tech companies collude before, and I'm guessing they're doing it again, trying to drive down the price of talent and make their employees less demanding.
I remember years of a no-backfill policy at Devon on a promises of automation. Since 2017 at least. The “desirable job market” for young people has been challenging well before LLM became popular. Want a dead end entry level job in food service earning $20/hour? No problem.
the economy actually creates all the jobs ever since hunt and gather. the buggy whip jobs did eventually dry up, but the economy continues to create other jobs, paid for by ever increasing surpluses.
> SWE figures dropped mid-2022 (almost magically in line with interest rate hikes) and LLM-copilots werent introduced for another year
It was pretty clear by late 2022 that AI assisted coding was going to transform how software development was done. I remember having conversations with colleagues at that time about how SWE might transform into an architecture and systems design role, with transformer models filling in implementations.
If it was clear to workers like us, it was pretty clear to the c-suite. Not that it was the only reason for mass layoffs, but it was a strong contributor to the rationale.
Many large companies were placing a bet that there were turbulent times ahead, and were lightening their load preemptively.
AI is barely a blip on why the job market is dead for entry level, and dying all the way up the ladder.
Every one of my engineer friends says the same thing. "My team is 80% indians" and more than half are not qualified for the job they have.
The whole thing is a fucking scam for them, every company, top to bottom. Recruiters, hiring managers, referrals, CEO's. All one thing in common.
I'll take my downvotes, I don't care, everyone here knows I'm right. And those with their head up their ass can enjoy getting replaced and spending years looking for another role.
Appointing indian leadership is the single biggest sign of moving to an extraction phase for a company.
The idea is they think the current value of the institution and IP is higher than their ability to innovate, so the try to outsource and reduce labour cost as much as possible intending to do the bare minimum maintenance for as long as possible.
This gets compounded by every layer trying to get the most out of the company as fast as possible, hiring in a way that has no long term outlook.
It is possible that multiple trends are coalescing
1. layoffs after web3 hiring spree
2. End of Zirp
However I think now, in 2025 is it impossible to reasonably claim AI isn't making an impact in hiring. Those who disagree on here seem to be insistent on some notion that AI has no benefits whatsoever, thus could never cause job loss.
Completely agree with you.
You can't be an economist and criticize current monetary policy. You will be labeled a crackpot, ostracized and have difficulty with grants. Grants from who? The same institution you'll be critizing in the first place.
Exactly this - I've said it before and will say it again - new technologies emerge in response to trends, often to accelerate existing trends and does not create them.
I see a few explanations for what you're saying, and those might be true, but I strongly believe part of it is investment (particularly VC, less so PE) has hit diminishing returns in tech and which means less subsidized "disruption", which means less money to hire people. AI becoming hugely popular right when this was happening is not a coincidence. And it's not just startups, less investment in startups also mean less clients for AWS and Azure. A16Z / Sand Hill switching to AI is not them just chasing the latest trend, it's a bid to reduce cost on people, which is the most expensive part of a tech company, as the only way to extend their unicorn-focused investment strategy.
This reminds me of the part of The Book of Why by Judea Pearl discussing how do calculus and the causal revolution came about with the simple insight that effects come before causes and so do calculus was invented to keep track of that in the math, rather than obscuring that with statistical relations that worked in either direction.
SWE, i know some worfloe digitalisation projects that had been in the planning for a very long time, budgetted as multiple person tear efforts, that due to pandemic nescessity were exected by a team of 3 over a long weekend in 2020. This did not go unnoticed, neither by customers nor swe providers.
Chat gpt 3 was 2020, even if the technology wasn't mature the hype was there informing investment and hiring decisions.
There was also other factors, there were covid booms, covid busts, overcorrections, Elon shoes you can cut by 90% and still keep a product running (kind of) and with X taking the flack other people followed suit without being as loud. There is a fairly major war in Europe ....
My understanding is that before Nov 2022, GPT models are obsecure, technical NLP stuff that most people don't understand or care about. ChatGPT is the first real product that is accessible and useful to everybody.
Openai also invented time travel to coordinate with companies.
Nothing to do with thr mass exodus and offshoring of US jobs.
The BPO industry is GROWING the opposite of standard AI understanding ideas.
Also call center is a good one I was doing research myself and call center jobs overseas have GROWN pretty rapidly over time these jobs are moving not vanishing.
Yep. For some reason everyone assumes that jobs in the US live in a closed system. In reality, things that can be moved abroad to save 20% of costs will be moved this way or the other.
I don’t know why everyone remembers how the manufacturing went to China, and at the same time forgets about it when we are talking about office jobs.
This is a second hand anecdote but someone commented here or on X, that basically he was on a cruise and overheard two heads of HR of 2 big Co's talking to each other about shenanigans.
Would not be the craziest considering that AI has to make a ROI. Even if it's not up there yet to do so organically. If you annihilate the entry labor market, then after some time, you have no choice but to use AI because there is no one remaining with the skills. AI is lower than entry level -> No one is hiring new grads -> There is no new talent being developed -> use AI for everything!
> This is a second hand anecdote but someone commented here or on X, that basically he was on a cruise and overheard two heads of HR of 2 big Co's talking to each other about shenanigans.
It's describing the setting for a conspiracy theory. Multiple (in this case 2) people (in this case powerful ones) getting together and deciding that a certain outcome would be mutually beneficial.
And the second paragraph details the conspiracy is to work together to remove a certain type of employee in large numbers, so that AI tools have to be used in order to make up for that loss.
Pretty much, though I would not say they go together. 2nd paragraph is just a separate conjecture.
Personally, don't need that much evidence; are we old enough to remember the hiring gentleman's agreement in big tech?
Let's also not forget one of the main functions of HR, as an industry, these days: friction. You think salaries (and inflation) wouldn't go up if hiring managers had more freedom?
You say this as if humans do not collude all the time. The pejorative idea of a "Conspiracy theory" is such a great modern tool for those who want to collude to hide their collusion in plain view.
Somehow it has become a heuristic that if caste in, the collusion is instantly dismissed as fiction. Even better that the person who thinks collusion is happening must have a lower IQ than those who don't. How convenient for those who are colluding.
An of the horizon for AI explosive growth was 10 years down the road, then what those execs report to the board/C*Os after their department failed to perform without half the employees?
Makes zero sense.
You completely misunderstand corporate incentives.
> Why would a CEO or the Board gamble the company on an outcome they have no input on?
have you seen the behavior of CEOs?
the market is doing it, and there is no way for a CEO, CIO, CTO, CISO, et al, to not do AI in 2025. the gains to stock price from the hype alone could be worthwhile, and even if not "everyone else was doing it"
The drop started from mid-2022 and 2023 and there is a single cause: Russian assets freeze. This led to governments around the world moving their assets from West/AngloSaxon countries. This lack of liquidity put the West in a “hang in there” situation. Economically, it showed up as raising interest rates and politically where things move slower, the emergence of a new coalition.
It’s really as simple as that. But people would like to believe that West GDP is higher than global south GDP by xxx amounts and so all of this couldn’t be possible.
If you want an insight inside their heads, there is a Biden speech after the assets freeze where he declares that the Russian economy/country will collapse in a few weeks under the measures. None of this materialized and their bet have failed which is why Trump is trying to pull the US out of the mess.
Of course all of this is my personal opinion. So take it from the grain in my bag of salt.
I made a stupid simple model where hiring in all age brackets rose slowly until 2021 and then fell slowly. That produces very similar looking graphs, because the many engineers that were hired at the peak move up the demographic curve over time. Normalizing the graph to 2022 levels, as the paper seems to do, hides the fact that the actual hiring ratios didn't change at all.
I'm not sure I understand. Your model shows that different group buckets (eg 20-24yo vs 25-29yo) peak at different years (in your figure, 2022 vs 2024) despite being driven by the same dynamics. Is that expected? I (naively?) expected the same groups to rise, fall and have peaks at the same times.
One of the dynamics is that people get older so they move into different buckets.
We can make the model way simpler to make it clearer. Say in 2020 we hired 1000 20-24yo, 1000 25-29yo etc and then we didn't hire anyone since then. That was five years ago, so now we have 0 20-24yo, 1000 25-29yo, 1000 30-34yo etc and 1000 retirees who don't show up in the graph.
Each individual year we hired the exact same number of people in each age bracket, and yet we still end up with fewer young people total whenever hiring goes down, because all the people that got hired during the big hiring spike are now older.
Wow, that's hilarious. So essentially hiring could be identical across all age groups, but due to a glitch in the analysis (young people don't stay young, who knew?), it appears that younger people are losing jobs more than the rest.
I think not hiring juniors is a tragedy of the commons situation. It started before the AI boom, during COVID. It's not tax-related as people claim here, since this phenomenon is not US-only.
The ZIRP era made companies hire people as if there was no tomorrow, and companies started "poaching" engineers from others, including juniors. I saw some interns with 2 years of experience getting offers as seniors. I had friends being paid to attend boot camp.
Then everyone realized they were training junior engineers who would quickly get offers from other companies as “Senior" and leave. So companies stopped hiring them.
We need to reframe it. At this point, what we call "AI" is not a technology, but a subscription company.
A technology is a tool you can adopt in your toolchain to perform at task, even if in this case it's outsourcing cognitive load. For a subscription company, well, as long as the subscription is active, you get to outsource some of the cognitive load. When Anthropic's CEO says that white color jobs will disappear, he means that he is selling Enterprise subscriptions, and that companies will inevitably buy it.
It's only a matter of time before AI becomes a commodity. The open source models are just a generation behind the proprietary ones and they're almost good enough for most users. Even if we're somehow limited to using proprietary models, since all of these "AIs" are based on natural language so you can practically hot swap the LLMs. Any company banking on selling any service other than AI hosting is going to be incredibly disappointed.
The only thing that could stop this commodification is some sort of vendor lock-in, but that looks to be technically challenging.
Windows gaming finally falling to desktop Linux, in terms of tech and mindshare among enthusiasts, proves to me that given a sufficiently large timescale open solutions tend to always win against a proprietary ones.
Companies just can't seem to stay focused on their own core competencies after a few decades. On the other hand, even when open projects "die" they can be resurrected ad infinitum.
Just my gut feeling but it seems like closed wins out big in the short term, but open wins in the end. Not applicable to everything I know.
I’m not sure I agree. Windows still has 95% market share in Steam’s hardware report. And even the modest gains that Linux has seen in this space have been as much a result of the efforts of a few small companies who have financial interests in undermining Microsoft’s monopoly as it has been a display of grassroots enthusiasm for open ecosystems.
Entrenched technologies take a while to un-trench; there's a lead lag on that kind of thing.
It starts with the kids saying I hate Windows. Then the adults. Then finally the grandmas. Windows will be evaporating marketshare for decades, like a long-half life on an unstable isotope.
Any economic data from between 2020 and 2025 should be tossed in the garbage. We will have no idea what affect AI has or hasn't had until AI has been available outside of the extremely confounded current circumstances. Tell me how employment looks after the next recession when the after effects of the pandemic, rapid inflation, interest rate unpredictability, and tariff whiplash are hopefully all behind us.
And the data for the two decades before that should be tossed out because of the global housing crisis, the sovereign debt crisis, and all the reverberations from that.
And the data for the two decades before that obviously needs to be tossed out because of the one-off nature of the dot-com boom, the dot-com crash, 9/11, and so on.
And before that... point is, you don't get clean data in economics. There's always something big going on, there are no double-blind trials to run, etc. It's called the dismal science for a reason. But that doesn't make it useless.
If your only dataset is 2008 to 2010, yeah your conclusions are almost certainly garbage. Likewise if your dataset is 1999 to 2002, or just the year 1987.
There will always be something going on, but there won't always be this specific thing going on, and if 100% of your data comes from during one specific crisis (nonetheless multiple concurrent crises), then it is 100% useless. Even with longer periods of data, reconcilliation with longer trends is technically challenging. We've had enough recessions to correct for them in our data, but until we've had a half dozen global pandemics you can't use pandemic data in your analysis.
Lots of apparently unexplored alternative explanations. In times of uncertainty, you don't hire unless you need to. Another junior developer or customer service agent can be delayed, and youngsters in the labor force are most exposed to this. But if you need a home health aide, you probably don't have a lot of choice: somebody has to change grandma's diapers. Tariffs top my list of uncertainties for businesses, but interest rates are a close second.
"AI" dives in and disrupts and then it turns out that AI isn't too I. The disrupt phase where HR dumps staff based on dubious promises and directions from above takes a few months. The gradual re-hiring takes way longer than the dumping phase and will not trigger thresholds.
I've spent quite a while with "AI". LLMs do have a use but dumping staff is not one of the best ideas I've seen. I get that a management team are looking for trimmings but AI isn't the I they are looking for.
In my opinion (MD of a small IT focused company) LLMs are a better slide rule. I have several slide rules and calculators and obviously a shit load of computers. Mind you my slide rules can't access the internet, on the other hand my slide rules always work, without internets or power.
I started university (in Australia) in 2004, not long after the dot com crash. CS enrolment rates were low, kids were getting scared off due to perceived lack of jobs. As a result, there was a shortage of grad talent (companies were already ramping up hiring again by 2004). I got a grad job just fine, in 2008, and I've never been short of work since.
So my advice to high school kids of 2025: right now is the perfect time to enrol in CS. 5 years from now, the AI hype will be over, and employers will be short on grads.
> 5 years from now, the AI hype will be over, and employers will be short on grads*
alterative view: the AI hype is real, AI takes over, and no one has any jobs anyway
also a thought: in 5 years the boomers will be retiring in droves as will the first series of GenX and the market, in most fields, should be opening up anyway
Experience. You learn to ignore what people _believe_ it does and what they _say_ does and look at what it _actually_ does.
It's fun to play with, but LLMs can't reason and are fundamentally unreliable. They cannot be made reliable.
The actual market uses for large quantities of human-like text is, like, autocomplete and spam.
I use copilot as fancy autocomplete and like it, but ~all claims that it will replace SWEs are by people selling AI or people who fundamentally do not understand what SWEs actually do.
It'll probably replace some offshoring, ironically lol
This time is different. A fact right now is that software engineers now can orchestrate LLMs and agents to write software. The role of software engineers who do this is quality control, compliance, software architecture and some out of the box thinking for when LLMs do not cut it. What makes you think advances in AI wont take care of these tasks that LLMs do not do well currently? My point is once these tasks are taken care off a CS graduate won't be doing tasks that they learnt to do in their degrees. What people need to learn is how to think of customers needs in abstract ways and communicate this to AI and judge the output in a similar way someone judges a painting.
> CS graduate won't be doing tasks that they learnt to do in their degrees
how is that different from the previous decade(s)? How often do you invert a redblack tree in your daily programming/engineering job?
A CS degree is a degree for thinking computationally, using mathematics as a basis. It's got some science too (aka, use evidence and falsifiability to work out truths and not rely on pure intuition). It's got some critical thinking attached, if your university is any good at making undergraduate courses.
A CS degree is not a boot camp, nor is it meant to make you ready for a job. While i did learn how to use git at uni, it was never required nor asked - it was purely my own curiosity, which a CS degree is meant to foster.
The original comment advised people to enroll in CS to capture the potential shortage of CS grads in the workforce. You’re saying no people shouldn’t be doing CS to make themselves ready for a job. The comment you replied to also takes a similar stance, ie no CS doesn’t make people ready for a job.
You might think you’re disagreeing with the parent comment but in fact you’re disagreeing with the top level comment.
Software engineering is in correction mode since 2022, right after the Covid highs. AI is just the facade for job cuts. Zuck has been doing “the year of efficiency” for years now.
There are other factors that drive employment of young workforce, which don't have much to do with knowledge or skills. These are sort of blue-collar jobs within IT.
There is a lot of low-level drudgery work which is currently outsourced or assigned to non-employees (mostly young) in most companies. For example, the IT support and maintenance is mostly done outside of the West. This works requires a lot of back and forth. Don't think AI taking over this area.
Also, some work is assigned to young workers to spread the accountability and risk ownership. Not sure if you can hold AI as accountable as humans.
Also, young workers are generally preferred for their agility, flexibility and ability to work hard. There were easier to exploit and if they were unmarried, they won't mind giving all of their time and attention to work for less pay. I used to work in teams that stayed overnight at office to complete projects. Young people are also very cohesive and they team up well.
So, looking at the situation purely from a knowledge perspective may not give the full picture.
Several teams around me stopped hiring juniors over the past couple of years. It’s not that the newcomers aren’t good, it’s just that no one has time to train them. AI showed up at just the right moment to offer a convenient excuse, and companies are happy to save on the cost of mentoring.
But long term, this feels like borrowing from the future. Without someone to train, there’s no one ready to step up later.
Skimming this, I'm not sure why it couldn't be explained by the layoffs we had a couple years ago, which were primarily at tech companies (which are indeed more exposed to LLMs) and probably hit junior devs more.
Looking at the "overall" graph they provide, it's clear that jobs as a whole have flatlined since 22, and even non-exposed jobs have had a growth rate hugely reduced. If we disregard the existence of AI, it would be easy to assume this is just the regular economic slowdown impacting younger people more than older ones. I don't see any correlation work done to isolate the source, especially as a lot of the "ai-exposed" work is also very much exposed to how much money is flowing in.
I don't get how interest rates is given at best a cursory phrase when ZIRP regime ending is one of the biggest macro events of the past several decades. Seems like it would deserve more of a spotlight.
I doubt the whole narrative is true, it may just be hope that we do not need to hire because we will be able to do it with AI. But reality outside of software and tech is very different. I work in an organisation that heavily pushing AI and even with that push, a typical employee is still not utilising it fully, unprepared and expecting training from the employer. There is also a disconnect over connecting org data to these tools and between developers and cyber teams.
My experience: we're hiring for an AI engineer position and for a frontend developer position (and yes, we posted our positions here on Hackernews).
We have a stream of cookie-cutter candidates. As if they are clones of each other, it's uncanny. They typically have a BS degree in some foreign university, then a CS Masters' in the US, experience with robotics, then several years of experience in large companies.
And they completely fold during in-person coding tasks. Like, not being able to explain the difference between DFS and BFS (depth/breadth-first search). Or being able to write a simple custom metric and train a network in Pytorch.
And a similar story for the frontend developer position.
We now literally have to add more filters to not get inundated by underqualified candidates. These filters will make it harder for beginners to even _get_ to the resume review stage.
No conclusions from me, but something's been broken in the CS jobs market for a while.
The year is 2030: The junior engineers of the Adeptus Mechanicus stand in a circle around the holy monitor, chanting prayers to the Omnissiah. Their arcane books and lore guide the machine spirit, ensuring the correct holy words of blessing are entered into the holy prompt. Petitioning the machine spirit for its most truthful, secure holy answers.
I don't think it's true at all. Considering it only takes 2 to 3 years to rack up the 10,000 hours to "master" something, young people can get very good at a lot of things. The biggest barrier in my opinion are child labor laws that get in the way of people getting experience.
If you do something 80 hours per week for 2 years it totals 8320 hours? This is far from average behavior even if you have nothing else to do except coding.
> I don't think it's true at all. Considering it only takes 2 to 3 years to rack up the 10,000 hours to "master" something, young people can get very good at a lot of things.
They can, if they practice with feedback 8 hours a day.
Typically, young people, as a group, are not famous for practicing something 8 hours a day.
In practice they will not just do open source and people will exploit them for free work since there are significant barriers to access employers able to pay market rate. Even open source itself can potentially be exploitative due to being free work.
While open source may be okay for coding, there are other skills which may not be so easy to do from your own home. In practice they will not just do open source and people will exploit them for free work
> The strategic thinking that goes into longer-horizon tasks may be something LLMs aren’t as good at, which aligns with why entry-level workers are more affected than experienced workers.
I think the article is talking in generalities, so on average entry-level software engineers have less experience with long-horizon tasks (e.g. months-long development), though there are definitely the exceptions that prove this rule.
Did Section 174 changes accelerate tech job losses? It's unclear from the paper because they only look at the data excluding tech firms, not only tech firms.
I want to see cause-and-effect: the cause being tax changes, the effect being tech firm layoffs, but they don't analyze the effect.
Meh... just rehashing what he said before. The paper itself is fundamentally flawed, examining only a minuscule portion of the job market. If we step back and look at Europe's struggling economies over recent decades, we see that economic downturns disproportionately affect young people. Greece serves as the poster child, followed by Spain and Italy. In Germany alone, we've lost 50,000 jobs in manual labor heavy industries (mainly automotive) this past year. We're also seeing a 60% decline in apprenticeships for labor intensive roles at DAX companies that aren't even AI affected yet. AI has become a convenient scapegoat for a faltering economy driven by geopolitical tensions, protectionism and unqualified leadership in the world's largest economies. Roaring 20s indeed.
I also have yet to see anyone meaningfully differentiate between "AI is taking jobs" and "AI hype is causing stupid executive decisions" and even "AI hype is sucking up all the capital that would normally go towards hiring".
For a startup, I now can solo it with the help of AI far beyond what was possible a few years ago.
This does not mean I otherwise would have hired a few juniors. More likely I would not have taken that business beyond the idea stage.
But direct massacres I can personally observe are in translation, copywriting and illustration. Yes, a good person can do better, but for a majority of cases AI has already become "good enough".
Then there is an onslought from just non-AI automation, in e.g. retail and finsncial services. This had been building for over a decade, but the pandemic lockdows exponentially accelerated it.
Like AI slop always looks or sounds the same... Generated videos/images are uncanny. Text is really easy to identify too and reads boring. AI is missing character.
On the thread of copywriting/publishing, my wife works in the field. She recently has had trouble with authors submitting low quality material - vague, nonsensical, lacking voice. I told her it sounded like AI and sure enough it was. I don’t blame her because she’s pretty offline. But the point stands that basically no one wants this crap. I don’t want your “one pager” that GPT pooped out, I want you to sit down and compose the problem in a digestible way, one that makes me think and one that shows that YOU have thought about it.
Don't underestimate the effect of Elon nuking the Twitter employee base when he acquired the company. All the predictions were that Twitter would die. It hasn't. That sent a powerful message to the other leaders of tech companies: "You can do just as much with far fewer people" / "Most of your employees aren't doing needle moving work". Shortly thereafter, Zuck announced layoffs at Meta. These new attitudes towards headcount have cascaded down from the top-tier tech companies down through the ecosystem of companies.
except they laid off of a lot of trust and safety and marketing, and twitter has never been the same in that regard.
eng—has twitter really changed much since acquisition? it seems to me like twitter had really great eng to begin with. keeping the lights on is much different from building new product.
Even if I cede all of your points, if I'm Zuck or Sundar or Satya, etc. I might think "Well, I'm not going to nuke 80% of the head count, but I definitely could layoff 10-20% and slow way down on hiring."
Young people from where? I’m in South American and the young people here are earning much more than their parents earn but 1/3 what software engineers earn in San Francisco writing software.
By what mechanism can you distinguish a decline from one cause compared to another?
I could understand if, given enough time for all of the factors involved to occilate that you could pick out a signal, but that's not the data that exists right now. Surely the only way to identify the first time instance of a cause of decline could only by accumulating a count of clear instances where the cause occurred and measuring those as a proportion of other cases.
Programming in a structured high-level language like C is much more productive than programming in assembly. Programming in a managed language with GC can be more productive still.
The creation of package managers and the widespread availability of open-source repos means developers don't need to write as much from scratch.
The creation of search engines and Stack Overflow did (and still do) much of the useful things that people use AI for (boilerplate, debugging obscure error messages).
Machines have gotten exponentially faster for the last several decades. This means devs need to spend less time optimizing code. And the time to compile and run speeds up, meaning you can prototype things faster.
Why is it, that somehow none of these inarguable improvements to the speed and efficiency of development haven't lead to a a massive decrease in the number of developers? If we take it as axiomatic that AI significantly improves productivity, why, for the first time in history, does that not result in more programming jobs?
None of the improvements of the past you outline were advertised as capable of replicating agency. They were sold as tools. Note that I am not making any claim about actual capability for agency, there’s other people more qualified than me to discuss this. Regardless factuality of ability to replace people, this is how it’s sold and arguably also how it’s bought. This gives the view that it has impact on jobs more weight.
Also I think it is plausible (if not likely) that LLMs reduce the demand for other kinds of software. They're (relatively) general purpose and can handle many tasks that previously would've needed bespoke software (and a team of people to create/maintain it).
In some ways developing and working with a high level but less efficient language for velocity is actually a vast improvement, imo.
Take node.js for example, devs can just sling code out as fast as they can and shit gets done. Then the node.js core devs can optimise certain paths/features after the fact to negate many of the efficiency problems.
However it does annoy me that what this has meant is that many of my colleagues don't know anything about memory management, debugging, or any other more traditional concepts, so we see bloat & OOMs over time that need to be resolved.
Researchers need to project the pre-Covid hiring rates and omit the subsequent overhiring boom to credibly report on any believable loss in jobs. Dropping personnel who should never have been hired to begin with is a return to normal, not a new concerning trend. Start by showing the data from at least 2015 onward rather than lying with statistics using charts starting in 2021 for maximum drama.
> For automative occupations, a lot of it is software engineering, auditing, and accounting, where there are well-defined workflows and LLMs are good at doing one-off tasks without a lot of feedback. For augmentative cases, you’re looking at more complex or managerial roles.
Nope coding is definitely augmentive for Sep 2025 and before. Maybe more so than managing.
A lot of CEOs are saying do more with less. Basically they are saying, “If there are any requests to hire additional people the first thing I ask them is if any AI tools have been tried first.”
Then every 2-bit president, leader, manager, CEO out there regurgitates the same thing.
So yes, companies want to save money and do more with leas. It certainly won’t help job seekers or the economy.
I would expect something more convincing for such a (seemingly) popular article of this title. Seems like a relatively straightforward difference-in-differences or synthetic control could be applied to show something convinving, but this is just some dude's opinions as 'evidence'.
Tax code changes & interest rate changes have been unfavorable. Secondly “learn to code” and vastly lowered CS standards have churned out a lot of young developers that are unskilled, much like in the .com bust. Lastly AI which at best has completely shut the unskilled out.
It's not AI replacing jobs. There is a hiring downturn due to economic conditions (reaction to covid over-hiring and subsequent interest increases) and the people on the bottom of the ladder get bumped off.
One thing that confuses me is that the anti-AI movement has adopted several talking points saying that nobody wants AI. (e.g. nobody wants it, the AI companies are pushing it on us, management is pushing it on us, it just creates low quality slop, the demand is fake, etc).
But if there's no demand, then there's no threat to jobs. On the other hand if there is a threat to jobs then there must be demand (since it competes with human labor in the job market). I'm not sure why they're taking this particular tactic, but it's going to lead to strange comment sections where people won't know how to stay on message as it becomes clearer that AI is impacting the labor force.
A lot of people intuitively imagine that to compete with humans there's some sort of 1:1 exchange ratio. But initially the calculus will be something like a 10 team with plus AI performs about on par with a 12 person team (or whatever the details work out to). So we will see AI impacting job numbers well before AI can do your entire job.
I don't think it's AI primarily, but rather AI is being used as a justification and a blame, and what's a better blame than this new trend that will last years and nothing can be done about it? I think it's just companies' greed, another excuse to lower the wages more and/or use ones who are ok with lower wages. It also has to do with procurement that's already using AI to process applications, with all the negative impacts this will have. I also did notice something when it comes to the job market: mostly those who are suffering are men, not women. I initially thought maybe because of the nature of the jobs, but that wasn't the case. Looking around on LinkedIn, a lot of women are doing product/project management jobs, analytics, business-related roles, even HR and procurement aren't impacted, and I have yet to see a single woman personally or online that was let go because of AI, even jobs in legal work, administration work -none of them are impacted that much. Meanwhile, I personally know several engineers (not software engineers) who are jobless with years of experience, and a LOT of software programmers too! I was discussing this with a friend and he also brought up a new term, "boomers' harems," as in, managers who are mostly old men prefer to hire young women now, and he did support his claim with many examples of fresh graduate girls that are working as engineers in aerospace or similar industries already, and their male classmates are still looking around.
So in conclusion, while AI does have an impact, personally if I would quantify it, it probably won't exceed 25% of the issue. Other factors make up the rest, but everyone is distracted by AI for all sorts of reasons.
Boomer harems lol that’s a new one on me but undoubtedly a thing.
My whole career in the UK I’ve noticed a similar thing in HR harems - in many places, particularly recruitment companies but it’s common everywhere, 90%-100% of the HR staff are women who then employ more and more women over men while having a generally poor understanding of the requirements for a role. I can’t help but feel like a group of women will have a natural disposition for adding extra women rather than men, while prioritising communication and networking over competencies like creative thinking, problem solving, generalism, and self-starting.
Even if we take the empirical claims from highly partisan sources at face value, obvious axiomatic problems remain. AI employment doom, like other forms of neoluddism is predicated on a zero-sum view of economics.
As an example, consider the claim, "Steam shovel adoption is destroying entry level jobs in ditch digging"
Yes, we want more productive technologies to be used where applicable. We want workers to specialize and become more productive with less hours worked. This isn't destructive at all. Framing it as such is either deliberately misleading or demonstrates a misunderstanding of basic econ.
AI taking jobs is the biggest bullshit and hype the world has ever seen that been pushed by the likes of Salesforce etc to tell their customers: Look out AI product is so good that we used it ourselves to cut our own workforce. And inside the company walls they whisper to each other : our AI product is such crap that it is really useless and the only way to sell it is to credit our AI for tha layoff and hiring freeze we are doing anyway.
AI has destroyed salaries and it is destroying jobs. The problem AI actually solves is wages. Why? Because perfection is the enemy of the good. Anyone who still believes AI is not destroying jobs is delusional.
Seems to me like the jobs disappeared in reaction to the extremely obvious: a certain president causing a crisis to get himself a tax cut, the latest in a very long series of government decisions to make labor extremely unattractive for the private sector. AI is an excuse, nothing more. And I mean both Macron and Trump.
AI is not even remotely close to the point where it can replace a human working for you, that's just not it. Everybody keeps screaming "NOT YET", and perhaps that's true, but either case, it's not currently true.
However, economic conditions are so that companies now want to not hire, because price rises due to tariffs mean much less spending happening, with the outlook steeply downward. It will very mean widely spread layoffs soon. The first to suffer are new entrants to the job market and the close-to-pension near-the-exit people as well, but let's not kid ourselves: they will hardly be the only ones.
The irony is that to me, this seems to be the reverse of what people think they see: AI is a clear investment target at the moment. It's being accused of killing jobs, but reality? It's one of the few clear investment targets. It is a portion of the economy that is entirely opposing the general trend. AI is not just not causing of firings, but actually is putting a break on the firings (by providing jobs funded by investment). It's a huge positive for the economy at the moment, and I bet it's a huge positive for jobs at the moment. Like most investments, the gains it promises have barely materialized right now: it's promising to replace people but it isn't. Frankly, the only other large investment target I see is weapons. And, while AI can be used in weapons, it's still leagues better than making actual weapons in my book. Nobody is literally blowing off anyone's head by firing an AI model at them.
I find this an obvious insight once you look at what companies are actually doing: they're not killing jobs and providing the same services. They're killing jobs and providing less services, for less money, to try to survive. If AI was replacing people, they'd be providing more service for less money. Money is the problem here. Money is artificial, entirely a decision of society. Where is the money going? Look at the stock market: it certainly isn't going to investors (look at an EU stock market, outside of weapons manufacturers)
And there's the key, fundamentally, businesses' desire to replace people is not a desire of business. It's a government decision. A tax decision. A very large portion of government income is income tax of various kind. People-based taxes. This means: you generate revenue from the means of production, capital (ie. "a factory"), input goods, and people's labor? It's people's labor that is taxed. Everything else is actually tax-exempt. Capital is free (you can spend 100% of your investor's money on buildings, no tax, assuming you follow standard practice). Input goods are free (VAT/Sales tax exempt, you don't even have to pay it initially). You want to keep more of your company's revenue? I don't think enough people realize this: but you lose a LOT more on the people than on anything else. In fact you only lose on people in some sense (because capital and input goods can at least theoretically be sold or more likely subleased for similar value as you got them for, they're "free", or only historically low interest is required). You almost only pay the government for the privilege of getting labor from someone else.
In France, the actual tax is over 70%, if you measure it fully. By that I mean: let's say I pay you $100. Any tax, patronal (employer tax), income tax, insurance, pension (which are all government), import tax, VAT, ... is all to be paid from the $100. You like the product my company makes. You buy all you can from it, you spend all of that $100 on my product. How much do I see on my bank account? $28.7, by my last count. That amount, by the way, is then taxed at 40% before it goes into my bank account, so it's comfortably under $20. The $28.7 is what I could reinvest into my company (and need to buy the input goods in the first place). Even this is not counting many forms of tax that are effectively mandatory for everyone, such as rental tax, garbage tax, park tax ...
In other words, if I didn't have to pay any tax at all, I wouldn't bat an eye to have your work done by 3 or even 4 people, as that would be a much better deal. I'd be looking for extra services people would pay for and provide them.
Now I get that government is necessary, but we're paying for government services in the west by artificially increasing the cost of labor 500%. That is where tax comes from. There's other taxes, but they're perhaps not rounding errors, but obviously it's not what I'm worried about. And you are complaining that CEO's, or AI, or greed, or ... is costing jobs?
No. The fact that in at least one view something like 80% of all efforts (all "economic value", mostly labor) in France is just keeping the government running, nothing more, that is making it critical for the private sector to avoid using labor, to avoid providing jobs like the plague. Oh, and of course, then the government allows foreign (read: US) companies to come in and "use contractors", in other words: to not pay labor tax (Uber, Deliveroo, ...), which they of course don't allow for French companies.
And then, because the government is never happy with a big disaster unless it grows into a nice huge well-fed catastrophe, government makes it really hard to stop spending on people, so over hiring is a huge, extremely expensive, mistake. 100-person companies go bankrupt due to 5 unnecessary hires at the wrong time. I get that this is people's lives we're talking about, but given that the government gets 80%+ of the value of people's labor, I feel like it's perfectly reasonable to ask the government to take care of these people. Of course, they don't, not well.
Of course, it's "companies' greed" that gets blamed for all the effects. Truth is this just isn't true, frankly not even at huge companies like Total. Or, to put it differently, if party A's greed is not even 20% of the total, and B demands over 80%, I feel like a healthy amount of blame needs to go to party B.
Value is what others are willing to pay. Ever since twitter is not publicly traded, it is not for sale. Any "estimations" by third parties are to be taken with more than a grain of salt.
I agree to some extent, but that’s a completely different point than I made.
The point I made is that firing 80% of the workforce was not showing other CEOs that that is such a value generating move (as the person above me implied).
Betting on AI would be "hire some AI engineers and see what they can do", not "get rid of some engineers and see what happens". I think what you mean is "scapegoating AI".
I think there's also a pinch of "we've run out of ideas / high margin projects" or "we're tired of funding 'platform 2.0' projects that end up creating more problems than they solve".
But generally I agree with your assessment. Especially the Musk effect I think gets underplayed.
As one of the Andreis: they already had us all working for them a long time ago and with fertility rates as they are (and have been for three decades now) around here, there's hardly any new talent to choose from.
Also we got hit with job cuts all the same. For instance, my team is currently working half its usual hours per week. It's not enough to cover all my family's expenses, but I was actually anticipating a layoff, so I count my blessings.
While working at HBO Max (200 engineers at launch of the original product) I talked to a recruiter at Disney+, where I was informed they had 2000 engineers.
So yeah, 80% sounds about right. :(
Since that time HBO Max was acquired into an org that was an order of magnitude larger. I was downsized out when they cut 20% or so off, but honestly they could have cut another 40% and been Just Fine if the architecture and infrastructure had been built properly.
Do you think that the architecture was built properly or was it rushed? I'm curious about your experience working there. Speaking as an user, HBO Max is the worst streaming service that I've used, by far. Errors happening frequently, basic features missing, etc. I don't expect Netflix level from the start, just the basics being covered.
The backend stuff was super stable. My team had ~3 on call incidents across 3 years.
The front end and catalog systems had more issues. The front end basically used an in house system that was the same idea as react native but originally built before react native, and it was never given enough engineering resources so it kind of hobbled along. The other issue is that we had to support a lot of different platforms, and some used the in house system, some used bespoke systems, and one used screens rendered on a server farm streamed to the underpowered set top boxes because those boxes were complete pieces of trash.
The backend stuff was all amazing though, best dev ops tooling I've seen so far in the industry. True CI/CD, teams deployed to prod multiple times a day w/o issue.
Also offshoring, which ramped up after COVID, probably because companies realized remote work can work at scale.
> 25% musk (getting rid of 80% of twitter showing every CEO that at least half the staff is sleeping)
That was just a signal to the rest of the capital class that the labor class had gotten too big for their britches and needed to be shown their place. Twitter and all other companies that followed his lead have devolved into toxic cultures due to fewer staff being burdened with more work and asked to "be scrappy" and "do more with less."
TL;DR: recent changes in Section 174 IRC will _incentivize_ R&D spending, not cause layoffs of researchers and developers.
Section 174 allows businesses to deduct their domestic R&D expenses.
In 2017 Trump made businesses have to amortize these expenses over 5 years instead of deducting them, starting in 2022 (it is common for an administration to write laws that will only have a negative effect after they're gone). This move wrecked the R&D tax credit. Many US businesses stopped claiming R&D tax credits entirely as a result. Others had surprise tax bills.
Trump's second term work is now to undo the disaster he caused (S.O.P.). Congress has reversed the amortization rule and businesses can again deduct R&D expenses immediately.
This is a good thing rolling back a bad thing. The bad thing might have been responsible for layoffs a few years ago, but it will have only positive impact on 2025.
To be clear: the Section 174 changes that took effect in 2022 were disastrous and absolutely contributed to the layoffs.
BBB reverses the changes for years 2025-2029 (what happens after that, who knows) and provides retroactive relief to small businesses under a certain income cap. Large businesses can accelerate amortization, but remain impacted for those years.
I would say tariffs would probably account for less than 0.1% of tech layoffs. That does have some effect, but honestly, things shift so quickly. You'll more likely find that goods are going to be dumped into third countries and then make their way over. There are many hacks being deployed no one will feel tariffs for a while.
Do you really think that companies were hiring that many unqualified people for DEI reasons? Just about every time the subject came up there were people saying it was just lip service and theater -- put a DEI statement on your company's public-facing webpage and pretend they actually did anything.
Maybe. I had two different hiring managers in two different companies explicitly tell me and others to hire women or PoC. Yes it was illegal. No one cares.
Yep. It's much easier to improve your DEI metrics by doing it illegally than it is by doing it legally.
I had an internship at a place like that and the first disabled woman of color to apply would have been practically guaranteed a job. Needless to say I didn't end up working there after the internship - if they're willing to break labor laws just to improve metrics then what's stopping them from trying to cheat their employees.
What do you mean by PoC? Because PoC hiring barely budged during the "DEI era" -- unless you meant Indian/Asian PoC. For example at Google over that 10 year era (from 2014 to 2024) Black+Latino hiring by 6% points. Indian/Asian increased by almost 15%.
Yes, even in my current job we don't explicitly hire for DEI type initiatives, but there is the general sense that we want to retain as many female or PoC staff as we can and we'd potentially go "above & beyond" for that.
Hating on minorities is nothing new, and has always been a powerful political driver. DEI is just another thing to direct that hate to, it doesn't matter what it actually is or does.
Also, establising a link between DEI, a vague group of very mild and mostly ineffectual incentives, and the rise of right wing ideology is really dumb. No one would care about DEI if it hadn't been made a major talking point by right wing propagandists. If DEI didn't exist it would be something else that would "turn young men to the right".
Don't fall for such basic propaganda. The war on these supposedly unfair hiring practices is being led by rich heirs that never did an honest day of work in their entire lives. Those disenfranchised young men buying the hate are made to turn against their own interests by the very same ones that fucked their opportunities in the first place.
Only a fool would think MAGA stands for equality and against discrimination. Just thinking about it makes me laugh. I wish the anti-DEI folk was honest and stopped hiding behind "ending discrimination" when they have proved times and times again that they are all extremely confortable with other, far worse forms of it.
I know HN is gonna downvote me into oblivion for this, but… I’m a cis-het white dude, a this rings true for me:
“When you’ve been in the majority for a long time, equality can feel like oppression.”
Just because a system desires proportional representation does not mean it’s discriminatory against the majority. It just means it’s no longer preferential toward them.
If the system values proportional representation higher than qualification, than I will either abandon my own strive towards excellence or I will actively support changing that system.
I feel the latter option is more likely than abandoning something that is often shaping one's own identity
The system should value qualification higher than other factors. But the system is made up of people with inherent biases that has led to imbalanced representation of the majority over actual qualifications.
You can strive for excellence and equality at the same time. It’s not zero sum.
In my country, in high school, you get grades and at the end you have a standardized test.
Colleges decide what ratio will be used (and if any special requirements are needed), and in most cases it's 60% standardized test results, 40% grades + some formula to turn that into 0-100 score. This is known well in advance, before even applying to the college.
College has 150 open spots, 230 people apply, 20 fail the last year of high school, the other 210 are put on a ranked list by the points they've achieved, at 150th place "a line is drawn" and that's the cuttof for who gets accepted and who doesn't. They just publish "86.5 points needed to be accepted", and you can do the math at home and don't have to wait for the post to arrive.
How is that not equal? It has worked since literally the commie times.
Is it? Almost all outcomes favor the majority. How many straight white males actually think they would have better life outcomes being born black female gay? Even with affirmative action, that only impacts a very small percentage of people at a very narrow window of time.
Why is it the job of private institutions to regulate the life outcomes of key political demographics?
Private institutions have the job of selecting the best candidates, and they don't have the right to discriminate against any candidates on the basis of race.
In one breath, supporters of affirmative action in this thread will deny that such discrimination exists, and in the other they will justify its existence. Clearly you must acknowledge on some level that it's not really defensible.
It’s a great question. And I think we are in a bit of a pickle as not doing something is just acting in the opposite way to regulate life outcomes.
It’s like gerrymandering districts and then when people want to move things back to a more normal partition you say “let’s just leave things as they are and not tinker”. But you’re now just advantaging the group that tinkered last.
But the kids applying to colleges today had nothing to do with the history. A white (or asian) boy won't get accepted to his chosen college because of something he had no influence on, be it "history" or his skin color and gender.
Is collective punishment of kids for something they had nothing to do with really the answer?
This thread is specifically about jobs, where people are specifically evaluated on an individual basis. University admissions are a whole different discussion, but are broken in similar ways.
> No one would care about DEI if it hadn't been made a major talking point by right wing propagandists.
That's a circular argument (post hoc ergo propter hoc/begging the question). It also sounds backwards.
This is how your argument sounds to me:
1. DEI is made into a major talking point by right wing propagandists
2. How do you tell if someone is a right wing propagandist? They make DEI a major talking point.
This is backwards! Politicians adjust their messaging for the most votes[1].
TBH, this whole talking-point mess was not completely made up. The politicians aren't creating talking points and then trying to convert people, they are adjusting their talking points to what matters to the voters.
If DEI didn't matter, and we weren't constantly under a barrage of "If you disagree you're a nazi", the Trump campaign would have found something else to make one of the major talking points.
===================================
[1] Well, the Trump does, anyway. The major difference I, as an outsider, saw between the two parties in the most recent presidential election was in the adjustment and delivery of messaging.
The Left's message was "This is what we stand for. You need to fall in line in order for us to win".
Trumps message was "This matters to you? Okay, then it matters to me too".
It's not hard to see that one of those are backwards.
My arguments is not what you're making it up to be, at all. It's:
1. DEI is made into a major talking point by right wing propagandists.
2. DEI suddenly becomes a core issues for right wing voters.
Conservative politicians didn't adjust their messaging to address what matters to the voters, they made up an issue to galvanize hate against minorities and turn it into political goodwill. It's like the Jews under nazi Germany (but far, far less extreme). DEI/Jews aren't actually making that much of a difference in society, they're just a convenient scapegoat to point to and command hate from the masses.
As for your note: yes, the democrats are severly lacking in the populism area. But don't mistake Trump's populism for any actual interest in voters' issues. After all, only a fool would think MAGA stands for equality and against discrimination.
No mention that 2 candidates from other parties died in the run up. Or that it's out of 20,000+ individuals contesting various seats. No mention that they are mostly 59+ years old with preexisting health conditions.
Luckily it gives us the most critical bit of info we could ask for, that Musk tweeted "!!"
If you rephrase "ending DEI" to "reducing the risk of getting sued when laying off x% of staff", does it make any more sense?
Nobody knows how to actually hire competent staff because it's a constantly changing bar: if you give people leetcode, they start cramming leetcode; if you review their GitHub profile, they start spending disproportionate amounts of time on projects; if you give them take-homes, they spend 5x the recommended time; if you give them real-world problems in a timed interview, that's probably harder to game, but some candidates will send a completely different person along. On top of that, some people just interview really well but aren't good 9 to 5. At a big enough company, you've always got a list of people who you incorrectly hired and want to get rid of.
DEI is a minor barrier to doing that for some cohorts. It's not that you hired incompetent people in XYZ groups to bump up your diversity numbers, it's that you hired incompetent people in every group and now you're unable to get rid of some of the ones in XYZ.
Also, let's not forget that some people are just genuinely sexist and/or racist and/or whateverist, either consciously or unconsciously. What happens when those people aren't held back by HR as strongly?
I don't think it's as big of a factor as the parent comment, but I witness a lot of extremely weird DEI related hiring things in 2020-2022.
C-level executives would flag certain job openings as only eligible for women or minorities. I clearly remember a meeting where our CTO declared that he had rejected an extremely qualified male candidate because "we have enough of those".
When some people complained they started hiding the details, but it was still obvious. There would be hiring rounds where the only candidates coming from HR were dozens of women for a specific role. After interviewing all of them and giving several second chances we couldn't find anyone qualified in that batch of candidates, so there was a very tense meeting where we were heavily pressured to just pick one.
You could tell a lot of the candidates involved in this process were catching on and/or being pandered to and they really didn't like it either.
I referred someone incredibly qualified for a Chief of Staff role at a company. Their resume was well beyond what the company could have hoped to find. The executive recruiting firm was over the moon with him. However, they basically told him that this company was looking for a 'more diverse background' and as a straight white guy, he wasn't it - but they were excited to take him around to other clients.
For a few years, the hiring process seemed broken overall, and in retrospect, it didn't do much to actually help the people it claimed to.
I'm all about strength from diversity, but you can't throw away everything to get there.
Only anecdotally I can tell you when I was at a medium sized (~200 employee) fintech business in Australia, I was told by my engineering manager to hire any woman or PoC that applied.
but in my 2 year tenure I think only 1 of either applied, both were hired immediately.
I've had like 10x more pressure lately to hire cheap contractors from India than I ever did to hire a woman or black guy at any point in my 10 years of hiring in this field.
>Do you really think that companies were hiring that many unqualified people for DEI reasons?
Depending on what industry you are in, absolutely. I can offer one anecdote that I can personally attest actually occurred. (though I was not the protagonist).
There was an opening for a new, salaried, full-time faculty member after the unfortunate death of the previous position holder. During the hiring discussion at a staff meeting at this (private) NYC college the Dean stated, "we aren't hiring or promoting any more straight white men". They said this openly, and without shame, in front of a room full of people including a well-credentialed adjunct (who happened to be a straight, white man) who had worked there for several years, without an annual contract or any of the accompanying benefits. And, in fact, they ended up hiring a completely unqualified black, LGBTQ woman for that position. The woman was so unqualified and out of her depth that she stopped showing up entirely just a month into the semester. The passed-over adjunct tried to file an EEOC complaint but was told (rightly or wrongly) that since he wasn't part of a protected class he didn't qualify. For the next several years, of the ~10 people that were hired or promoted at this NYC college, none were straight white men.
People heavily invested in AI, obviously. We have an economy that's heavily driven by investor perception, and while "AI is taking jobs" sounds bad for workers or humanity as a whole, it can still be a sales pitch for investing in AI
I've seen three major pushers of this narrative. Well 3.5.
1) CEOs of AI and AI adjacent companies, like the Anthropic CEO quoted in the article, Sam Altman(till recently atleast), Perplexity CEO, Microsoft CEO etc. It brings them new VC money, investment, and customers who "don't want to miss out on this big trend".
1.5) Media heavily pushing the above CEOs quotes, probably just for clicks and engagement, brings them money. The angle pushed is that these CEOs would know the next trend, because they're developing better models in secret right now.
2) BlueSky appears to really hate on anything AI to the point of personal attacks, putting AI related tweeters on blocklists and bans etc. Maybe coz artists are overrepresented and AI is having a real or perceived effect on artists?
It looks like a neo-Luddite movement to me, but much like the original Luddites, it’s only and anti new technology movement because that’s been conflated with their real pain which is that the benefits of productivity have been sucked up by one group of people while they have to deal with all the inequities.
Why do you have to imply there's some conspiracy? Haven't you noticed productivity gains by incorporating AI to your workflow? If you have, then there's your answer: we point to that possibility because we are seeing everyday how much more we are accomplishing by using AI. If demand doesn't increase as much, then there will be a decrease in employment.
It’s a direct quote from an episode of South Park.
In the episode they aren’t making fun of a regional accent, they are making fun of an affected accent from certain classes. I’m from the area of Colorado where the episode takes place. There is no regional accent for Colorado.
Ah yes, South Park, a TV show known for its sensitivity towards difficult topics. Quoting someone else being douchy just means you're douchy and unoriginal, it doesn't make you not a douche simply because someone else said it and you're copying them. You're still choosing to say those things.
From the perspective of the publications, it’s fear-mongering which makes clicks.
Out of control AI is a common sci-fi trope because it’s a convenient allegory for the uncaring systems that determine the quality or continuation of human life.
Of course, investors are loving this because there is no such thing as bad press.
My challenge here is that every time I see “The Atlantic” or “The New York Times”, I can’t shake the feeling that it’s got to be a paid advertisement or some influence piece by a special interest group. I am not sure what to make of the articles that appear in those places anymore.
They are the mouthpiece of the empire- but they aren't promoting products- they're promoting the dissolution of social and communal values and trying to erase the idea of intellectualism- the nyt casually, the atlantic explicitly, and the new yorker very covertly- it shows the powers that really run america have a deep ambivalence towards it and will likely hop to the next centre of prosperity when they get bored. The american experiment is over because they decided it to be. How weak and sad your country has become.
And yeah I've seen they are the first to jump on ai anti intellectualism, for the reasons i've stated
You can't expect reactionaries to have any specific thoughts or for their beliefs to be founded on any particular facts or (real) historical events, like the COVID discussion below.
I stopped trusting any of those rags after the pushed the hysterical “4% kill rate for Covid” fear mongering nonsense well after it was shown to be multiple orders of magnitude less fatal. All forms of critical thinking went out the window thanks to their misinformation.
That's crazy because NYT never reported that. I haven't checked The Atlantic, but I suppose it's much the same story.
NYT reported the WHO's early (and high) estimate of 3.4% CFR (way way below the 4% IFR that you claim) in March 2020 [1] but even in that same article noted that this was probably a high over-estimate.
> Is 3.4 percent a misleading number? We spoke to a number of experts in epidemiology, and they all agreed that 1 percent was probably more realistic (the W.H.O. has also said the number would probably fall)
The real CFR ended up being somewhere between 0.5% and 1%, which is way closer to both the 1% CFR the NYT reported and to the 3.4% CFR the WHO reported than your alleged 4% IFR. Which... again... was never reported by the NYTimes.
Neither the WHO's 3.4% nor NYTimes' 1% estimates are "multiple orders of magnitude" above 0.5% - 1%.
It seems like you lost trust in reputable institutions because you've been lied to incessantly on the Internet about what they said when. It might be worth reconsidering the trust you place in whatever pulled your trust away from these institutions!
Just for context of how insanely made-up your 4% figure is, in March 2020 when NYTimes was reporting "probably close to 1% CFR," our testing infrastructure was extremely lacking. It would be reasonable to estimate less than 25% of cases were detected. If so, a 4% IFR would imply a CFR of at least 16%. But yeah, as mentioned, the NYTimes was reporting a CFR of 1%. Which is pretty close to what it ended up being.
They are the party mouthpieces of the Democrats. It’s not useful as an empirical analysis or philosophical exercise. But it is useful as a declaration of belief for a certain cohort of American elites. So the revealed news is really that the Democrats will add “we must weaken or break up Big Token to increase youth employment” to their midterm and presidential platform. Whether this is sound macroeconomic policy is beside the point.
How does one explain the drop starting January 2023 (esp for things like Customer Service Rep, which is an NLP-heavy task) when most corporations didnt even start LLM/NLP pilots until mid/late 2023? I skimmed thru the 100+ page paper but didnt see an explanation for this strange leading effect.
SWE figures dropped mid-2022 (almost magically in line with interest rate hikes) and LLM-copilots werent introduced for another year. The paper notes they did an adjustment for the end of ZIRP. I dont know enough econometrics to understand whether this adjustment was sufficient, but the chart doesnt make sense since the labor efforts seem to be leading the actual technology by over a year or more. From informal surveys, LLM-copilot usage didnt become widespread until late 2023 to mid 2024, certainly not widespread enough to cause macro labor effects in mid-2022.
The 2022 drop for SWE is easy for me to explain, and it's not on these analysts' list of factors (though I'm not an economic quant, I don't know how you could really control for it): In 2017, a tax bill was passed that cut a particular tax incentive in 2022 in an effort to be counted as "revenue neutral" despite being otherwise a massive tax cut overall. The incentive in question was a writeoff for "Research and development". This means that in 2022, it got effectively much more expensive to hire anyone who falls under that category, including developers not directly necessary for the day-to-day function of a business (hell, one might argue they would have counted anyway) and scientists of most kinds. That this hit big firms, which have a higher relative amount of R&D efforts going at a given time, first makes a lot of sense.
For customer service, my explanation is that companies literally do not care about customer service. Automated phone trees, outsourced call centers whose reps have no real power to help a customer, and poorly-made websites have been frustrating people for decades, but businesses never seem to try to compete on doing better at it. It's a cheap win with investors who want to hear about AI initiatives to lay off yet even more of this department, because it doesn't matter if the quality of service declines, there are no market or regulatory forces that are punishing this well enough to ever expect firms to stop breaking it, let alone fix it
Love this note. For those interested, this is the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017 Section 179.
For a software engineering business, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017 significantly impacted how software costs can be expensed under Section 179. While Section 179 previously allowed for the immediate expensing of many software purchases, TCJA reforms restricted this deduction primarily to "off-the-shelf" software. Custom-developed software and internal development costs are no longer eligible for Section 179 expensing and must now be capitalized and amortized.
Under the TCJA, Section 179 cannot be used for software that a company develops for itself. This includes the direct costs for the engineers, programmers, and other personnel involved in the development process.
The report not addressing this elephant in the room is a disappointing.
I think it may have been a one-two punch of §174 and the end of ZIRP.
Of note, the OBBB reinstated the ability to deduct R&D, so businesses are no longer required to capitalize and amortize R&D expenses (including software development).
https://warrenaverett.com/insights/one-big-beautiful-bill-se...
I was talking about zirp in another thread and got downvoted. But yes, companies were taking out low/zero interest loans and hiring people in hopes of making 1-2% on it, which worked for awhile. It doesn't work at 4-5%, though. We can't pin our hopes to zirp anyways. But a lot of sketchy activities around investing were accomplished because of zirp.
Section 174 was the big one that affected how SE salaries could be deducted, that many blamed for the start of layoffs.
However, that's back for tax year 2025, so why aren't we seeing the jobs come back? Maybe it really was 174 then, but AI now?
Anecdotally I saw a post on reddit about a senior SWE in the USA who was laid off and couldn't get any interviews, with their old job outsourced to eastern Europe. And then this month the people he hadn't even got a response back from started requesting he apply for their jobs. Only one data point but the market might be coming back.
Anecdotally in the past month or so, I've started seeing a large uptick in recruiter reach-outs. I had none for the past year (aside from directly reaching out), but there have been 4 cold contacts in the last couple of weeks alone now.
I did a bunch of interviews, I was actually busy with them, earlier this summer. I just can pass the damn system design interview lol ugh
I think if your willing to go to the sf bay and work in an office there are lots of opportunities. Remote and high pay doesn't have alot of options.
20 miles to SF, 25 yoe (backend, data, basic frontend), been there done that and all I have got is this automated rejection email
Remote is career suicide anyways.
As a 20 year remote employee across multiple companies...in my experience, this is true depending on one's definition of career. If you want to advance high in the company, remote is going to stifle you unless the entire company is remote. And even then something as small as skipping an offsite or keeping your cam off will stifle you. Humans like connection, apparently.
My own career progress was much slower and topped out lower than (in my enlightened opinion) much less qualified folks in office.
That said, it's a tradeoff. I -still- wouldn't move to work in office knowing this. I value my family, time, and lifestyle I'm able to afford in a place I want to be more than making tons of money.
In another 10 or 20 years I'm half sure I'll run the numbers and regret that, but so far so good.
I have been promoted while working remote, so I disagree.
I don’t have 2 different 1 hour commute blocks on my calendar. While you’re fighting traffic, I’m working. While you’re rushing through your morning routine, I’m sitting at my computer catching up on slack. While you’re finding the meeting room, I’m reading the meeting prep material. While you’re getting distracted by Sales in your open office, I’m locked in, midway through a 2 hour coding session.
Did you actually get a promotion with pay increase?
Or did they give you a title and say, great job — now we have higher expectations of you!
It was a $50k salary bump.
What you’re talking about seems like an attempt to placate rather than reward.
Wow, congratulations! Thought that only happened in fairy tales!
No other options though.
I did the sf thing and don't want to go back. Don't want to live in NYC or Seattle or commute over an hour from NYC suburbs.
Not remotely true.
How so?
Also overhiring in the pandemic.
>why aren't we seeing the jobs come back?
It was only just reinstated, so it's probably too early to see the effects.
I also expect that despite the restoration of Section 174, companies realized that they not only overhired during ZIRP, but also that they don't actually need that headcount, given the outcome of Musk's Twitter layoffs. There were so many prognostications that Twitter would imminently implode after downsizing from ~8k to ~1.5k employees, and when these claims never came to pass, it was a wake-up call to the rest of the industry [0].
[0] https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/elon-musk-fired-80-p...
I also think it’s fashionable to have a smaller headcount these days. Historically, the dynamics of businesses encouraged rising headcounts, as ICs weren’t as valued as managers (salary caps basically, as impact for ICs is hard to measure unless you are in sales), and managers generally view headcount as a metric to career and salary growth.
So there was just this general pressure from the middle up to grow instead of paying more to existing staff or finding some other way to spend the money. After all, investors generally want you to spend the money you have access to, otherwise they’ll put it to use elsewhere.
It seems that there is external pressure right now from investors, and on to executives, to push headcounts down as there is a general feeling that good companies should be able to leverage AI to become much more efficient, and higher headcounts just burn money and bog things down. Whether or not that’s true is another question, but the perception exists.
I’m not sure if this is a fundamental change in the dynamic, or just a temporary push against it that will eventually lose steam.
> good companies should be able to leverage AI to become much more efficient
I feel like this should be a “both and” situation. AI is not a panacea. If your company has 10 good engineers and a ChatGPT subscription, and my company has 100 good engineers and a ChatGPT subscription, we are going to move considerably faster.
Until someone gets an exclusive contract with AGI, it doesn’t change things.
This isn't how it practically works though. You hit a saturation point where there's no more work to be done. There's only so much software to write, only so many ad campaigns to push, sometimes you just need to maintain, stabilize, and not iterate. If you have a problem that requires 10 engineers, 100 isn't going to speed it up. 9 women can't make a baby in 1 month and all that.
I don't think many people really doubted that Twitter could keep itself up and running.
But that "everything app"? It hasn't happened. The money transfer app ("Twitter Payment Platform")? Still MIA.
>I don't think many people really doubted that Twitter could keep itself up and running.
Oh, they sure did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34617964
Even in that thread, a lot of people were saying "it's only been three months, give it a bit more time."
And they were right, I think. Twitter's UI has degraded. I can't see this tweet linked from the thread: https://x.com/Grady_Booch/status/1620720537805922306 - it gives me an error. It might have been deleted, but Twitter just says "something went wrong". And I don't think it's even possible to view threads anymore without logging in?
But more importantly, X has not released any substantially new features within the last 3 years. And I bet that it won't release anything new for a while, and anything they _do_ try to release will be laughably broken.
Existing features are also suffering and going unfixed. If you browse any tweet with more than a few dozen replies, loading replies takes a notable amount of time, and X very conspicuously does not load all of them. Sometimes changing reply sorting algorithms loads entirely different batches of tweets.
Besides that most basic functionality, many times notifications are not sent when the notification settings would suggest they should be. And of course, moderation has fallen by the wayside, although that's more of a policy shift than a technical failure.
Incidentally, those defects would be good for censorship with deniability.
(Occam says deficit of institutional capability is the most likely cause. But that could also turn into a feature.)
> But more importantly, X has not released any substantially new features within the last 3 years.
Just on top of my head, there's the ability to write longer texts, the AI integration (that seems fairly popular in there). There was also some revenue sharing scheme where accounts can get paid for engagement. And from the point of view of management, making it impossible to view threads without login would also be a feature (as in "something we have to deliberately implement").
It's not a lot, but I don't think the pre-Musk Twitter changed even that much in the 3 year period before the acquisition.
I don't understand this thread - twitter is pretty much entirely dead, like stackoverflow - in some zombie state before getting the plug inevitably pulled in a decade or so. Its revenue halved since 2020.
Net income/profit is what matters, revenue is largely irrelevant. Your own date is a perfect example of this since Twitter somehow managed to lose a ton of money in 2020 when they did indeed see record revenue, probably owing to over-stuffed election coffers. X's user counts and EBITDA are at record levels. In 2024 it was $1.25 billion on $2.7 billion revenue, contrasted against 'old Twitter's' $0.68 billion on $5 billion revenue in 2021. [1]
[1] - https://archive.is/evLAL (WSJ archive)
Doesn't this forum periodically discuss an article[*] about profit not really mattering in the grand scheme of things? (As in, profitable and growing companies are capable of showing profit whenever they want, and conversely to show no profit if they so wish.)
[*] This one I believe - https://commoncog.com/cash-flow-games/
The numbers I referenced were EBITDA, which is mostly the point of that article.
But a software company shouldn't really need to show even EBITDA. Amazon didn't between 2000 and 2012.
I'm not sure this is true. Amazon was investing heavily in things that would be reasonably expected to yield future gains, like fulfillment centers and just broadly expanding their logistic capacity. But for Twitter? So far as I know, most of their expenses were just ongoing operational costs and which seem to have been greatly bloated owing to mismanagement.
That's due to Elon's gross mishandling of Twitter governance (e.g. demanding that the recommendation algorithm be tweaked so that literal Nazis dominate people's feeds), not due to any technical failings of the platform as a result of downsizing the engineering staff.
Twitter really is a hellscape. I was drawn in for a few days recently and started getting affected by the barrage of relentless right-wing garbage. And for those on twitter it seems like the most important information in the world when it’s just a dopamine pump of rage and fear. Easier just to switch it off and live your life in peace.
I doubt it. There are no Nazis in my feed.
For some people, everyone else is nazi.
This is a thought terminating cliche, ironically about a thought terminating cliche. X does have a problem with actual, literal, antisemitic, genocidal Nazis. No funny business or stretched definitions. Nazis. Dismissing it just because of a few people going by the Nazi bar analogy risks normalizing the actual fucking Nazis we're dealing with. "Oh everyone's a Nazi to you people" is a crazy thing to say when the individual under discussion is screaming about globalist cabals of bankers ushering in white erasure. And that is who is getting algorithmically elevated on X.
Also plenty of racists and homophobes, more than I see just about anywhere else on the internet. And more wild, rabid hate surrounding trans people than I see anywhere outside of narrow, festering cesspools in wastelands like 4chan.
I believe you that there are literal Nazis on X, just as there are on every social media platform (and society in general). I despise Nazis but again I literally never see them on my feed so I find it hard to believe that this is a major problem or that the platform is boosting that content. If you're seeing a lot of Nazi content then you're probably following the wrong type of accounts.
No, in fact I block every such account I see. I go on Twitter for inspiration of various kinds, not for doomscrolling, although I recognize that that's in vogue. But the owner of the platform has been demonstrated to artificially push posts and accounts into people's timelines and notifications, particularly his own, and he has retweeted, replied to, and otherwise boosted blatantly antisemitic conspiracy theories. It's pretty well documented as something that does actually happen, and not just as some sort of algorithmic quirk.
Recruiters have been blowing my inbox up since the day Trump signed the OBBB
although I think entry level is still in shambles, for now
Those changes got permanently reversed in the recent passage of the Big Beautiful Bill by a one-in-a-year reconciliation process that was able to pass with only 51 votes in the Senate with zero votes from the opposition.
Note that the reversal only applies to American software jobs, not offshore ones. So maybe tech hiring is going to pick up again soon. Those changes should've been reversed before they took effect in 2022 by the govt at the time.
What was the reasoning behind this change? Isn’t R&D something we’d encourage to be a tax write off since it reduces the cost of well.. R&D? Or is R&D not as important as I’m thinking?
It was done to try and make the bill somewhat pencil out and make the national debt increase less egregious. Everyone just assumed it would be delayed forever or reversed before it could take effect, but those negotiations failed, triggering massive waves of layoffs.
https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/section-174/
The story that I’ve heard (probably on here) is that the administration did it to make the tax bill look more balanced over the long term by phasing out that tax write-off, while giving them (or the next administration) time to reverse it before it really impacted anything. But, nobody reversed it, until this year.
That administration really didn't like tech
Why do you think they brought it back this year?
It was also in part a budgetary time bomb that was set to go off in the next term. If Trump won, they would have rolled it back. As it was, there were several attempts to roll it back between 2021 and 2024 that were blocked by republicans ( https://www.claconnect.com/en/resources/blogs/manufacturing/... https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/4737635-senate-republica... ) so that the economy would continue to suffer under Biden.
Once Trump won and was in place for 2025, they defused it so that (they hoped) the economy would pick up.
>> Why do you think they brought it back this year?
Huge amounts of coordinated lobbying by the tech industry concentrated on three topics (crypto, section 179, ai deregulation)
Presumably because they see the tech industry as having been brought sufficiently to heel.
This 1000x.
I was working in Europe for a big American company, which will remain nameless, and they started shutting down most, if not all, of their European operations.
A change in the US tax code made software development amortize over 5 years in the US and over 15 years overseas. It was later changed instant deduction in the US but still 15 years for overseas. It no longer makes sense to outsource software development in many cases.
> It's a cheap win with investors who want to hear about AI initiatives to lay off yet even more of this department, because it doesn't matter if the quality of service declines, there are no market or regulatory forces that are punishing this well enough to ever expect firms to stop breaking it, let alone fix it
There's also some argument that, if people cannot get customer service to "help" they stop asking for help - driving that cost down.
And not having to remedy issues in the product = no repair/replace cost
And people are then left with only a few options, one of which... buy a replacement... which in a restricted market is a WIN because more money coming in...
And something to note - this cut has been reinstated as part of the Big Beautiful Bill. Which has passed. I think the drop in jobs between now and a year from now atleast be separated as AI vs just interest rates. There are less confounding variables.
I've heard this complaint/observation many times and I just don't buy it. For one thing, particularly for large companies, the deduction smooths out. Yes, you can only deduct 20% of the costs this year but you're also deducting 20% from the previous year, 20% from the eyar before that and so on.
Also, the 2017 tax cuts and the recent bill have provided substantial tax cuts to these corporations too.
Usually this subject comes up where people (at least on HN) are telling people to mail their Congresspeople and Senators to get a bill passed to "fix" this and my question is always this:
"What tax cuts are you going to give back to pay for this?"
If we want to end this ridiculous IP transfer to Ireland and royalty payments to offshore profits to avoid taxes at the same time, I'm 100% on board with fixing the deductability of engineering salaries.
> Also, the 2017 tax cuts and the recent bill have provided substantial tax cuts to these corporations too.
That's just not how big companies look at their budgets, it isn't all one big pool of funds coming in and going out everything has a cost center and is accounted for individually end to end. This tax change made certain jobs suddenly 20% more expensive on paper. People in corporate finance look at these numbers and make recommendations that get implemented.
> the 2017 tax cuts and the recent bill have provided substantial tax cuts to these corporations too.
Sure, but that doesn't necessarily change the marginal cost of hiring another dev if the tax incentives have worsened.
The time value of money over 5 years is significant, especially in a fast moving industry like tech. The correlation between this change passing and tech hiring dropping is strong so I'm inclined to think there's some signal there.
> I'm 100% on board with fixing the deductability of engineering salaries.
It's already been fixed for US workers.
How does US tax bill explain global slowdown?
You absolutely misunderstand Section 174 and you are spreading misinformation.
The only companies this affected are those right at the margins of becoming profitable. It doesn't affect new startups and it doesn't affect established businesses. And if you are at the margins of becoming profitable you have likely accumulated more than enough tax credits for all your losses.
The changes to Section 174 is not the explanation of why software engineering jobs were lost in 2022. They were lost because every company overhired from 2020-2022 and they have to absorb it given the drop in activity once the Pandemic was over.
Not entirely accurate. An unprofitable company that is acquired for its tech or team might have a huge amount of tax credits that they can’t use, but the acquiring company can. This can make an acquisition more attractive, even if the target company never made any money.
You are right that it creates residual value which might be purchased for value (probably at a discount.) However, it doesn't help the startup actually pay the bills while it operates.
Historically, the R&D payroll just wiped out same year revenue and you essentially did cash accounting. After Section 174, you had to finance the R&D by borrowing or just hiring less.
This only makes sense if you have taxable income :))) and if you dont in the near term, the present value of those tax credits are lower.
You won’t lose the tax credits they only get time shifted.
I was responding to “The only companies this affected are those right at the margins of becoming profitable.”
It also affects wildly unprofitable companies that have burned lots of cash and never made any money.
And you do “lose” the tax credits upon acquisition - they’re not only time-shifted, they are company-shifted.
>> You won’t lose the tax credits they only get time shifted.
Yes, from a value perspective you do not lose the tax credits. But from a "cash" perspective, how do I pay my tax bill in years 1, 2, 3, 4?
I do consulting, I'm constantly scouting clients. Right around November 2022 something very stark happened. I went from fighting off prospects with a stick, to crickets, almost over night. I deal mostly with startups and mid-size companies, nobody with insider knowledge or cutting edge interests. I can tell you that GPT was not heavily on anyone I dealt with's radar as an opportunity to reduce costs.
Some sort of cultural zeitgeist occurred, but in terms of symptoms I saw with my own eyes, I think ZIRP ending (projects getting axed) and layoffs starting (projects getting filled within ~24 hours) were huge drivers. I have no proof.
> Right around November 2022 something very stark happened.
The Twitter layoffs perhaps?
The interest rate rise also. It happened earlier but thats when the effects started to filter down.
The Twitter layoffs were done in anticipation of AI. Musk knew he wanted to make X and Twitter was one entry point. The loss in twitter productivity would be made up by AI gains and the first realization of that AI was named Grok.
So there's a bit of circular causality here. AI is a cause of the Twitter layoffs, and others are arguing that the Twitter layoffs may be a cause of other labor force shrinkage. If so then the Twitter layoffs are a costly signal that AI will impact the labor force and the shrinkage downstream of them is AI related.
No, they weren't.
The Twitter layoffs were because the company was hemorrhaging money and Musk is an egomaniac.
Is your claim that Musk, who cofounded OpenAI and started buying GPUs by the tens of thousands almost immediately after buying Twitter, and whose stated purposes in buying Twitter included AI, and who has been trying to build X since the 1990s, and who uses AI in SpaceX and Tesla, did not foresee that he would use AI on Twitter when he conducted the layoffs?
Can you walk me through your thought process here?
You're too in love with your own conclusion here. The reality is Elon's kind of an idiot who just impulsively does stuff and mostly gets away with it because money.
Elon talked shit online and then fought hard to wriggle out of buying Twitter after promising to pay the funny weed sex number for it.
And he fired employees because he's cheap and only keeps people who yes man him. You can read the complaint yourself:
https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/twitter-employee-laws...
I think part of that is a bit of a collapose of traditional consulting. There's been a huge transition into the boutique firms now.
Where do you think the market is going in regards to boutique firms? I've heard it mentioned but I'm not sure what counts as boutique and what that signifies for the next few years.
So if we are talking about "traditional consulting", that usually means MBB/Big Three
The value they add is their corpus of previous work to lean on and sell. And anybody at the firm can reference that. But it's always almost the junior level consultants doing the work, and a bunch of c-suites trying to manage it and sell it.
So when you work with a firm like this, you are going to get a team who has managed a similar project as yours, but it usually ends up being generic and trying to repeat past successes.
I really think that's where some of the boutique firms are being different.
Instead of just saying "here is our Lean Six Sigma team", they can say "we've got these four people who are perfect for technical implementation, and here is a project manager who has done almost exactly this before, and here is a RevOps person who has worked in your actual industry".
Maybe someone is an expert on some super obscure domain. They might not qualify for a full time consultant position at a big 3 firm, can suddenly be pulled in on projects that are their specialty.
Mostly these boutique firms can put together a more highly specialized and focused team than the prebuilt teams at a place like Bain or McKinsey.
Interest rate was hiked rapidly from 1% (in May 2022) to 4% (in Dec 3 2022).
Oct 2022 recorded the lowest for S&P 500 since COVID (till now).
COVID assistance was over. Vaccination reached a critical majority. On Sep 2022, Biden declared "COVID-19 pandemic was over" [1].
Businesses got a reality check.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_the_Unite...
Yep, interesting. Thank you.
I had the same thoughts, there are clearly indicators that the weakness in the labor market started happening before LLMs and AI took over popular discourse.
All the more reason to believe that while correlated, LLMs are certainly not the largest contributor, or even the cause of the job market weakness for young people. The more likely and simple explanation is that there are cracks forming in the economy not just in the US but globally; youth employment is struggling virtually everywhere. Can only speculate on the reasons, but delayed effects from questionable monetary and fiscal policy choices, increasing wealth gaps, tariffs, geopolitics, etc. have certainly not helped.
>youth employment is struggling virtually everywhere.
Interesting point. With Baby Boomers retiring everywhere and fertility falling everywhere, one would expect fierce competition for young workers.
The Boomers are largely gone now from tech. One former manager of mine was 65 when I left, she retired a year later at 66, gone. Unfortunately, most of the roles those people held were not back-filled. The roles vanished, too.
Anecdata: I spent quite a bit of time driving around office parks in Eagan, MN. Most of them are dead--really, really dead. Vacant offices everywhere, the hotel that used to cater to business travelers is shuttered and the parking lot looks like a jungle. I can't peg exactly when all this took place because I haven't worked in that area in several years, but probably the effects of 2020, the remote work culture, and now the layoff hangover. I see a lot of people in their 50s and 60s working retail jobs right now. They often look like folks who would have been working in an office someplace.
>The paper notes they did an adjustment for the end of ZIRP. I dont know enough econometrics to understand whether this adjustment was sufficient
Looking at the paper [0], they attempted to do it by regressing the number of jobs y_{c,q,t} at company c, time t, and "AI exposure quintile" q, with separate parameters jointly controlling for company/quintile (a), company/time (b) and quintile/time (g). This is in Equation 4.1, page 15, which I have simplified here:
log(y_{c,q,t}) ~ a_{c,q} + b_{c,t} + g_{q,t}
Any time-dependent effects (e.g. end of ZIRP/Section 174) that would equally affect all jobs at the company irrespective of how much AI exposure they have should be absorbed into b.
They normalized g with respect to October 2022 and quintile 1 (least AI exposure), and plotted the results for each age group and quintile (Figure 9, page 20). There is a pronounced decline that only starts in mid-2024 for quintiles 3, 4, and 5 in the youngest age group. The plots shown in the article are misleading, and are likely primarily a reflection of ZIRP, as you say. The real meat of the paper is Figure 9.
A potential flaw of this method is that ZIRP/Section 174 may have disproportionately affected junior positions with high AI exposure, e.g. software engineers. This would not be accounted for in b and would thus be reflected in g. It would be interesting to repeat this analysis excluding software engineers and other employees subject to Section 174.
[0] https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/...
Yeah my company started stepping up outsourcing in 2023. We also started some AI projects. The AI projects haven't made much progress but the outsourcing is at an extremely advanced stage.
I personally sat in meetings in 2022 where we adjusted staffing projections in anticipation of AI efficiency. Sure some of it was "overhiring," but the reality was that those staffing goals were pre-ai. Once they were updated, that's when the layoffs started because management didn't want anyone who didn't have an AI or big data background.
Gen-AI was still extremely niche in 2022; ChatGPT didn't come out until the end of the year, on 30 November, and it was pretty much just a toy curiosity until mid-2023 when GPT-4 came out. I am very surprised that leadership at your company was seriously discussing the business impact of AI that early on.
Chat gpt wasn't considered a toy... Not sure where you got that. We were interested in what openai was going from very early given the founders' history.
It absolutely was considered a toy by most people when it debuted in late 2022. This was the era when memes abounded about how ChatGPT would dutifully answer the query "what's the world record for crossing the English Channel on foot?" [0] or "what weighs more, a pound of feathers or a kilogram of bricks?" [1]
Most people didn't start taking ChatGPT/gen-AI seriously until mid-2023, when GPT-4 became widely used.
[0] https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/format:webp/1*yJs...
[1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fpl09fAakAE1cFW?format=jpg&name=...
You can see for your self how seriously HN users took ChatGPT in late 2022 https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1672444800&dateRange=custom&...
Some of the highlights include:
* Building a Virtual Machine Inside ChatGPT https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33847479 (Dec 3, 2022; 2029 points; 919 comments)
* Disputing a Parking Fine with ChatGPT https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33937753 (Dec 10, 2022; 606 points; 348 comments)
* ChatGPT passes the 2022 AP Computer Science A free response section https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33858844 (420 points; Dec 4, 2022; 455 comments)
* ChatGPT is a ‘code red’ for Google’s search business https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34086462 (396 points; Dec 23, 2022; 636 comments)
* Build your front end in React, then let ChatGPT be your Redux reducer https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34166193 (395 points; Dec 28, 2022; 142 comments)
Hacker News is not most people. Even today most non-tech people I speak to have barely touched AI. Perhaps a bit of gimmicky “ooh that’s cool” image generation or chatGPT, but nothing serious.
Warren Buffet is also not most people, yet people like him have far more to do with what actually happens on the stock market than the tens millions of retail investors.
...so? It seems that you forgot what this thread is about.
I mean very good job staying on-top of new tech but you're not actually trying to imply your not the anomaly in that regard right?
He was certainly on top of new technology movement but signs were there the whole time.
I wasn’t aware of ChatGPT in 2022 but I was aware that we could not keep data scientists hired long term because several faangs like meta were just dropping 100% increases in salary as the opener to our people for some mega project related to machine learning based on the skill set of the people being hired
Correct. We didn't know chatgpt would be huge but we knew big data and ai were the next big thing and we're investing heavily in that space. The funding for this came from sre teams, pms, etc.
Not for people paying attention to the entire AI space. GPT wasn't the only thing going on at the time. AlphaGo was a big deal for anyone paying attention.
Huge difference between people with forward thinking and without, right.
GitHub Copilot was out there in 2021. The "chat about anything" era hadn't really begun, but "your computer can write code for you" era was well underway. And given that said business wanted to retain the people it had with AI/big data backgrounds, strongly suggesting it isn't like a restaurant where it would be unlikely that any staff would have that kind of experience, we can reasonably assume that they are in that particular niche.
in addition to this detail I might add I can't remember the last time I had a customer service call that took place with someone stateside. It's easy to point to AI when offshoring for favorable interest rates is really the reason.
I'm surprised more folks aren't live to this -- AI is just the scapegoat. The jobs are moving to where labor is cheaper.
I remember the outsourcing meme was huge in the early 2000s. "Don't study CS, you'll get outsourced." Why is it only happening now? It's far from a new idea.
> Why is it only happening now?
because 2020-2022 COVID happened and forced everything remote. world didn't end.
the offshoring boom was the 90s and 2000s, and generally ended not amazing, but now a new generation of leadership saw it could be done, and done better -- video calls to the other side of the globe work far better than in 2004, speaking from experience.
The exaggerated state of the national security narrative.
Two data points from last month:
American Express
And a large bank headquartered in Virginia
I think USAA but that was two years ago
I just had one on saturday actually, was a pleasant surprise!
I called bank of america’s credit card line and asked for a support agent. A friendly lady answered, she had a southern accent. :)
I think it's lipstick on a pig. We've seen tech companies collude before, and I'm guessing they're doing it again, trying to drive down the price of talent and make their employees less demanding.
I remember years of a no-backfill policy at Devon on a promises of automation. Since 2017 at least. The “desirable job market” for young people has been challenging well before LLM became popular. Want a dead end entry level job in food service earning $20/hour? No problem.
The economy is destroying the jobs and AI is just the raven on the shoulder of a stumbling bull . . .
>The economy is destroying the jobs
the economy actually creates all the jobs ever since hunt and gather. the buggy whip jobs did eventually dry up, but the economy continues to create other jobs, paid for by ever increasing surpluses.
> the economy actually creates all the jobs ever since hunt and gather.
The economy neither creates nor destroys jobs. The economy is the aggregate of the jobs.
yes, this is it
> SWE figures dropped mid-2022 (almost magically in line with interest rate hikes) and LLM-copilots werent introduced for another year
It was pretty clear by late 2022 that AI assisted coding was going to transform how software development was done. I remember having conversations with colleagues at that time about how SWE might transform into an architecture and systems design role, with transformer models filling in implementations.
If it was clear to workers like us, it was pretty clear to the c-suite. Not that it was the only reason for mass layoffs, but it was a strong contributor to the rationale.
Many large companies were placing a bet that there were turbulent times ahead, and were lightening their load preemptively.
My company had multiple call center modernizing projects going on starting around 2021, including many NLP based routing and task upgrades.
H1B visas are clearly a massive factor. Well before AI.
AI is barely a blip on why the job market is dead for entry level, and dying all the way up the ladder.
Every one of my engineer friends says the same thing. "My team is 80% indians" and more than half are not qualified for the job they have.
The whole thing is a fucking scam for them, every company, top to bottom. Recruiters, hiring managers, referrals, CEO's. All one thing in common.
I'll take my downvotes, I don't care, everyone here knows I'm right. And those with their head up their ass can enjoy getting replaced and spending years looking for another role.
If people don't wake up to this fact, things are going to get very ugly very quickly. They already are in the retail sector.
Upvoting!
This is 100% the reason, saying its A.I. is gas lighting
Appointing indian leadership is the single biggest sign of moving to an extraction phase for a company.
The idea is they think the current value of the institution and IP is higher than their ability to innovate, so the try to outsource and reduce labour cost as much as possible intending to do the bare minimum maintenance for as long as possible.
This gets compounded by every layer trying to get the most out of the company as fast as possible, hiring in a way that has no long term outlook.
It is possible that multiple trends are coalescing
1. layoffs after web3 hiring spree
2. End of Zirp
However I think now, in 2025 is it impossible to reasonably claim AI isn't making an impact in hiring. Those who disagree on here seem to be insistent on some notion that AI has no benefits whatsoever, thus could never cause job loss.
M2 Money supply: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL
I sense some conflation of causation/correlation at hand.
Completely agree with you. You can't be an economist and criticize current monetary policy. You will be labeled a crackpot, ostracized and have difficulty with grants. Grants from who? The same institution you'll be critizing in the first place.
Exactly this - I've said it before and will say it again - new technologies emerge in response to trends, often to accelerate existing trends and does not create them.
I see a few explanations for what you're saying, and those might be true, but I strongly believe part of it is investment (particularly VC, less so PE) has hit diminishing returns in tech and which means less subsidized "disruption", which means less money to hire people. AI becoming hugely popular right when this was happening is not a coincidence. And it's not just startups, less investment in startups also mean less clients for AWS and Azure. A16Z / Sand Hill switching to AI is not them just chasing the latest trend, it's a bid to reduce cost on people, which is the most expensive part of a tech company, as the only way to extend their unicorn-focused investment strategy.
Like the drug dealers.
They just supply what people want and follow the trends.
This reminds me of the part of The Book of Why by Judea Pearl discussing how do calculus and the causal revolution came about with the simple insight that effects come before causes and so do calculus was invented to keep track of that in the math, rather than obscuring that with statistical relations that worked in either direction.
SWE, i know some worfloe digitalisation projects that had been in the planning for a very long time, budgetted as multiple person tear efforts, that due to pandemic nescessity were exected by a team of 3 over a long weekend in 2020. This did not go unnoticed, neither by customers nor swe providers.
2 things can be true. I was applying for jobs in 2022 and we all knew that the market was crap then because of overhiring during pandemic.
Tech companies pumped massive money into coding boot camps, overproduced coders, market crashes, salaries go down (or at least stagnate).
My understanding is the same thing recently happened to pharmacists.
seeing the same in IT security / cyber.
so, so many jr hires with no-name online degrees.
Chat gpt 3 was 2020, even if the technology wasn't mature the hype was there informing investment and hiring decisions.
There was also other factors, there were covid booms, covid busts, overcorrections, Elon shoes you can cut by 90% and still keep a product running (kind of) and with X taking the flack other people followed suit without being as loud. There is a fairly major war in Europe ....
You are confusing GPT models and ChatGPT.
Oh yep.
Still, even fine tuned gpt2 was an eye opener.
And 2022 (chatgpt) fits time wise- the hype came before mature solutions.
My understanding is that before Nov 2022, GPT models are obsecure, technical NLP stuff that most people don't understand or care about. ChatGPT is the first real product that is accessible and useful to everybody.
GPT3 drove the AI Dungeon explosion iirc
Coordination, plain and simple.
Could you please explain more. Very interested in anything that explains the massive hole in the timeline.
Openai also invented time travel to coordinate with companies.
Nothing to do with thr mass exodus and offshoring of US jobs.
The BPO industry is GROWING the opposite of standard AI understanding ideas.
Also call center is a good one I was doing research myself and call center jobs overseas have GROWN pretty rapidly over time these jobs are moving not vanishing.
Yep. For some reason everyone assumes that jobs in the US live in a closed system. In reality, things that can be moved abroad to save 20% of costs will be moved this way or the other.
I don’t know why everyone remembers how the manufacturing went to China, and at the same time forgets about it when we are talking about office jobs.
This is a second hand anecdote but someone commented here or on X, that basically he was on a cruise and overheard two heads of HR of 2 big Co's talking to each other about shenanigans.
Would not be the craziest considering that AI has to make a ROI. Even if it's not up there yet to do so organically. If you annihilate the entry labor market, then after some time, you have no choice but to use AI because there is no one remaining with the skills. AI is lower than entry level -> No one is hiring new grads -> There is no new talent being developed -> use AI for everything!
> This is a second hand anecdote but someone commented here or on X, that basically he was on a cruise and overheard two heads of HR of 2 big Co's talking to each other about shenanigans.
I have no idea what this means.
It's describing the setting for a conspiracy theory. Multiple (in this case 2) people (in this case powerful ones) getting together and deciding that a certain outcome would be mutually beneficial.
And the second paragraph details the conspiracy is to work together to remove a certain type of employee in large numbers, so that AI tools have to be used in order to make up for that loss.
Pretty much, though I would not say they go together. 2nd paragraph is just a separate conjecture.
Personally, don't need that much evidence; are we old enough to remember the hiring gentleman's agreement in big tech?
Let's also not forget one of the main functions of HR, as an industry, these days: friction. You think salaries (and inflation) wouldn't go up if hiring managers had more freedom?
You say this as if humans do not collude all the time. The pejorative idea of a "Conspiracy theory" is such a great modern tool for those who want to collude to hide their collusion in plain view.
Somehow it has become a heuristic that if caste in, the collusion is instantly dismissed as fiction. Even better that the person who thinks collusion is happening must have a lower IQ than those who don't. How convenient for those who are colluding.
An of the horizon for AI explosive growth was 10 years down the road, then what those execs report to the board/C*Os after their department failed to perform without half the employees?
Makes zero sense.
You completely misunderstand corporate incentives.
I do see that angle, and my impression is this push comes from the top top. The execs and middle are just following, milking it as long as it lasts.
cf. Matt Levine's thoughts on how Blackrock optimizes whole industries beyond the company level.
It still makes no sense. Why would a CEO or the Board gamble the company on an outcome they have no input on?
> Why would a CEO or the Board gamble the company on an outcome they have no input on?
have you seen the behavior of CEOs?
the market is doing it, and there is no way for a CEO, CIO, CTO, CISO, et al, to not do AI in 2025. the gains to stock price from the hype alone could be worthwhile, and even if not "everyone else was doing it"
Broad pressure because everybody else MIGHT be using AI and this (example) company stock MIGHT go down.
Until you run out of people using AI in the first place lol
[dead]
Coordination of…?
Think Trust as in anti-trust
What?
Coordination as in a trust or cartel
Why can't it be both?
The drop started from mid-2022 and 2023 and there is a single cause: Russian assets freeze. This led to governments around the world moving their assets from West/AngloSaxon countries. This lack of liquidity put the West in a “hang in there” situation. Economically, it showed up as raising interest rates and politically where things move slower, the emergence of a new coalition.
It’s really as simple as that. But people would like to believe that West GDP is higher than global south GDP by xxx amounts and so all of this couldn’t be possible.
If you want an insight inside their heads, there is a Biden speech after the assets freeze where he declares that the Russian economy/country will collapse in a few weeks under the measures. None of this materialized and their bet have failed which is why Trump is trying to pull the US out of the mess.
Of course all of this is my personal opinion. So take it from the grain in my bag of salt.
I made a stupid simple model where hiring in all age brackets rose slowly until 2021 and then fell slowly. That produces very similar looking graphs, because the many engineers that were hired at the peak move up the demographic curve over time. Normalizing the graph to 2022 levels, as the paper seems to do, hides the fact that the actual hiring ratios didn't change at all.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1z0l0rNebCTVWLk77_7HA...
I'm not sure I understand. Your model shows that different group buckets (eg 20-24yo vs 25-29yo) peak at different years (in your figure, 2022 vs 2024) despite being driven by the same dynamics. Is that expected? I (naively?) expected the same groups to rise, fall and have peaks at the same times.
One of the dynamics is that people get older so they move into different buckets.
We can make the model way simpler to make it clearer. Say in 2020 we hired 1000 20-24yo, 1000 25-29yo etc and then we didn't hire anyone since then. That was five years ago, so now we have 0 20-24yo, 1000 25-29yo, 1000 30-34yo etc and 1000 retirees who don't show up in the graph.
Each individual year we hired the exact same number of people in each age bracket, and yet we still end up with fewer young people total whenever hiring goes down, because all the people that got hired during the big hiring spike are now older.
Got it, thanks! Yeah, so it makes sense that any age-bucketing like this would have a similar effect
Wow, that's hilarious. So essentially hiring could be identical across all age groups, but due to a glitch in the analysis (young people don't stay young, who knew?), it appears that younger people are losing jobs more than the rest.
I think not hiring juniors is a tragedy of the commons situation. It started before the AI boom, during COVID. It's not tax-related as people claim here, since this phenomenon is not US-only.
The ZIRP era made companies hire people as if there was no tomorrow, and companies started "poaching" engineers from others, including juniors. I saw some interns with 2 years of experience getting offers as seniors. I had friends being paid to attend boot camp.
Then everyone realized they were training junior engineers who would quickly get offers from other companies as “Senior" and leave. So companies stopped hiring them.
Also AI hype is sucking all capital out of traditional hiring
We need to reframe it. At this point, what we call "AI" is not a technology, but a subscription company.
A technology is a tool you can adopt in your toolchain to perform at task, even if in this case it's outsourcing cognitive load. For a subscription company, well, as long as the subscription is active, you get to outsource some of the cognitive load. When Anthropic's CEO says that white color jobs will disappear, he means that he is selling Enterprise subscriptions, and that companies will inevitably buy it.
It's only a matter of time before AI becomes a commodity. The open source models are just a generation behind the proprietary ones and they're almost good enough for most users. Even if we're somehow limited to using proprietary models, since all of these "AIs" are based on natural language so you can practically hot swap the LLMs. Any company banking on selling any service other than AI hosting is going to be incredibly disappointed.
The only thing that could stop this commodification is some sort of vendor lock-in, but that looks to be technically challenging.
Windows gaming finally falling to desktop Linux, in terms of tech and mindshare among enthusiasts, proves to me that given a sufficiently large timescale open solutions tend to always win against a proprietary ones.
Companies just can't seem to stay focused on their own core competencies after a few decades. On the other hand, even when open projects "die" they can be resurrected ad infinitum.
Just my gut feeling but it seems like closed wins out big in the short term, but open wins in the end. Not applicable to everything I know.
I’m not sure I agree. Windows still has 95% market share in Steam’s hardware report. And even the modest gains that Linux has seen in this space have been as much a result of the efforts of a few small companies who have financial interests in undermining Microsoft’s monopoly as it has been a display of grassroots enthusiasm for open ecosystems.
Entrenched technologies take a while to un-trench; there's a lead lag on that kind of thing.
It starts with the kids saying I hate Windows. Then the adults. Then finally the grandmas. Windows will be evaporating marketshare for decades, like a long-half life on an unstable isotope.
The thing about market share is that it looks like sigmoid function. It's way more difficult to climb from 1% to 2% than from 40% to 50%.
I agree that it is still too early to call it, but note how SteamOS still hasn't officially come out on laptops/desktops yet.
Any economic data from between 2020 and 2025 should be tossed in the garbage. We will have no idea what affect AI has or hasn't had until AI has been available outside of the extremely confounded current circumstances. Tell me how employment looks after the next recession when the after effects of the pandemic, rapid inflation, interest rate unpredictability, and tariff whiplash are hopefully all behind us.
And the data for the two decades before that should be tossed out because of the global housing crisis, the sovereign debt crisis, and all the reverberations from that.
And the data for the two decades before that obviously needs to be tossed out because of the one-off nature of the dot-com boom, the dot-com crash, 9/11, and so on.
And before that... point is, you don't get clean data in economics. There's always something big going on, there are no double-blind trials to run, etc. It's called the dismal science for a reason. But that doesn't make it useless.
If your only dataset is 2008 to 2010, yeah your conclusions are almost certainly garbage. Likewise if your dataset is 1999 to 2002, or just the year 1987.
There will always be something going on, but there won't always be this specific thing going on, and if 100% of your data comes from during one specific crisis (nonetheless multiple concurrent crises), then it is 100% useless. Even with longer periods of data, reconcilliation with longer trends is technically challenging. We've had enough recessions to correct for them in our data, but until we've had a half dozen global pandemics you can't use pandemic data in your analysis.
Lots of apparently unexplored alternative explanations. In times of uncertainty, you don't hire unless you need to. Another junior developer or customer service agent can be delayed, and youngsters in the labor force are most exposed to this. But if you need a home health aide, you probably don't have a lot of choice: somebody has to change grandma's diapers. Tariffs top my list of uncertainties for businesses, but interest rates are a close second.
Trends take time to work out.
"AI" dives in and disrupts and then it turns out that AI isn't too I. The disrupt phase where HR dumps staff based on dubious promises and directions from above takes a few months. The gradual re-hiring takes way longer than the dumping phase and will not trigger thresholds.
I've spent quite a while with "AI". LLMs do have a use but dumping staff is not one of the best ideas I've seen. I get that a management team are looking for trimmings but AI isn't the I they are looking for.
In my opinion (MD of a small IT focused company) LLMs are a better slide rule. I have several slide rules and calculators and obviously a shit load of computers. Mind you my slide rules can't access the internet, on the other hand my slide rules always work, without internets or power.
I started university (in Australia) in 2004, not long after the dot com crash. CS enrolment rates were low, kids were getting scared off due to perceived lack of jobs. As a result, there was a shortage of grad talent (companies were already ramping up hiring again by 2004). I got a grad job just fine, in 2008, and I've never been short of work since.
So my advice to high school kids of 2025: right now is the perfect time to enrol in CS. 5 years from now, the AI hype will be over, and employers will be short on grads.
> 5 years from now, the AI hype will be over, and employers will be short on grads*
alterative view: the AI hype is real, AI takes over, and no one has any jobs anyway
also a thought: in 5 years the boomers will be retiring in droves as will the first series of GenX and the market, in most fields, should be opening up anyway
what makes you so confident that AI is just a hype?
Experience. You learn to ignore what people _believe_ it does and what they _say_ does and look at what it _actually_ does.
It's fun to play with, but LLMs can't reason and are fundamentally unreliable. They cannot be made reliable.
The actual market uses for large quantities of human-like text is, like, autocomplete and spam.
I use copilot as fancy autocomplete and like it, but ~all claims that it will replace SWEs are by people selling AI or people who fundamentally do not understand what SWEs actually do.
It'll probably replace some offshoring, ironically lol
This time is different. A fact right now is that software engineers now can orchestrate LLMs and agents to write software. The role of software engineers who do this is quality control, compliance, software architecture and some out of the box thinking for when LLMs do not cut it. What makes you think advances in AI wont take care of these tasks that LLMs do not do well currently? My point is once these tasks are taken care off a CS graduate won't be doing tasks that they learnt to do in their degrees. What people need to learn is how to think of customers needs in abstract ways and communicate this to AI and judge the output in a similar way someone judges a painting.
> CS graduate won't be doing tasks that they learnt to do in their degrees
how is that different from the previous decade(s)? How often do you invert a redblack tree in your daily programming/engineering job?
A CS degree is a degree for thinking computationally, using mathematics as a basis. It's got some science too (aka, use evidence and falsifiability to work out truths and not rely on pure intuition). It's got some critical thinking attached, if your university is any good at making undergraduate courses.
A CS degree is not a boot camp, nor is it meant to make you ready for a job. While i did learn how to use git at uni, it was never required nor asked - it was purely my own curiosity, which a CS degree is meant to foster.
The original comment advised people to enroll in CS to capture the potential shortage of CS grads in the workforce. You’re saying no people shouldn’t be doing CS to make themselves ready for a job. The comment you replied to also takes a similar stance, ie no CS doesn’t make people ready for a job.
You might think you’re disagreeing with the parent comment but in fact you’re disagreeing with the top level comment.
Software engineering is in correction mode since 2022, right after the Covid highs. AI is just the facade for job cuts. Zuck has been doing “the year of efficiency” for years now.
There are other factors that drive employment of young workforce, which don't have much to do with knowledge or skills. These are sort of blue-collar jobs within IT.
There is a lot of low-level drudgery work which is currently outsourced or assigned to non-employees (mostly young) in most companies. For example, the IT support and maintenance is mostly done outside of the West. This works requires a lot of back and forth. Don't think AI taking over this area.
Also, some work is assigned to young workers to spread the accountability and risk ownership. Not sure if you can hold AI as accountable as humans.
Also, young workers are generally preferred for their agility, flexibility and ability to work hard. There were easier to exploit and if they were unmarried, they won't mind giving all of their time and attention to work for less pay. I used to work in teams that stayed overnight at office to complete projects. Young people are also very cohesive and they team up well.
So, looking at the situation purely from a knowledge perspective may not give the full picture.
Discussed earlier in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45052423
Thanks! Macroexpanded:
AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45052423 - Aug 2025 (629 comments)
Several teams around me stopped hiring juniors over the past couple of years. It’s not that the newcomers aren’t good, it’s just that no one has time to train them. AI showed up at just the right moment to offer a convenient excuse, and companies are happy to save on the cost of mentoring. But long term, this feels like borrowing from the future. Without someone to train, there’s no one ready to step up later.
Skimming this, I'm not sure why it couldn't be explained by the layoffs we had a couple years ago, which were primarily at tech companies (which are indeed more exposed to LLMs) and probably hit junior devs more.
Not wrong. Also want to point out the continued layoffs at Microsoft, Intel, etc.
Looking at the "overall" graph they provide, it's clear that jobs as a whole have flatlined since 22, and even non-exposed jobs have had a growth rate hugely reduced. If we disregard the existence of AI, it would be easy to assume this is just the regular economic slowdown impacting younger people more than older ones. I don't see any correlation work done to isolate the source, especially as a lot of the "ai-exposed" work is also very much exposed to how much money is flowing in.
I don't get how interest rates is given at best a cursory phrase when ZIRP regime ending is one of the biggest macro events of the past several decades. Seems like it would deserve more of a spotlight.
I doubt the whole narrative is true, it may just be hope that we do not need to hire because we will be able to do it with AI. But reality outside of software and tech is very different. I work in an organisation that heavily pushing AI and even with that push, a typical employee is still not utilising it fully, unprepared and expecting training from the employer. There is also a disconnect over connecting org data to these tools and between developers and cyber teams.
My experience: we're hiring for an AI engineer position and for a frontend developer position (and yes, we posted our positions here on Hackernews).
We have a stream of cookie-cutter candidates. As if they are clones of each other, it's uncanny. They typically have a BS degree in some foreign university, then a CS Masters' in the US, experience with robotics, then several years of experience in large companies.
And they completely fold during in-person coding tasks. Like, not being able to explain the difference between DFS and BFS (depth/breadth-first search). Or being able to write a simple custom metric and train a network in Pytorch.
And a similar story for the frontend developer position.
We now literally have to add more filters to not get inundated by underqualified candidates. These filters will make it harder for beginners to even _get_ to the resume review stage.
No conclusions from me, but something's been broken in the CS jobs market for a while.
With the size of context windows now it'd be economical to dump all the resumes into an LLM and query the pool this way.
Short term thinking. Yes, maybe those jobs are replaceable. But how do you train the next gen of seniors?
The year is 2030: The junior engineers of the Adeptus Mechanicus stand in a circle around the holy monitor, chanting prayers to the Omnissiah. Their arcane books and lore guide the machine spirit, ensuring the correct holy words of blessing are entered into the holy prompt. Petitioning the machine spirit for its most truthful, secure holy answers.
Oh wait, wrong distopian future.
Not their (the companies, managers, executives) problem. You come in knowing your job, or they move to the next name on the list.
Education is an externality.
This article continues to propagate the misconception that young is the same thing as inexperienced.
We can assume the two are so strongly correlated that it's not worth it to differentiate. Even though many exceptions exist.
I don't think it's true at all. Considering it only takes 2 to 3 years to rack up the 10,000 hours to "master" something, young people can get very good at a lot of things. The biggest barrier in my opinion are child labor laws that get in the way of people getting experience.
If you do something 80 hours per week for 2 years it totals 8320 hours? This is far from average behavior even if you have nothing else to do except coding.
Yes. That is why we have many 18 years old better at programming than fresh graduates. Teenagers have a lot of free time to code.
I will be extremely concerned if my teenage boy spending >10 hours everyday, in 2 years, just sitting in front of computer screen.
> I don't think it's true at all. Considering it only takes 2 to 3 years to rack up the 10,000 hours to "master" something, young people can get very good at a lot of things.
They can, if they practice with feedback 8 hours a day.
Typically, young people, as a group, are not famous for practicing something 8 hours a day.
This means, for the group as a whole, it is true.
The audacity to paint child labor laws as a "barrier for experience"...
Children can work open source and rack up experience there. This is like the most humane way in any job ever to get experience as a minor.
In practice they will not just do open source and people will exploit them for free work since there are significant barriers to access employers able to pay market rate. Even open source itself can potentially be exploitative due to being free work.
While open source may be okay for coding, there are other skills which may not be so easy to do from your own home. In practice they will not just do open source and people will exploit them for free work
I think you are referring to
> The strategic thinking that goes into longer-horizon tasks may be something LLMs aren’t as good at, which aligns with why entry-level workers are more affected than experienced workers.
I think the article is talking in generalities, so on average entry-level software engineers have less experience with long-horizon tasks (e.g. months-long development), though there are definitely the exceptions that prove this rule.
I'd be interested to see more discussion on Section 174, how engineer salaries suddenly triggered a higher tax bill in 2022. https://qz.com/tech-layoffs-tax-code-trump-section-174-micro...
Did Section 174 changes accelerate tech job losses? It's unclear from the paper because they only look at the data excluding tech firms, not only tech firms.
I want to see cause-and-effect: the cause being tax changes, the effect being tech firm layoffs, but they don't analyze the effect.
Meh... just rehashing what he said before. The paper itself is fundamentally flawed, examining only a minuscule portion of the job market. If we step back and look at Europe's struggling economies over recent decades, we see that economic downturns disproportionately affect young people. Greece serves as the poster child, followed by Spain and Italy. In Germany alone, we've lost 50,000 jobs in manual labor heavy industries (mainly automotive) this past year. We're also seeing a 60% decline in apprenticeships for labor intensive roles at DAX companies that aren't even AI affected yet. AI has become a convenient scapegoat for a faltering economy driven by geopolitical tensions, protectionism and unqualified leadership in the world's largest economies. Roaring 20s indeed.
I also have yet to see anyone meaningfully differentiate between "AI is taking jobs" and "AI hype is causing stupid executive decisions" and even "AI hype is sucking up all the capital that would normally go towards hiring".
For a startup, I now can solo it with the help of AI far beyond what was possible a few years ago.
This does not mean I otherwise would have hired a few juniors. More likely I would not have taken that business beyond the idea stage.
But direct massacres I can personally observe are in translation, copywriting and illustration. Yes, a good person can do better, but for a majority of cases AI has already become "good enough".
Then there is an onslought from just non-AI automation, in e.g. retail and finsncial services. This had been building for over a decade, but the pandemic lockdows exponentially accelerated it.
It’s not ”good enough” from the consumers’ perspective. Only from the owners’.
Like AI slop always looks or sounds the same... Generated videos/images are uncanny. Text is really easy to identify too and reads boring. AI is missing character.
On the thread of copywriting/publishing, my wife works in the field. She recently has had trouble with authors submitting low quality material - vague, nonsensical, lacking voice. I told her it sounded like AI and sure enough it was. I don’t blame her because she’s pretty offline. But the point stands that basically no one wants this crap. I don’t want your “one pager” that GPT pooped out, I want you to sit down and compose the problem in a digestible way, one that makes me think and one that shows that YOU have thought about it.
You can 100% identify the AI slop that you identify.
Don't underestimate the effect of Elon nuking the Twitter employee base when he acquired the company. All the predictions were that Twitter would die. It hasn't. That sent a powerful message to the other leaders of tech companies: "You can do just as much with far fewer people" / "Most of your employees aren't doing needle moving work". Shortly thereafter, Zuck announced layoffs at Meta. These new attitudes towards headcount have cascaded down from the top-tier tech companies down through the ecosystem of companies.
except they laid off of a lot of trust and safety and marketing, and twitter has never been the same in that regard.
eng—has twitter really changed much since acquisition? it seems to me like twitter had really great eng to begin with. keeping the lights on is much different from building new product.
Even if I cede all of your points, if I'm Zuck or Sundar or Satya, etc. I might think "Well, I'm not going to nuke 80% of the head count, but I definitely could layoff 10-20% and slow way down on hiring."
Young people from where? I’m in South American and the young people here are earning much more than their parents earn but 1/3 what software engineers earn in San Francisco writing software.
In Canada, mass immigration is creating high unemployment for young people. Don't be so quick to blame AI when government policies are to blame. https://www.kingstrust.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/TKTC-De...
Interest rates have way more impact.
By what mechanism can you distinguish a decline from one cause compared to another?
I could understand if, given enough time for all of the factors involved to occilate that you could pick out a signal, but that's not the data that exists right now. Surely the only way to identify the first time instance of a cause of decline could only by accumulating a count of clear instances where the cause occurred and measuring those as a proportion of other cases.
Programming in a structured high-level language like C is much more productive than programming in assembly. Programming in a managed language with GC can be more productive still.
The creation of package managers and the widespread availability of open-source repos means developers don't need to write as much from scratch.
The creation of search engines and Stack Overflow did (and still do) much of the useful things that people use AI for (boilerplate, debugging obscure error messages).
Machines have gotten exponentially faster for the last several decades. This means devs need to spend less time optimizing code. And the time to compile and run speeds up, meaning you can prototype things faster.
Why is it, that somehow none of these inarguable improvements to the speed and efficiency of development haven't lead to a a massive decrease in the number of developers? If we take it as axiomatic that AI significantly improves productivity, why, for the first time in history, does that not result in more programming jobs?
None of the improvements of the past you outline were advertised as capable of replicating agency. They were sold as tools. Note that I am not making any claim about actual capability for agency, there’s other people more qualified than me to discuss this. Regardless factuality of ability to replace people, this is how it’s sold and arguably also how it’s bought. This gives the view that it has impact on jobs more weight.
Also I think it is plausible (if not likely) that LLMs reduce the demand for other kinds of software. They're (relatively) general purpose and can handle many tasks that previously would've needed bespoke software (and a team of people to create/maintain it).
In some ways developing and working with a high level but less efficient language for velocity is actually a vast improvement, imo.
Take node.js for example, devs can just sling code out as fast as they can and shit gets done. Then the node.js core devs can optimise certain paths/features after the fact to negate many of the efficiency problems.
However it does annoy me that what this has meant is that many of my colleagues don't know anything about memory management, debugging, or any other more traditional concepts, so we see bloat & OOMs over time that need to be resolved.
Researchers need to project the pre-Covid hiring rates and omit the subsequent overhiring boom to credibly report on any believable loss in jobs. Dropping personnel who should never have been hired to begin with is a return to normal, not a new concerning trend. Start by showing the data from at least 2015 onward rather than lying with statistics using charts starting in 2021 for maximum drama.
> For automative occupations, a lot of it is software engineering, auditing, and accounting, where there are well-defined workflows and LLMs are good at doing one-off tasks without a lot of feedback. For augmentative cases, you’re looking at more complex or managerial roles.
Nope coding is definitely augmentive for Sep 2025 and before. Maybe more so than managing.
A lot of CEOs are saying do more with less. Basically they are saying, “If there are any requests to hire additional people the first thing I ask them is if any AI tools have been tried first.”
Then every 2-bit president, leader, manager, CEO out there regurgitates the same thing.
So yes, companies want to save money and do more with leas. It certainly won’t help job seekers or the economy.
Part of the job downturn may be due to AI, not in the obvious way of LLMs doing peoples jobs but due to the money allocation:
>Companies will spend $375 billion globally in 2025 on A.I. infrastructure, the investment bank UBS estimates. (nyt)
which means they have less money to hire and train recruits.
I would expect something more convincing for such a (seemingly) popular article of this title. Seems like a relatively straightforward difference-in-differences or synthetic control could be applied to show something convinving, but this is just some dude's opinions as 'evidence'.
Tax code changes & interest rate changes have been unfavorable. Secondly “learn to code” and vastly lowered CS standards have churned out a lot of young developers that are unskilled, much like in the .com bust. Lastly AI which at best has completely shut the unskilled out.
I'd wager that vast resources being spent in one very niche subfield is what's hurting job creation from young people.
Aside from this there simply doesn't exist another mechanism in which AI can meaningfully affect employment in the long term.
Demand will shift to AI-literate knowledge workers whose productivity will be increased.
It's striking that the decline in hiring started when ChatGPT was first demoed, but wasn't really good enough to do much useful.
If it wasn't working now, though, we would see those graphs going back up.
It's not AI replacing jobs. There is a hiring downturn due to economic conditions (reaction to covid over-hiring and subsequent interest increases) and the people on the bottom of the ladder get bumped off.
There's a sizable overlap between the anti-AI movement (e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/antiai/) and self-identified socialists.
One thing that confuses me is that the anti-AI movement has adopted several talking points saying that nobody wants AI. (e.g. nobody wants it, the AI companies are pushing it on us, management is pushing it on us, it just creates low quality slop, the demand is fake, etc).
But if there's no demand, then there's no threat to jobs. On the other hand if there is a threat to jobs then there must be demand (since it competes with human labor in the job market). I'm not sure why they're taking this particular tactic, but it's going to lead to strange comment sections where people won't know how to stay on message as it becomes clearer that AI is impacting the labor force.
A lot of people intuitively imagine that to compete with humans there's some sort of 1:1 exchange ratio. But initially the calculus will be something like a 10 team with plus AI performs about on par with a 12 person team (or whatever the details work out to). So we will see AI impacting job numbers well before AI can do your entire job.
Does the ADP data include international employees in lower cost geos?
If we don't solve this by 2030, This and including the projected 10% increase in unemployment in the same year will give us another crash.
That is what true "AGI" is.
What are those "augmentative" jobs that fresh CS grads can transition to?
I don't think it's AI primarily, but rather AI is being used as a justification and a blame, and what's a better blame than this new trend that will last years and nothing can be done about it? I think it's just companies' greed, another excuse to lower the wages more and/or use ones who are ok with lower wages. It also has to do with procurement that's already using AI to process applications, with all the negative impacts this will have. I also did notice something when it comes to the job market: mostly those who are suffering are men, not women. I initially thought maybe because of the nature of the jobs, but that wasn't the case. Looking around on LinkedIn, a lot of women are doing product/project management jobs, analytics, business-related roles, even HR and procurement aren't impacted, and I have yet to see a single woman personally or online that was let go because of AI, even jobs in legal work, administration work -none of them are impacted that much. Meanwhile, I personally know several engineers (not software engineers) who are jobless with years of experience, and a LOT of software programmers too! I was discussing this with a friend and he also brought up a new term, "boomers' harems," as in, managers who are mostly old men prefer to hire young women now, and he did support his claim with many examples of fresh graduate girls that are working as engineers in aerospace or similar industries already, and their male classmates are still looking around.
So in conclusion, while AI does have an impact, personally if I would quantify it, it probably won't exceed 25% of the issue. Other factors make up the rest, but everyone is distracted by AI for all sorts of reasons.
Boomer harems lol that’s a new one on me but undoubtedly a thing.
My whole career in the UK I’ve noticed a similar thing in HR harems - in many places, particularly recruitment companies but it’s common everywhere, 90%-100% of the HR staff are women who then employ more and more women over men while having a generally poor understanding of the requirements for a role. I can’t help but feel like a group of women will have a natural disposition for adding extra women rather than men, while prioritising communication and networking over competencies like creative thinking, problem solving, generalism, and self-starting.
Moreso that women are going to be the majority of college graduates and thus eligible candidates for most sectors.
what I hate about it the most is, all AI company CEO constantly deny the fact that at least 50% of the jobs will be gone
Well, that’s the makings of revolution.
Even if we take the empirical claims from highly partisan sources at face value, obvious axiomatic problems remain. AI employment doom, like other forms of neoluddism is predicated on a zero-sum view of economics.
As an example, consider the claim, "Steam shovel adoption is destroying entry level jobs in ditch digging"
Yes, we want more productive technologies to be used where applicable. We want workers to specialize and become more productive with less hours worked. This isn't destructive at all. Framing it as such is either deliberately misleading or demonstrates a misunderstanding of basic econ.
Maybe its the secret recession?
AI taking jobs is the biggest bullshit and hype the world has ever seen that been pushed by the likes of Salesforce etc to tell their customers: Look out AI product is so good that we used it ourselves to cut our own workforce. And inside the company walls they whisper to each other : our AI product is such crap that it is really useless and the only way to sell it is to credit our AI for tha layoff and hiring freeze we are doing anyway.
Yeah we the people at silicon valley really care about young people job prospects of course, yeah, who would ever even doubt that.
AI has destroyed salaries and it is destroying jobs. The problem AI actually solves is wages. Why? Because perfection is the enemy of the good. Anyone who still believes AI is not destroying jobs is delusional.
Seems to me like the jobs disappeared in reaction to the extremely obvious: a certain president causing a crisis to get himself a tax cut, the latest in a very long series of government decisions to make labor extremely unattractive for the private sector. AI is an excuse, nothing more. And I mean both Macron and Trump.
AI is not even remotely close to the point where it can replace a human working for you, that's just not it. Everybody keeps screaming "NOT YET", and perhaps that's true, but either case, it's not currently true.
However, economic conditions are so that companies now want to not hire, because price rises due to tariffs mean much less spending happening, with the outlook steeply downward. It will very mean widely spread layoffs soon. The first to suffer are new entrants to the job market and the close-to-pension near-the-exit people as well, but let's not kid ourselves: they will hardly be the only ones.
The irony is that to me, this seems to be the reverse of what people think they see: AI is a clear investment target at the moment. It's being accused of killing jobs, but reality? It's one of the few clear investment targets. It is a portion of the economy that is entirely opposing the general trend. AI is not just not causing of firings, but actually is putting a break on the firings (by providing jobs funded by investment). It's a huge positive for the economy at the moment, and I bet it's a huge positive for jobs at the moment. Like most investments, the gains it promises have barely materialized right now: it's promising to replace people but it isn't. Frankly, the only other large investment target I see is weapons. And, while AI can be used in weapons, it's still leagues better than making actual weapons in my book. Nobody is literally blowing off anyone's head by firing an AI model at them.
I find this an obvious insight once you look at what companies are actually doing: they're not killing jobs and providing the same services. They're killing jobs and providing less services, for less money, to try to survive. If AI was replacing people, they'd be providing more service for less money. Money is the problem here. Money is artificial, entirely a decision of society. Where is the money going? Look at the stock market: it certainly isn't going to investors (look at an EU stock market, outside of weapons manufacturers)
And there's the key, fundamentally, businesses' desire to replace people is not a desire of business. It's a government decision. A tax decision. A very large portion of government income is income tax of various kind. People-based taxes. This means: you generate revenue from the means of production, capital (ie. "a factory"), input goods, and people's labor? It's people's labor that is taxed. Everything else is actually tax-exempt. Capital is free (you can spend 100% of your investor's money on buildings, no tax, assuming you follow standard practice). Input goods are free (VAT/Sales tax exempt, you don't even have to pay it initially). You want to keep more of your company's revenue? I don't think enough people realize this: but you lose a LOT more on the people than on anything else. In fact you only lose on people in some sense (because capital and input goods can at least theoretically be sold or more likely subleased for similar value as you got them for, they're "free", or only historically low interest is required). You almost only pay the government for the privilege of getting labor from someone else.
In France, the actual tax is over 70%, if you measure it fully. By that I mean: let's say I pay you $100. Any tax, patronal (employer tax), income tax, insurance, pension (which are all government), import tax, VAT, ... is all to be paid from the $100. You like the product my company makes. You buy all you can from it, you spend all of that $100 on my product. How much do I see on my bank account? $28.7, by my last count. That amount, by the way, is then taxed at 40% before it goes into my bank account, so it's comfortably under $20. The $28.7 is what I could reinvest into my company (and need to buy the input goods in the first place). Even this is not counting many forms of tax that are effectively mandatory for everyone, such as rental tax, garbage tax, park tax ...
In other words, if I didn't have to pay any tax at all, I wouldn't bat an eye to have your work done by 3 or even 4 people, as that would be a much better deal. I'd be looking for extra services people would pay for and provide them.
Now I get that government is necessary, but we're paying for government services in the west by artificially increasing the cost of labor 500%. That is where tax comes from. There's other taxes, but they're perhaps not rounding errors, but obviously it's not what I'm worried about. And you are complaining that CEO's, or AI, or greed, or ... is costing jobs?
No. The fact that in at least one view something like 80% of all efforts (all "economic value", mostly labor) in France is just keeping the government running, nothing more, that is making it critical for the private sector to avoid using labor, to avoid providing jobs like the plague. Oh, and of course, then the government allows foreign (read: US) companies to come in and "use contractors", in other words: to not pay labor tax (Uber, Deliveroo, ...), which they of course don't allow for French companies.
And then, because the government is never happy with a big disaster unless it grows into a nice huge well-fed catastrophe, government makes it really hard to stop spending on people, so over hiring is a huge, extremely expensive, mistake. 100-person companies go bankrupt due to 5 unnecessary hires at the wrong time. I get that this is people's lives we're talking about, but given that the government gets 80%+ of the value of people's labor, I feel like it's perfectly reasonable to ask the government to take care of these people. Of course, they don't, not well.
Of course, it's "companies' greed" that gets blamed for all the effects. Truth is this just isn't true, frankly not even at huge companies like Total. Or, to put it differently, if party A's greed is not even 20% of the total, and B demands over 80%, I feel like a healthy amount of blame needs to go to party B.
Yes no shit.
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> getting rid of 80% of twitter showing every CEO that at least half the staff is sleeping
The company also dropped 80% in value [1]. I don’t think Musk his value destruction at Twitter is that inspirational.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/02/business/elon-musk-twitter-x-...
Pretty sure SA (arabia) and many other oppressive regimes consider it a steal [wink]
Value is what others are willing to pay. Ever since twitter is not publicly traded, it is not for sale. Any "estimations" by third parties are to be taken with more than a grain of salt.
yeah he won the election with twitter power. how do you value that??
No, that was tribalism.
tribalism is having two parties and prentending they care about people. spoiler: they don't
no that was oligarchy and the erosion of democracy
Pretty sure this is outdated news.
Musk destroyed 80% of Twitter's value, but the ROI was great for his personal brand (like it or not).
And that's what buying it was really about.
I agree to some extent, but that’s a completely different point than I made.
The point I made is that firing 80% of the workforce was not showing other CEOs that that is such a value generating move (as the person above me implied).
Betting on AI would be "hire some AI engineers and see what they can do", not "get rid of some engineers and see what happens". I think what you mean is "scapegoating AI".
I think there's also a pinch of "we've run out of ideas / high margin projects" or "we're tired of funding 'platform 2.0' projects that end up creating more problems than they solve".
But generally I agree with your assessment. Especially the Musk effect I think gets underplayed.
Betting on AI could mean a pause on hiring junior developers while we wait to see how AI plays out, though.
30% fraudulent H1b, TN, and PERM visa mills (predominantly from india).
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> 10% Hiring Andrei instead of Andrew
As one of the Andreis: they already had us all working for them a long time ago and with fertility rates as they are (and have been for three decades now) around here, there's hardly any new talent to choose from.
Also we got hit with job cuts all the same. For instance, my team is currently working half its usual hours per week. It's not enough to cover all my family's expenses, but I was actually anticipating a layoff, so I count my blessings.
While working at HBO Max (200 engineers at launch of the original product) I talked to a recruiter at Disney+, where I was informed they had 2000 engineers.
So yeah, 80% sounds about right. :(
Since that time HBO Max was acquired into an org that was an order of magnitude larger. I was downsized out when they cut 20% or so off, but honestly they could have cut another 40% and been Just Fine if the architecture and infrastructure had been built properly.
Do you think that the architecture was built properly or was it rushed? I'm curious about your experience working there. Speaking as an user, HBO Max is the worst streaming service that I've used, by far. Errors happening frequently, basic features missing, etc. I don't expect Netflix level from the start, just the basics being covered.
I worked on the original infra, pre merger.
The backend stuff was super stable. My team had ~3 on call incidents across 3 years.
The front end and catalog systems had more issues. The front end basically used an in house system that was the same idea as react native but originally built before react native, and it was never given enough engineering resources so it kind of hobbled along. The other issue is that we had to support a lot of different platforms, and some used the in house system, some used bespoke systems, and one used screens rendered on a server farm streamed to the underpowered set top boxes because those boxes were complete pieces of trash.
The backend stuff was all amazing though, best dev ops tooling I've seen so far in the industry. True CI/CD, teams deployed to prod multiple times a day w/o issue.
General post-COVID economic malaise (might just be ZIRP end in response to inflation).
General greater economy malaise over tariffs
Also offshoring, which ramped up after COVID, probably because companies realized remote work can work at scale.
> 25% musk (getting rid of 80% of twitter showing every CEO that at least half the staff is sleeping)
That was just a signal to the rest of the capital class that the labor class had gotten too big for their britches and needed to be shown their place. Twitter and all other companies that followed his lead have devolved into toxic cultures due to fewer staff being burdened with more work and asked to "be scrappy" and "do more with less."
my guess: 90% because inflation and the fed rates.
That and IRS section 174.
TL;DR: recent changes in Section 174 IRC will _incentivize_ R&D spending, not cause layoffs of researchers and developers.
Section 174 allows businesses to deduct their domestic R&D expenses.
In 2017 Trump made businesses have to amortize these expenses over 5 years instead of deducting them, starting in 2022 (it is common for an administration to write laws that will only have a negative effect after they're gone). This move wrecked the R&D tax credit. Many US businesses stopped claiming R&D tax credits entirely as a result. Others had surprise tax bills.
Trump's second term work is now to undo the disaster he caused (S.O.P.). Congress has reversed the amortization rule and businesses can again deduct R&D expenses immediately.
This is a good thing rolling back a bad thing. The bad thing might have been responsible for layoffs a few years ago, but it will have only positive impact on 2025.
To be clear: the Section 174 changes that took effect in 2022 were disastrous and absolutely contributed to the layoffs.
BBB reverses the changes for years 2025-2029 (what happens after that, who knows) and provides retroactive relief to small businesses under a certain income cap. Large businesses can accelerate amortization, but remain impacted for those years.
And now, economic uncertainty due to tariffs
I would say tariffs would probably account for less than 0.1% of tech layoffs. That does have some effect, but honestly, things shift so quickly. You'll more likely find that goods are going to be dumped into third countries and then make their way over. There are many hacks being deployed no one will feel tariffs for a while.
also (affected mostly startups):
- collapse of Silicon Valley Bank
- section 173
Do you really think that companies were hiring that many unqualified people for DEI reasons? Just about every time the subject came up there were people saying it was just lip service and theater -- put a DEI statement on your company's public-facing webpage and pretend they actually did anything.
Maybe. I had two different hiring managers in two different companies explicitly tell me and others to hire women or PoC. Yes it was illegal. No one cares.
Yep. It's much easier to improve your DEI metrics by doing it illegally than it is by doing it legally.
I had an internship at a place like that and the first disabled woman of color to apply would have been practically guaranteed a job. Needless to say I didn't end up working there after the internship - if they're willing to break labor laws just to improve metrics then what's stopping them from trying to cheat their employees.
What do you mean by PoC? Because PoC hiring barely budged during the "DEI era" -- unless you meant Indian/Asian PoC. For example at Google over that 10 year era (from 2014 to 2024) Black+Latino hiring by 6% points. Indian/Asian increased by almost 15%.
PoC refers to non-European in HR speak
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Yes, even in my current job we don't explicitly hire for DEI type initiatives, but there is the general sense that we want to retain as many female or PoC staff as we can and we'd potentially go "above & beyond" for that.
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Hating on minorities is nothing new, and has always been a powerful political driver. DEI is just another thing to direct that hate to, it doesn't matter what it actually is or does.
Also, establising a link between DEI, a vague group of very mild and mostly ineffectual incentives, and the rise of right wing ideology is really dumb. No one would care about DEI if it hadn't been made a major talking point by right wing propagandists. If DEI didn't exist it would be something else that would "turn young men to the right".
Don't fall for such basic propaganda. The war on these supposedly unfair hiring practices is being led by rich heirs that never did an honest day of work in their entire lives. Those disenfranchised young men buying the hate are made to turn against their own interests by the very same ones that fucked their opportunities in the first place.
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Only a fool would think MAGA stands for equality and against discrimination. Just thinking about it makes me laugh. I wish the anti-DEI folk was honest and stopped hiding behind "ending discrimination" when they have proved times and times again that they are all extremely confortable with other, far worse forms of it.
I know HN is gonna downvote me into oblivion for this, but… I’m a cis-het white dude, a this rings true for me:
“When you’ve been in the majority for a long time, equality can feel like oppression.”
Just because a system desires proportional representation does not mean it’s discriminatory against the majority. It just means it’s no longer preferential toward them.
If the system values proportional representation higher than qualification, than I will either abandon my own strive towards excellence or I will actively support changing that system.
I feel the latter option is more likely than abandoning something that is often shaping one's own identity
The system should value qualification higher than other factors. But the system is made up of people with inherent biases that has led to imbalanced representation of the majority over actual qualifications.
You can strive for excellence and equality at the same time. It’s not zero sum.
In my country, in high school, you get grades and at the end you have a standardized test.
Colleges decide what ratio will be used (and if any special requirements are needed), and in most cases it's 60% standardized test results, 40% grades + some formula to turn that into 0-100 score. This is known well in advance, before even applying to the college.
College has 150 open spots, 230 people apply, 20 fail the last year of high school, the other 210 are put on a ranked list by the points they've achieved, at 150th place "a line is drawn" and that's the cuttof for who gets accepted and who doesn't. They just publish "86.5 points needed to be accepted", and you can do the math at home and don't have to wait for the post to arrive.
How is that not equal? It has worked since literally the commie times.
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Is it? Almost all outcomes favor the majority. How many straight white males actually think they would have better life outcomes being born black female gay? Even with affirmative action, that only impacts a very small percentage of people at a very narrow window of time.
Why is it the job of private institutions to regulate the life outcomes of key political demographics?
Private institutions have the job of selecting the best candidates, and they don't have the right to discriminate against any candidates on the basis of race.
In one breath, supporters of affirmative action in this thread will deny that such discrimination exists, and in the other they will justify its existence. Clearly you must acknowledge on some level that it's not really defensible.
It’s a great question. And I think we are in a bit of a pickle as not doing something is just acting in the opposite way to regulate life outcomes.
It’s like gerrymandering districts and then when people want to move things back to a more normal partition you say “let’s just leave things as they are and not tinker”. But you’re now just advantaging the group that tinkered last.
When the system is dominated by the majority, and has been for a long time, a correction requires being “discriminatory against the majority”.
“The system” itself was incorrect before. This is why it’s called systemic racism/sexism/etc.
But the kids applying to colleges today had nothing to do with the history. A white (or asian) boy won't get accepted to his chosen college because of something he had no influence on, be it "history" or his skin color and gender.
Is collective punishment of kids for something they had nothing to do with really the answer?
This thread is specifically about jobs, where people are specifically evaluated on an individual basis. University admissions are a whole different discussion, but are broken in similar ways.
> No one would care about DEI if it hadn't been made a major talking point by right wing propagandists.
That's a circular argument (post hoc ergo propter hoc/begging the question). It also sounds backwards.
This is how your argument sounds to me:
1. DEI is made into a major talking point by right wing propagandists
2. How do you tell if someone is a right wing propagandist? They make DEI a major talking point.
This is backwards! Politicians adjust their messaging for the most votes[1].
TBH, this whole talking-point mess was not completely made up. The politicians aren't creating talking points and then trying to convert people, they are adjusting their talking points to what matters to the voters.
If DEI didn't matter, and we weren't constantly under a barrage of "If you disagree you're a nazi", the Trump campaign would have found something else to make one of the major talking points.
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[1] Well, the Trump does, anyway. The major difference I, as an outsider, saw between the two parties in the most recent presidential election was in the adjustment and delivery of messaging.
The Left's message was "This is what we stand for. You need to fall in line in order for us to win".
Trumps message was "This matters to you? Okay, then it matters to me too".
It's not hard to see that one of those are backwards.
My arguments is not what you're making it up to be, at all. It's:
1. DEI is made into a major talking point by right wing propagandists.
2. DEI suddenly becomes a core issues for right wing voters.
Conservative politicians didn't adjust their messaging to address what matters to the voters, they made up an issue to galvanize hate against minorities and turn it into political goodwill. It's like the Jews under nazi Germany (but far, far less extreme). DEI/Jews aren't actually making that much of a difference in society, they're just a convenient scapegoat to point to and command hate from the masses.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...
As for your note: yes, the democrats are severly lacking in the populism area. But don't mistake Trump's populism for any actual interest in voters' issues. After all, only a fool would think MAGA stands for equality and against discrimination.
> why AfD is on the rise
Except for the 6 that just died, right before a local election [1].
[1] https://www.thetimes.com/world/europe/article/germany-afd-ca...
No mention that 2 candidates from other parties died in the run up. Or that it's out of 20,000+ individuals contesting various seats. No mention that they are mostly 59+ years old with preexisting health conditions.
Luckily it gives us the most critical bit of info we could ask for, that Musk tweeted "!!"
In summary this article is shit.
If you rephrase "ending DEI" to "reducing the risk of getting sued when laying off x% of staff", does it make any more sense?
Nobody knows how to actually hire competent staff because it's a constantly changing bar: if you give people leetcode, they start cramming leetcode; if you review their GitHub profile, they start spending disproportionate amounts of time on projects; if you give them take-homes, they spend 5x the recommended time; if you give them real-world problems in a timed interview, that's probably harder to game, but some candidates will send a completely different person along. On top of that, some people just interview really well but aren't good 9 to 5. At a big enough company, you've always got a list of people who you incorrectly hired and want to get rid of.
DEI is a minor barrier to doing that for some cohorts. It's not that you hired incompetent people in XYZ groups to bump up your diversity numbers, it's that you hired incompetent people in every group and now you're unable to get rid of some of the ones in XYZ.
Also, let's not forget that some people are just genuinely sexist and/or racist and/or whateverist, either consciously or unconsciously. What happens when those people aren't held back by HR as strongly?
I don't think it's as big of a factor as the parent comment, but I witness a lot of extremely weird DEI related hiring things in 2020-2022.
C-level executives would flag certain job openings as only eligible for women or minorities. I clearly remember a meeting where our CTO declared that he had rejected an extremely qualified male candidate because "we have enough of those".
When some people complained they started hiding the details, but it was still obvious. There would be hiring rounds where the only candidates coming from HR were dozens of women for a specific role. After interviewing all of them and giving several second chances we couldn't find anyone qualified in that batch of candidates, so there was a very tense meeting where we were heavily pressured to just pick one.
You could tell a lot of the candidates involved in this process were catching on and/or being pandered to and they really didn't like it either.
I hate to admit it, but I saw similar things.
I referred someone incredibly qualified for a Chief of Staff role at a company. Their resume was well beyond what the company could have hoped to find. The executive recruiting firm was over the moon with him. However, they basically told him that this company was looking for a 'more diverse background' and as a straight white guy, he wasn't it - but they were excited to take him around to other clients.
For a few years, the hiring process seemed broken overall, and in retrospect, it didn't do much to actually help the people it claimed to.
I'm all about strength from diversity, but you can't throw away everything to get there.
I hope you forwarded that CTO's documented order to candidate so appropriate action could be taken.
Only anecdotally I can tell you when I was at a medium sized (~200 employee) fintech business in Australia, I was told by my engineering manager to hire any woman or PoC that applied. but in my 2 year tenure I think only 1 of either applied, both were hired immediately.
I've had like 10x more pressure lately to hire cheap contractors from India than I ever did to hire a woman or black guy at any point in my 10 years of hiring in this field.
>Do you really think that companies were hiring that many unqualified people for DEI reasons?
Depending on what industry you are in, absolutely. I can offer one anecdote that I can personally attest actually occurred. (though I was not the protagonist).
There was an opening for a new, salaried, full-time faculty member after the unfortunate death of the previous position holder. During the hiring discussion at a staff meeting at this (private) NYC college the Dean stated, "we aren't hiring or promoting any more straight white men". They said this openly, and without shame, in front of a room full of people including a well-credentialed adjunct (who happened to be a straight, white man) who had worked there for several years, without an annual contract or any of the accompanying benefits. And, in fact, they ended up hiring a completely unqualified black, LGBTQ woman for that position. The woman was so unqualified and out of her depth that she stopped showing up entirely just a month into the semester. The passed-over adjunct tried to file an EEOC complaint but was told (rightly or wrongly) that since he wasn't part of a protected class he didn't qualify. For the next several years, of the ~10 people that were hired or promoted at this NYC college, none were straight white men.
It's sad this racist crap is so upvoted here...
What’s racist about it?
presumably something related to DEI
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making the serious accusation of racism without offering any justification for the claim ain't so great either...
The original comment implied that white people were losing jobs to non-white people (it has since been deleted by HN)
In fact using racism, homophobia claims inappropriately/as a weapon to shut down or turn conversation your way is despicable, imo.
They never did DEI as for me as a gay man anyway, only for women & PoC.
Dog whistling is trendy and celebrated nowadays, specially around tech bros: they fucking love it
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We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45121835 and marked it off topic.
People heavily invested in AI, obviously. We have an economy that's heavily driven by investor perception, and while "AI is taking jobs" sounds bad for workers or humanity as a whole, it can still be a sales pitch for investing in AI
I've seen three major pushers of this narrative. Well 3.5.
1) CEOs of AI and AI adjacent companies, like the Anthropic CEO quoted in the article, Sam Altman(till recently atleast), Perplexity CEO, Microsoft CEO etc. It brings them new VC money, investment, and customers who "don't want to miss out on this big trend".
1.5) Media heavily pushing the above CEOs quotes, probably just for clicks and engagement, brings them money. The angle pushed is that these CEOs would know the next trend, because they're developing better models in secret right now.
2) BlueSky appears to really hate on anything AI to the point of personal attacks, putting AI related tweeters on blocklists and bans etc. Maybe coz artists are overrepresented and AI is having a real or perceived effect on artists?
3) Reddit, especially the antiwork side
It looks like a neo-Luddite movement to me, but much like the original Luddites, it’s only and anti new technology movement because that’s been conflated with their real pain which is that the benefits of productivity have been sucked up by one group of people while they have to deal with all the inequities.
Why do you have to imply there's some conspiracy? Haven't you noticed productivity gains by incorporating AI to your workflow? If you have, then there's your answer: we point to that possibility because we are seeing everyday how much more we are accomplishing by using AI. If demand doesn't increase as much, then there will be a decrease in employment.
> Haven't you noticed productivity gains by incorporating AI to your workflow?
Has anyone? Other than anecdotes here and there?
In my experience with this question, whichever answer you want to find, you can find research useful in defending it.
* https://www.perplexity.ai/search/what-research-is-there-into...
* https://www.perplexity.ai/search/what-research-is-there-into...
Please don't parody regional accents to imply stupidity.
It’s a direct quote from an episode of South Park.
In the episode they aren’t making fun of a regional accent, they are making fun of an affected accent from certain classes. I’m from the area of Colorado where the episode takes place. There is no regional accent for Colorado.
Pretty confident it’s from South Park: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goobacks
If I’m wrong I’ll accept that. If I’m right nope we learned a valuable lesson about making the worst assumptions about strangers in the internet.
I identified it as a South Park reference although the reference in question was parodying a country accent imo.
As someone who grew up in the country however, fuck em
Ah yes, South Park, a TV show known for its sensitivity towards difficult topics. Quoting someone else being douchy just means you're douchy and unoriginal, it doesn't make you not a douche simply because someone else said it and you're copying them. You're still choosing to say those things.
From the perspective of the publications, it’s fear-mongering which makes clicks.
Out of control AI is a common sci-fi trope because it’s a convenient allegory for the uncaring systems that determine the quality or continuation of human life.
Of course, investors are loving this because there is no such thing as bad press.
As individuals less work is a good thing obviously. But as a society less work is a bad thing.
Perverse.
As individuals less work is a good thing obviously. But as a society less productivity is a bad thing.
I think the concept that AI sellers are trying to push is that we can work less and be more productive.
Not sure its there yet :-P
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My challenge here is that every time I see “The Atlantic” or “The New York Times”, I can’t shake the feeling that it’s got to be a paid advertisement or some influence piece by a special interest group. I am not sure what to make of the articles that appear in those places anymore.
They are the mouthpiece of the empire- but they aren't promoting products- they're promoting the dissolution of social and communal values and trying to erase the idea of intellectualism- the nyt casually, the atlantic explicitly, and the new yorker very covertly- it shows the powers that really run america have a deep ambivalence towards it and will likely hop to the next centre of prosperity when they get bored. The american experiment is over because they decided it to be. How weak and sad your country has become.
And yeah I've seen they are the first to jump on ai anti intellectualism, for the reasons i've stated
Which social and communal values, specifically, do you think The NY Times and the New Yorker are promoting the dissolution of?
You can't expect reactionaries to have any specific thoughts or for their beliefs to be founded on any particular facts or (real) historical events, like the COVID discussion below.
It's vibes all the way down.
I stopped trusting any of those rags after the pushed the hysterical “4% kill rate for Covid” fear mongering nonsense well after it was shown to be multiple orders of magnitude less fatal. All forms of critical thinking went out the window thanks to their misinformation.
That's crazy because NYT never reported that. I haven't checked The Atlantic, but I suppose it's much the same story.
NYT reported the WHO's early (and high) estimate of 3.4% CFR (way way below the 4% IFR that you claim) in March 2020 [1] but even in that same article noted that this was probably a high over-estimate.
> Is 3.4 percent a misleading number? We spoke to a number of experts in epidemiology, and they all agreed that 1 percent was probably more realistic (the W.H.O. has also said the number would probably fall)
The real CFR ended up being somewhere between 0.5% and 1%, which is way closer to both the 1% CFR the NYT reported and to the 3.4% CFR the WHO reported than your alleged 4% IFR. Which... again... was never reported by the NYTimes.
Neither the WHO's 3.4% nor NYTimes' 1% estimates are "multiple orders of magnitude" above 0.5% - 1%.
It seems like you lost trust in reputable institutions because you've been lied to incessantly on the Internet about what they said when. It might be worth reconsidering the trust you place in whatever pulled your trust away from these institutions!
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/07/upshot/how-de...
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Just for context of how insanely made-up your 4% figure is, in March 2020 when NYTimes was reporting "probably close to 1% CFR," our testing infrastructure was extremely lacking. It would be reasonable to estimate less than 25% of cases were detected. If so, a 4% IFR would imply a CFR of at least 16%. But yeah, as mentioned, the NYTimes was reporting a CFR of 1%. Which is pretty close to what it ended up being.
Covid kill rate is not a number. It's a function. Inputs include isolation levels, respirator availability, vaccinations, etc.
They are the party mouthpieces of the Democrats. It’s not useful as an empirical analysis or philosophical exercise. But it is useful as a declaration of belief for a certain cohort of American elites. So the revealed news is really that the Democrats will add “we must weaken or break up Big Token to increase youth employment” to their midterm and presidential platform. Whether this is sound macroeconomic policy is beside the point.