13 ms·

Where is the AI jobs crisis?

• 7e 3mo ago
  A "job opening" is not a job. It's an aspirational advertisement. Further, the graph shown is pretty noisy and I'm not sure the upward move which counters the downward trent is statistically significant.
  • 9rx 3mo ago
    BLS doesn't look at job ads when compiling "job opening" data. Their method isn't perfect (nothing in life is), but far more comprehensive than you give it credit for.
    • handfuloflight 3mo ago
      So what do they look at?
      • 9rx 3mo ago
        The results of them actually talking to businesses and asking questions that are more than "did you have a job ad posted?" You are hardly the first person to imagine that job ads aren't representative of actual job opportunities. Obviously they are going to put in effort to avoid those weak signals.
        • handfuloflight 3mo ago
          How many businesses were surveyed?
          • 9rx 3mo ago
            As many as was required to find statistical significance. This S in BLS stands for statistics, after all.
            • handfuloflight 3mo ago
              What are the flaws in this methodology?
  • nomel 3mo ago
    Can a crisis exist within noise?
  • paulpauper 3mo ago
    You can also look at the BLS unemployment rate. Its also low. The predicted mass joblessness due to AI shows no sign of happening
  • tamimio 3mo ago
    Advertisement or trying to fool investors that they are growing
• BaconPackets 3mo ago
  I'll need to look at the underlying data, but it seems that the job "classification/category" should be more important than the raw number. A boost in lower paid/service industry jobs does not mean that there wasn't a loss in a category where AI can be more easily dropped into existing businesses. Data : https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf
  • JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
    Average weekly and hourly earnings were up in May [1], though “real average hourly earnings for all employees decreased 0.5 percent from March to April, seasonally adjusted” [2]. Nominal wages being up rejects the hypothesis that folks are being downsized into lower-paying roles. [1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t19.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t19.htm [2] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/realer.nr0.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/realer.nr0.htm
    • markstos 3mo ago
      The median would be interesting than the mean, as you can be hollowing out the middle, leaving more low-wage workers and a few very highly paid ones and the "average" still looks good.
      • WillPostForFood 3mo ago
        Median is also up: Median weekly earnings of the nation's 121.0 million full-time wage and salary workers were $1,235 in the first quarter of 2026 (not seasonally adjusted), the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. This was 3.4 percent higher than a year earlier, compared with a gain of 2.7 percent in the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) over the same period. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf
        • 5701652400 3mo ago
          wonder how much of it is K-shaped. if is payouts for execs, capital gains and alike are boosting aggregate.
• Apocryphon 3mo ago
  We're still going through the post-ZIRP job crisis.
• adamredwoods 3mo ago
  Bold claim to say "no signs" based on non-contextual numbers. I think I recall somewhere that most jobs added were in healthcare. >> The May jobs report reinforced this with nonfarm payrolls jumping by 172,000, confirming that there are no signs of workers being replaced by ChatGPT.
  • 9rx 3mo ago
    Workers taking on new/different roles isn't the same as being replaced. Workers have been taking on new/different roles since at least the advent of agriculture, so that's nothing new. Being replaced would be something new, but the data doesn't support it.
  • bwestergard 3mo ago
    The shift toward healthcare employment is a very long running trend driven by the greying of the Baby Boom generation. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES6562000101 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES6562000101
    • Analemma_ 3mo ago
      Yeah I'm starting to think the BLS needs to do "Boomer aging adjustments" to jobs numbers, in a similar manner to how they do "seasonal farming adjustments". Until we get through the Boomer population bulge, healthcare is going to keep adding jobs for quite a while regardless of how the rest of the economy does, but that doesn't necessarily mean the overall labor market is healthy. If you leave out healthcare, 2025 had massive job losses overall, with Boomer bedpan cleaning bringing the net number up to just above zero.
      • JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
        > the BLS needs to do "Boomer aging adjustments" to jobs numbers, in a similar manner to how they do "seasonal farming adjustments" You’re comparing a low-frequency trend with a high-frequency cycle. The latter has lots of data to characterize it. The former may be secular or may be a slow cycle; nobody should be adjusting for it in the base data.
• gib444 3mo ago
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  • deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
• alephnerd 3mo ago
  Exactly. Much of the "AI job crisis" rhetoric was PR comms to manage conversations around corporate restructuring (even ZIRP is a lazy PR comms excuse). Most decisionmakers by 2025 already agreed they didn't expect AI to have a significant impact on hiring [0]. I've pointed out the reasons ad nauseum on here but no one listens [1]. [0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-10/wall-street-s-ai-adoption-is-set-to-drive-hiring-boom-for-now https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-10/wall-stre... [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47174561 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47174561
  • srj 3mo ago
    For US SWE labor, off-shoring was and still is a big contributor. I do think AI is a factor too though. You almost get laughed at asking for headcount now. For junior positions in particular, there are close to zero openings. AI has grown dramatically in capability since last year as well so I'm not sure 2025 data holds today.
    • alephnerd 3mo ago
      It was difficult getting junior headcount in 2023 as well. That said, I agree with you that AI capabilities have grown massively, but the only way you aren't burning tokens with marginal RoI is having someone with credible domain experience using Claude Code or Codex hand-in-hand. Basically, no one wants to spend $200K TC on training a junior who will most likely be using an AI tool already. The math works out more positively at a significantly lower TC.
• amelius 3mo ago
  That little arrow on the right of that graph is wishful thinking.
• deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
• b-man 3mo ago
  https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1WPjJ https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1WPjJ
  • ryukoposting 3mo ago
    Wow, zooming out really puts the 2021-2022 hiring frenzy into perspective.
    • kevinob11 3mo ago
      Sort of, that it crosses so many lines makes it seem like it must be 6X, but it peaks at 230 based on a baseline of 100, so just 2.3X their baseline. Still a ton, but not as much as I thought at first glance.
      • ryukoposting 3mo ago
        The "edit graph" button reveals some pretty sweet ways to mess with the chart, yet I don't see an option to fix the Y axis at zero. Weird. Maybe words work better? There were roughly 28 months' worth of tech job postings within the 15 month period from July 2021 to October 2022. If you change the baseline to a rough average of the last 2 years, 0.66, that ratio becomes 42 months' worth of job postings within 15 months. I'd be curious to see what the numbers look like as a percentage of the existing tech workforce. Like, if there are 100 workers and the number of job postings doubled from 5 to 10, that's a huge deal. But if there are 1000000 workers and the number of job postings doubled from 1 to 2, well that's not a huge deal.
• abalashov 3mo ago
  I guess there are those who might say, "Well, hang on, give the crisis a minute to unspool..."
  • paulpauper 3mo ago
    It's always 2-3 years away. 2027 was supposed to be the inflection point. That was 1-2 years ago.
    • 5701652400 3mo ago
      same. I was expecting it to recover in 2025. but it only gets worse.
• rootusrootus 3mo ago
  Maybe AI will finally be the tool that allows us to get rid of some of the people we have who do nothing more than push paper around. Maybe. But somehow I doubt it, at least not in a typical big corporate environment. And I have zero concern about us letting actual software devs go. Things will have to change pretty dramatically before we get that far.
  • forinti 3mo ago
    AI will make those folks much more productive. They'll push a lot more paper around.
  • prerok 3mo ago
    You mean the middle management? I have been in environments where they were almost literally made up of pencil pushers. Wouldn't be too sad to see them go. Only half joking, but it is written in jest.
    • rootusrootus 3mo ago
      Nope, just people who basically swivel chair information from one place to another. Useful in some way, should have been automated a long time ago, and yet persist. But yes, middle management would qualify ;-). My manager seems spooked by LLMs. Loves to use them to write his emails, but seems to internalize that since they're doing his job for him at this point, his boss may figure it out.
• ams92 3mo ago
  I wonder when we’ll reach diminishing returns on new AI models. Haven’t tried Mythos or Fable yet but it seems like Anthropic is already priming itself for this by calling for a “slowdown” of AI development.
  • alephnerd 3mo ago
    At least in cybersecurity, we already have seen diminishing returns with newer models. At this point the harness/applayer matters more, as different models perform better or worse on exploit classes depending on the prompt, tuning, and various other parameters. Of course, by the time HN hyperfixates on a topic, it's already been executed on and HN is too late.
    • porridgeraisin 3mo ago
      Yea, in many usecases the tooling space is increasingly sophisticated context management such as fine tuning domain specific mappings into the model so that it is able to work directly with a compressed form of some data without needing to decompress into the context. In larger models, these fine tuning techniques work more reliably/robustly. Because of this many usecases tend to prefer larger models. It is possible to work the same behaviour into the smaller model, but it requires more effort. But it's one-time. And smaller models are usually much cheaper. People make a tradeoff along this curve. This is observed at few-B scale upto hundred-B scale. No way for us non-anthropic/openai to fine tune beyond that of course.
  • sdellis 3mo ago
    I think it's less of a technology problem and more of a money and investment problem. They called for the "slowdown" right when they filed for IPO. This allows them to both triage the money bleed while under the microscope as well as make their competitors look unethical and dangerous if they don't heed the warning to slow down before we lose control of A.I.
• dywilby 3mo ago
  Anecdotally, there's an AI job crisis for juniors right now
  • paulpauper 3mo ago
    This is a good point. So many stories on Reddit of college grads in computer science unable to find work despite being qualified.
  • voidfunc 3mo ago
    Yea, we're basically not hiring anyone that isn't a senior developer already. That's going to be a huge problem eventually but not my problem to deal with. My best advice for folks that want to get into software now is be willing to do it cheap for awhile and then jump once you've developed some skills. If you were getting into this industry for the money you're properly fucked and I hope you didn't load up on debt. If you're passionate about building stuff there's still room but the path forward is a lot murkier.
    • 5701652400 3mo ago
      same applies for seniors as well. ther isn't much distinction of senior vs junior human dev (as in cost and efficiency) compared to AI-dev (cost and efficiency). more so, at current imrpovement rate. in couple more years you would not need seniors anymore either.
      • mirsadm 3mo ago
        This seems pretty unlikely. If it turns out to be true then you don't need a junior or senior dev you can just get a random person from the street and they could do the job.
        • 5701652400 3mo ago
          that is what CEO of NVIDIA is telling everyone. "everyone is a programmer now".
• _tgxm 3mo ago
  I run a job search site and I don't see a crisis in terms of job openings even for SWE - but there is very clear signal that AI is deeply getting embedded in every SWE job. https://corvi.careers/blog/global_software-engineering_jobs_june_2026/ https://corvi.careers/blog/global_software-engineering_jobs_...
  • heathrow83829 3mo ago
    Your own site shows there's very very little demand for entry level SWE which mirrors all the other data we've seen. BTW, cool site!
    • _tgxm 3mo ago
      Thanks. Yes, entry level roles appear to be under pressure, and middle-management roles in the Bay Area may be seeing similar pressure. (anecdotally) What is less clear is whether these are early warning signs of a broader shift, or simply cost cutting measures to account for AI spend. IMO, AI coding tools have materially improved SWE productivity compared with two years ago. The open question is whether demand for new products and services will expand enough to absorb that productivity gain. If demand does not increase correspondingly, then it may only be a matter of time before we see meaningful job market pressure, starting with SWE.
  • OptionOfT 3mo ago
    I'd correct that to forcefully embedded, like unpaid on-call.
  • james_marks 3mo ago
    In the news I hear about tech layoffs, but I am having a difficult time trying to hire high quality senior SWE's. Perhaps it's not the senior's that were hit by the layoffs, or I'm just looking in the wrong places. The big job sites feel rife with unqualified applicants and outright fraud, leaving me frankly unsure how to proceed. It feels like a crisis of candidates-to-job-openings matching, and AI has made it much worse.
    • 3mo ago
• jmyeet 3mo ago
  You can't draw any conclusions based on "job openings" without dealing with, or at least addressing, "ghost job listings". There are several issues here: 1. AI ATS systems have made posting jobs "cheap", such that too companies post jobs that don't exist (ie "ghost jobs") to keep up appearances they're hiring or just to keep people in the pipeline in case they hire. This is a huge waste of everybody's time and should be illegal; 2. The hiring process itself gets increasingly Kafkaesque. AI screening, automated online tests, unpaid take-home work, etc. You have to get pretty far until a human gets involved. 10+ years ago this didn't happen because people needed to be involved much sooner and that's expensive; 3. In a lot of companies, getting employees to interview people is unpaid extra work effectively. They say it's important. You might even get dinged for not doing it. But anyone who has done it realizes pretty quickly a bunch of people who shouldn't get interviewed are getting interviewed and management doesn't care, even though employee time is expensive, because you essentially have to "make up the time" so it's still "free"; 4. Even if you go through all that and get hired, you get laid off within a year such that income isn't dependable and you end up wasting a ton of time on the job-seeking process itself. I've been thinking about this recently and high-information is part of the problem. In years long gone, it was hard to reach applicants so you'd have a small pool of higher-relevance candidates applying for a job. Say 10 people applying for 10 jobs. The odds were better. It was less work on everybody's side. But now you have 200 people applying for 200 positions. This wastes everybody's time but the problem is that companies have offset this by pushing filtering onto these automated systems. People still need to enter all their bio information, etc. So it's just much more inefficient inherently even if the job opening is legitimate.
  • paulpauper 3mo ago
    You can look at the official unemployment rate, too. It's still low despite rapid advances in LLMs
    • jmyeet 3mo ago
      The unemployment rate is cooked. It doesn't capture underemployment, people who want full-time employment and don't have it and people who don't make a living wage. Long gone are the days when the vast majority of people just have one job. Now it's 2-3 part-time jobs because companies are exploiting a legal loophole where they only have to pay benefits for full-time employees. And then you have people doing "gig" work, which is often sub-minimum wage when you factor in expenses (eg driving for Uber and not factoring in car wear). On top of all this we, across the Western world there's an increasing youth unemployment crisis. In 2008, entry-level jobs basically disappeared overnight and never came back. Well, that just got worse post-pandemic.
• timcobb 3mo ago
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• julienreszka 3mo ago
  Wrote about this https://julienreszka.com/blog/robots-create-more-jobs-than-they-kill/ https://julienreszka.com/blog/robots-create-more-jobs-than-t...
• 5701652400 3mo ago
  maybe look into industries AI is best at automating? like constant layoffs in Software? 160,000 people lost jobs in just 2026? the claim "hey there is no AI job crisis", when previous SWE of 6-figures now takes job dishwashing in McDonalds + one more gig as Uber driver + food delivery gig is "job creation! now they have 3 jobs!". does not make any sense.
  • ex-aws-dude 3mo ago
    Why would you assume that’s from AI You talk to any SE and it’s obvious we’re not running out of work to do since these tools became available
    • 5701652400 3mo ago
      1. C-level says so 2. on-the-ground people indeed much more productive but of course, it is not just AI. Software is consolidating and automating even without AI, that's the whole point of software.
      • thewillowcat 3mo ago
        C-level does not seem uniformly convinced, and they have a lot of reasons to tell that story, even if it isn't really true.
      • IX-103 3mo ago
        Even if they're more productive, the amount of work to be done has also increased significantly. Not only is there so much work to be done on AI integrations but all of the other products have bug trackers exploding with new privacy and security vulnerabilities that need to be addressed. Some of the security people I work with claim that without the productivity gains from AI, there is no way they could keep up with the bugs.
    • 5701652400 3mo ago
      don't know whom you talk to. I see people laid of left-and-righ, in FAANG, banks, startup, pretty much everywhere.
• wxw 3mo ago
  What kind of jobs are these? Volume is just one factor.
• RigelKentaurus 3mo ago
  The most glaring gap in this "analysis" is that it's too early to tell. I don't understand how people can be certain in both extreme viewpoints.
  • paulpauper 3mo ago
    How much time has to pass before we can dismiss the widely cited predictions by the media (and also many popular bloggers and podcasters) that AI will lead to mass joblessness? Those people need to at the very least acknowledge that their forecasts are so far wrong.
    • RigelKentaurus 3mo ago
      Both sides should take a deep breath and stay away from predictions.
      • sshine 3mo ago
        Both sides of what?
    • sshine 3mo ago
      To answer your question: It depends on your claim. All claims of mass unemployment thus far are evidently not true. All claims of mass unemployment in the near future: We'll have to wait and see. The prediction that AI will lead to mass unemployment is largely a widespread fear more than an observation. AI washing: On the one hand, you have periodic mass layoffs that could be related, but also could be "AI washing", with the companies citing AI to sound progressive when, in fact, they just over-hired. Multiple independent sources find no broad signal. (Anthropic's labor research, Yale Budget Lab, Apollo's chief economist Torsten Sløk) I'd still like to know more about the junior situation, though.
• mawadev 3mo ago
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• paulpauper 3mo ago
  If America becomes wealthier due to AI, it will mean more follow-on jobs such as people using their newfound fortunes to remodel their homes, consume more , vacation, etc. Companies will expand and hire. All of this creates jobs even if AI may also destroy some jobs. The net result is more jobs. There is a huge market for upper-middle-class people in their 30-50s to look younger. This means more health clinic jobs and demand for pharma.
  • IX-103 3mo ago
    Theoretically, that's true. In practice the gains were limited to the wealthy who use that money to fund increasingly deranged start-ups* until the market crashes. Then rinse and repeat. The failed start-ups effectively waste any increased productivity leaving everyone about where they were before. *They fund these start-ups to get a good return on investment so they can get even more money. As the economy overheats the number of places to invest with a reasonable return falls so they are left with the high-risk stuff to invest in. I'm not sure what they want the money for, though, since they could already afford most of the things I would find useful...
    • monknomo 3mo ago
      I think funding deranged startups is a type of consumption, and it does get money back into the economy the same way funding a remodel does. Maybe the reasoning to do so is different, and maybe the deranged startups add more capital than a bathroom remodel, but then again, bathroom remodels probably tank less often than startups, and worst case you can always read a magazine in your new bathroom. hard to do that in a dead startup
• kingkongjaffa 3mo ago
  This is a spin piece from a private equity firm. Hardly the most unbiased and credible source for this kind of reporting.
• juleiie 3mo ago
  Someone here said that they get paid 50k to fix the ai code. Maybe all the job cuts from ai were filled by fixers of ai output Or maybe, no one ever heard of jevons paradox. Or maybe everyone ignored it and preached job apocalypse as risky but a high reward marketing tactic
• impure 3mo ago
  First of all the May jobs report was mostly in temporary workers possibly due to the World Cup. Second as already noted the jobs are mostly in healthcare. Third job openings does not equal employment. These numbers have been diverging for a while likely due to people holding multiple jobs. Also I believe the evidence suggests the job crisis is due to WFH and not AI https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48326721 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48326721
• ChrisArchitect 3mo ago
  AI Has Broken Hiring https://hbr.org/2026/06/ai-has-broken-hiring-heres-how-to-fix-it https://hbr.org/2026/06/ai-has-broken-hiring-heres-how-to-fi...
• capital_guy 3mo ago
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• atleastoptimal 3mo ago
  It's crazy that so often I see articles, here on HN and elsewhere, where some pundit claims that there is no AI job crisis, AI isn't replacing any jobs, that layoffs are actually due to post-pandemic ZIRP overhiring, etc. But then people who work in actual tech companies come in and explicitly say they are not hiring any juniors anymore specifically because AI is good enough to do most of what juniors do, and that senior engineers can now write 3x as much code, etc. There seems to be a desire for a narrative that AI really just can't replace productive work, and that it's all a mirage. However it seems just like common sense that if an AI can do junior-engineer-level coding work, that a company has less reason to hire a junior engineer.
  • tboyd47 3mo ago
    They probably weren't hiring any junior coders to begin with.
  • nawgz 3mo ago
    > However it seems just like common sense that if an AI can do junior-engineer-level coding work, that a company has less reason to hire a junior engineer. I mean, if we want to not talk about economics that’s fine, but can the AI actually do junior work at the same price? What if we don’t look only at quarterly reports, and instead include the value of having people knowing about the business having to explain it to others, who then learn it and can improve it over time? I think it’s clear the AI is strong, there’s no doubt about that, but that’s not the whole picture.
    • mfuzzey 3mo ago
      >I mean, if we want to not talk about economics that’s fine, but can the AI actually do junior work at the same price? Even if we assume it can then not hiring Juniors still doesn't make sense - where will seniors come from in the future?
      • thewebguyd 3mo ago
        That's a problem for the next CEO of course
• pockybum522 3mo ago
  It's really funny that the first thing in the article is a graph showing a long downward trend with a tiny, brief uptick circled at the end and then the entire article appears to be written about that.
  • thewillowcat 3mo ago
    I don't see an uptick. Demand has been steady for the past two years after falling from the post-pandemic frenzy. That fits with my personal experience of the tech industry over the past several years. People are right to point out that hiring is nothing like the post-pandemic years, but it's not clear that it's any tougher out there than, say, 2018. This is from the perspective of someone with a lot of industry experience, though. I can't speak directly to the experience of junior engineers.
  • x312 3mo ago
    True, but coding agents have only been practically useful since early 2025. Jobs are flat or a bit up since then.
• thesumofall 3mo ago
  To me, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to hire fewer juniors because of AI. This assumes that the only thing AI can’t replicate is experience. This in itself already seems questionable, but most importantly what about creativity, relating to humans, common sense, etc.? If you had to hire a concierge for a hotel, would you rather take a guest-oriented, quick-witted junior or an AI? If you could either take a Waymo or an 80-year old driver, what would you take? I don’t believe hiring managers think that one-dimensionally. Roles are unique and in some roles experience is more important than in others. Plus, juniors already balance their lack of experience with lower salary expectations. The much easier explanation for the anecdotes: companies are more cautious at the moment and if you only have a few positions to hand out, you rather take the proven hand than risking it on someone who hasn’t shown yet that they can do it
• 1attice 3mo ago
  The expectation of linear presentation of change in a bistable system is gobsmacking here. If this kind of argument were generally valid, it would imply that: - all change neither accelerates nor decelerates, which is absurd, on the face of it; - the initial stages of a deep change are always surface-visible; for instance, cancers announce themselves when they begin to gestate, rather than when they metastasize - A few recent points of data of questionable significance outweighs a hypothesis with considerable support from reason, intuition, and other (unpresented) data. For example, the plight of recent CS grads, which _is_ new, and _is_ on graphs, just not the one the author here chose. So, since these implied claims are self-evidently _false_, it means that the author would, at a minimum, need to provide an explanation as to _why in this one instance, these considerations do not matter_; for example, the author could have argued that the graph positioned at the center of their argument is the one to look at (as opposed to, say, recent CS grads,) but that _itself requires further argumentation._ It also does not account for the other obvious possibilities; e.g.,that there is a delay between the (as it were) lightning and its thunder; or that even strongly nonlinear effects would have shown up by now in the metric chosen; etc. But since these contributions were not included in the original post, I have no choice but to discount it.
  • bwestergard 3mo ago
    Not really a question of linear versus non-linear change when we see, in aggregates, almost no change at all.
    • 1attice 3mo ago
      in, what, six months and like two points of data? No thank you, I prefer my thinking science-y.
• heathrow83829 3mo ago
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• kmoser 3mo ago
  Gedankenexperiment: If it turns out that the uptick in hiring is due to having to clean up after the first generation of vibecoded apps, is that really a net gain?
• deleted 3mo ago
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• specproc 3mo ago
  I'm a consultant, and had my first conversation about an AI clean-up job this week. I'm also just starting another gig analysing LLM output, my sell is that the analysis is hand-coded, as they weren't able to do it themselves with LLM support. On the other hand, I'm just finishing an agent-heavy piece. After getting it set up, it's been some of the most mindless and soul-destroying work I've had the displeasure of in a while. This stuff will be near minimum wage in a few years, totally unskilled babysitting. AI really hasn't been all that bad for work, by volume at least. I know where I want to focus my efforts though.
  • shinryuu 3mo ago
    As a fellow freelancer where do you see that you could survive this into the future?
    • specproc 3mo ago
      I operate in a bit of a niche, in terms of my clients. They're all typically people I've worked for full time in the past, or closely related. There are some fundamentals of that business I worry about, but I'm able to do things they can't, and I'm looking alright for the year. That's as good as I can generally wish for. Longer term, I don't know. I'd happily take something more secure if it came along, as long as it's not childminding for an agent. Super busy and bored out my mind the last few weeks, the worst sort of work.
• eatsyourtacos 3mo ago
  Well, I'm on a small two person team.. for the last few years I would have loved to have 2-3 people under me.. I've been underwater constantly, but we couldn't afford it. Now I have no need for anyone from a coding perspective.. I can keep up with multiple clients requests with a breeze. I don't have to manage anyone. I type of my phone while I'm on a walk and work gets done for me. So yeah... it's not good.
• grim_io 3mo ago
  If every company only hires seniors from now on, and if we assume that the number of senior level jobs is steady, why do I not perceive an increase in leverage like during covid?
• dubeye 3mo ago
  My anecdote is there was a single wave of cuts and a bit of a shuffle, but for most part it's business as normal now
• jongjong 3mo ago
  I don't see a software jobs crisis but I see a software industry crisis. The AI slopmageddon is upon us.
• Qhemlomo 3mo ago
  Btw. we haven't yet builed the whole Agentic AI layer which is coming and companies are working on. A lot of people and companies working left and right building things which are obvious that they are coming. We do not know yet how that impacts even more people. And AI already removed certain jobs.
• kulshan 3mo ago
  Pretty shallow analysis. Doesn't account or what sectors the new jobs are occurring or account for the extended length of unemployment many are experiencing or underemployment. If only he had asked chat GPT, it would have provided more context and nuance than a single chart.
• piloto_ciego 3mo ago
  These analyses always crack me up. "There's 1 at least 1 job per person, why are people complaining" is the vibe I always get. As though the decades of work I've put into my career means I should want a job as the hamburger man or working as a ditch digger. No shade to burger flippers or ditch diggers, but these are not jobs that I'm trained for, nor are they jobs that I remotely want to do. So for me, aviation expert, programmer, ML engineer, weird IT generalist, guy with a math degree who speaks a couple languages, and isn't exactly fully capable anymore, the idea that jobs in some other field (like an RN or an Oncologist or Electrician) are just something I can pivot into is just hilarious. It's such a shallow and ignorant take. Even the premise that all jobs are equally distributed and there aren't jobs that are more or less in demand at any time is a real funny take too. I'm so glad I started working for myself, because honestly, seeing this dogshit analyses from supposed experts means I'll be able to keep making money for a long time just be actually trying when I need to think about something.
• ubercore 3mo ago
  The jobs AI crisis is me being stressed and overworked as management demands more AI, showy (but shallow) "look I made a skill" presentations grab attention, and my PR review queue grows every day as people generate more code than ever. But to keep this out of a low-value vent, my experience has been that the _threat_ of it is there, but in my small corner of the world/industry, lots of layoffs that would have happened anywhere may just be categorized as "AI" layoffs, but the wild manpower reducing benefits aren't really there. The larger an org gets, the more of your job is dedicated to human stuff, and you can just get some of the code part done a little more quickly. Would be interesting if we could measure how much effort is put into agentic coding harnesses, frameworks, and theory, vs labor saved using them.
  • epolanski 3mo ago
    Have never worked in my life like last year, and there's no signs of slowing down. At least I don't have to review PRs, we have built a team around the concept of trust and not needing to check each other's work. There's simply too much work to start nit picking in PRs, everybody's very talented and a good engineer you can trust. They ask for feedback when they want it. And no, we're not producing slop, if anything AI has helped improve the codebase a lot and the harnessing has definitely raised the bar at all levels. But sure as hell, the job sucks now, and I hate it. And it's not just due to the amount of work.
    • ubercore 3mo ago
      75% of the value on PR review is team visibility
      • epolanski 3mo ago
        We have built our team around not needing team visibility. We're 5 developers working on 7 products used by 5 different companies. I *don't* want to have to know what others are doing nor how. This may work on teams that work on a narrower scope and lower rhythms, cannot work for us.
• catigula 3mo ago
  We're on the cusp of it. Models JUST got good enough to be better than the average white collar worker at nearly everything. This literally is a brand new phenomenon; it's only a matter of time.
  • fdsdfsdfzxczxc 3mo ago
    No, you're wrong and have no data to back it up. I, on the other hand, bring valuable personal experience that says AIs are useless. I asked it to do X and it did X, but it did it differently than I would do it. This means it is fundamentally flawed and complete utter trash. If it can't do X exactly how I like it without any guidance whatsoever it is not ready for prime time and never will be because it lacks "intelligence".
  • _se 3mo ago
    Literally the same thing people have been saying for two years. How gullible can you be.
    • orangecoffee 3mo ago
      Has there been anytime, when senior experts in a field, are consistently maintaining this time it's different? You can ignore this at your own peril.
• gwbas1c 3mo ago
  20 years ago, everyone was whining about losing their jobs to outsourcing. Seems like the more things change, the more they stay the same.
  • james_marks 3mo ago
    In the US there is a widening income equality gap[0], of which outsourcing is one plausible component in a large, complex system. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-in-income-and-wealth-inequality/ https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-...
• mindcandy 3mo ago
  AFAICT, the "Rising layoffs year after year" news lately has been an intentional misreporting of "Layoff rates slowly returning to normal after the hiring spree during COVID stimulation" https://blog.glassdoor.com/site-us/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/11/2025_JOLTS_layoff_data_through_august_3600x2400.png https://blog.glassdoor.com/site-us/wp-content/uploads/sites/... https://www.glassdoor.com/blog/worklife-trends-2026/ https://www.glassdoor.com/blog/worklife-trends-2026/ But, CEOs figured out that if they blame layoffs on AI, stock go up a lot. Reporters know that anxiety about AI drives the clicks that write the checks. I do think that AI anxiety is making HR around the world anxious about hiring. That's my best guess for why everyone is finding they need to apply to 500 jobs to get anywhere. So, AI is making it hard for you to find a job not because it took your job, but because HR is reading ragebait and turning it into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
  • packetlost 3mo ago
    I don't recall there being regular, industry-wide layoffs effecting software engineers for basically the entirety of my career up until the last couple of years. I'm sure my memory is bad and there's data to refute that, but this doesn't feel like "normal" at all.
    • wbl 3mo ago
      If your career was entirely post GFC you lived through the good times. The GFC and dot com crash were not good.
      • giancarlostoro 3mo ago
        So after 2007 for people like me who arent used to the GFC acronym. Which in my case, I was 17 in 2007 and “shielded” from all of that.
        • int_x 3mo ago
          For others like me: GFC = Global Financial Crisis
• marcosdumay 3mo ago
  Hum... That's a huge conclusion from a single graph, I expected to see more data. The jobs openings / unemployed close but a bit larger than 1 is the expected value when nothing is turning the economy completely upside down right now. It means there is no new shock that is too fast for people to adapt. What is surprising, yes, because I could easily name half a dozen shocks that I would expect to see there. But it seems US people are adapting quickly right now, or things are canceling out.
• bottlepalm 3mo ago
  I'm pretty sure I have enough tech debt built up to last through the singularity. And AI somehow is only increasing the amount of things I want to do.
• spelunker 3mo ago
  Maybe give it some time?
• christkv 3mo ago
  Now that Claude Fable is out I’m sure it will finally come true /s
• nphardon 3mo ago
  The tech co I work for just massively scaled token usage after the copilot price changes. If there was a chance for ai to replace anyone, it's gone now.
• roadside_picnic 3mo ago
  I used to think comparisons of AI with the web where ridiculous, but increasingly it looks like they're not that dissimilar as far as how they change how we work. But as someone who graduated college during the bust there was a loooong gap between peak hype and things like online banking and e-commerce becoming standard. Even if AI is an absolutely bubble, and SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI all cease to exist in a year... there's simply no way that AI has not fundamentally changed work. Even if I was forever pinned to the local models I'm running and the agent harnesses they use, I would never write code for work the same way. But I lived through the rise of the web. I remember serving dynamic websites through cgi (which meant a new instance of an interpreter was spawned per user session). I vividly remember great JavaScript books saying things like "never use JavaScript for core functionality". I recall Java engineers saying Ruby on Rails was a toy and would never take off, that Python offered nothing over Perl and that "rich web applications" where never going to replace app native interfaces. I remember when the MVC pattern from the early Smalltalk days being dusted off and repurposed for web applications, completely changing how we designed software for the web. And all of that is just software. It wasn't until the pandemic that ebooks replaced print books in share of academic library circulation (reversing a decades long trend of reduced circulation). In my daily use of agents for coding and other forms of problem solving, while it is a wild accelerant, it's also clear we have not even started scratching the surface of how to think about building things with these tools. I suspect we'll adapt to AI faster, but having lived through one major tech revolution, transforming work still takes some time. I'm not surprised we don't see an immediate jobs crisis. Not to mention the completely separate topic that huge classes of employees were not and are not all that productive, so boosts in productivity don't imply lost jobs. That would require a boost in productivity combined with pressure to create concrete value with less, looking at the SpaceX IPO we're still a ways away from working about how efficiently we create concrete value.
• guluarte 3mo ago
  AI creates more work
• deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
• woohanhan 3mo ago
  I am a manager with former FAANG experience followed by mid-size comanies. Most people here saying there is no AI job crisis dont know what they are talking about and talking out of their ass. I know plenty of people looking for job for months at this point. I am looking for 3+ months and have a few leads finally but nowhere close to offer. Remember, people have to live in these high cost GEOs (SF, Seattle, NYC and others). Since COVID, the US economy is effy at best with housing prices doubled, rents and household expenses doubled. Just for something simple it costs $200 subscription like mowing the lawn. Pulling stats out of some dashboard that a rando made is not how people live day to day life. Remember, people lie with statistics all the time. So yes, there is a significant job crisis. Because Ycombinator invested in AI companies this narrative is suppressed here and moderator DANG (one of the worst) heavily moderates anything critical of AI and YC.
  • BLKNSLVR 3mo ago
    This account was created an hour ago. Personally, this makes me suspicious of calling out mods for censorship. This, in turn, makes me suspicious about the truthiness of any of the information presented. I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with any of the opinions or experiences expressed.
  • 9rx 3mo ago
    > So yes, there is a significant job crisis. And the link echoes that there is a job crisis. But not an AI job crisis; rather a COVID frenzy fallout job crisis.
  • woohanhan 3mo ago
    @BLKNSLVR - What does account creation time have anything to do with my comment? You are demonstrating classical case of logical fallacy. I have other account but I don't want to post with that or have it banned by censorship king DANG. If you don't want to believe that is fine but don't make surreptitious accusations.
• senectus1 3mo ago
  the AI job crisis will be because the AI bubble will pop and th economic fallout is going to be tremendous. dotcom and GFC might not be as bad as what the AI bubble popping might be.
• mbgerring 3mo ago
  The AI job crisis is large tech employers firing workers to free up cash for AI capex, and those workers competing with everyone else in a competitive job market. I’ve been unemployed and actively looking for a job for about 6 months, the longest stretch of active job searching I’ve ever done in my career. Several close friends who work in tech or tech-adjacent fields are in the same boat. Anecdata on Hacker News or LinkedIn tells the same story. A chart showing “total number of jobs” is not meaningful. I took a temp job in a metal shop to make ends meet while I wait for the endless rounds of interviews I’ve now gone through with 4 companies. It pays less than half of what I was making before, and I am barely making ends meet. It’s not sustainable, even though the pay is more than fair for the work. There are also a lot of job openings for home health care workers, or seasonal resort workers, that used to be filled by immigrants. Those jobs are not going to be taken by any of the engineers who just got laid off by Meta. I have the strong impression that people who write articles like this are very disconnected from the reality of the economy right now, and that their curiosity ends at the line on the chart they cooked up to make a contrarian point.
  • punkbit 3mo ago
    That's true! In 12 months, I got two contracts: a 3-month fixed-term contract and a previous 10-day contract role. Let's say that the landlord decides to sell the place I'm renting, I won't be able to rent another place due to unemployment.
  • iceflinger 3mo ago
    Same boat, used to do backend infrastructure but have now been doing basic IT support at a non-tech industry; on paper I'm still employed, but between making not enough to make ends meet anymore and not even being fully engaged with the work, I feel effectively unemployed.
  • bwestergard 3mo ago
    I am very sympathetic to your situation, and fear something similar happening to me. But the article is addressed to investors, who are interested in aggregate labor demand declines. "A chart showing “total number of jobs” is not meaningful." It is meaningful in answering the question being asked, which is whether the hype around labor displacement, which has been growing for nearly five years now, is actually occurring in a way that would justify some of the higher valuations for AI firms. The "AI jobs crisis" is generally understood to mean a sustained downturn in demand for all labor due to AI substituting for labor across a huge range of tasks.
• dualvariable 3mo ago
  If there's no jobs crisis, where are the productivity gains to offset all the massive datacenter spending? If we need to spend just as much on salaries, while shelling out $700B/yr on AI, how does all that spending get paid for?
• moniosi 3mo ago
  i swear people will always say it's just another fad until they lose their job themselves, might be a coping mechanism
• queenkjuul 3mo ago
  I mean, hasn't practically every single Trump-era jobs report been massively adjusted downwards after the fact?
• shantnutiwari 3mo ago
  Like others, let me call bullshit on that graph. It just gives a general "job" going up, but * how many of those are real jobs? I've seen the amount of scam/fake jobs go up a lot since 2022 * How many are jobs only for PhD with 20 years expereince? * How many jobs for actual juniors / newcomers? Just taking the aggregate is a bit scummy
• fzeroracer 3mo ago
  Companies learned one weird trick, that's why you don't see job opening collapse. Most of the job openings listed are fake. Companies aren't hiring despite showing signals that they are; you can ask any engineer that's been laid off over the past year and they'll tell you the same story of how bad the job market is right now.