I wonder if we’re actually in like a shadow recession and companies are just using AI as an excuse to do layoffs or hire less.

Idk there’s a lot of diff variables and it’s complicated of course, I really don’t think it’s because “AI’s taking the jobs” tho.

The job market is a fickle mistress.

Companies are harvesting domestic salaries, possibly offshoring and slashing jobs, and blaming AI.

They want you to not oppose their offshoring, or stunning executive salaries, or God forbid join a union.

Who ya gonna blame? AI.

Sample size of 1 here, but my inbox is absolutely overflowing with recruiters. Sample size of more than 1 - the SWE who were laid off recently from my company are finding new jobs quickly.

Certainly the job market is more brutal than it was during the covid mass hiring spree, but it doesn't seem any worse than historical average. My view is anecdotal but I haven't seen any real data on the other side of it either.

I suspect very few people in the tech industry understand or have experienced what office and civil service workers do. It might not be all that different than most engineering work: Organizing and arranging things, fitting things together, troubleshooting edge cases, bypassing controls to keep things working.

I'd say recreating an existing website as is, is the easier task. Doing a look alike, even if the models do take some shortcuts on the way is doable right now. You have a template frontend to compare to. Now if it would scale to the number of users is a different ask and harder to validate for the models.

Building something new is where they struggle most.

I totally agree, but a lot of this debate comes down to the definition of apocalypse a 20% reduction in jobs will affect a huge amount of people who will fill all forums with complaints of job getting difficulty without being an apocalypse.

Same with design and art direction. I think we might see a temp slowdown in the workforce but companies will want to stand out again after realizing the slop machines spit out fairly cookie cutter designs.

Tell that to recruiters requiring leet code tests for Senior/Leadership roles. Absolutely idiotic market at the moment.

I agree with your sentiment, doing security auditing for old-school entprise and the like. I'd revise the timeline ti 3-10 years though. Eith how much AI can change productvity companies that don't adopt it will be in a tougher spot much more quickly than with new tech in the past.

AI is different than previous technologies in that a sufficiently advanced AI can "adopt" itself. That is, it can analyze the situation of a company (asking questions when necessary), describe the benefits, and deploy itself. This sounds like science fiction, but is very plausible in 3 years of trends hold.

> It's just a nonissue for most people.

I'm not sure how relevant the sentiment of average people are regarding the future. People are generally not well tuned in to any such things. Things just happen to most of us and we spend our lives thinking about gossip and life stuff, family, friends, chores etc., not musing about the future which we have little impact on.

Think about people's views on the coronavirus in February 2020. Things can change fast, and people will be like "Where did this come from all of a sudden? I was told by all the experts that AI is a bubble and irrelevant chatbot stuff." Most people hold extremely outdated (ie ~1-3 year out of date) ideas about AI capabilities and are absolutely unable to imagine what the capabilities in 1-3 years in the future will be (because they are unable to imagine what is already possible with frontier models today).

What I'm seeing, as someone who works in a giant company but not in a tech department, is the rise of middle companies that specifically do all the hard work of organizing/wrangling the AI and providing more streamlined options that are easier to understand, with the end users giving up flexibility and freedom for ease of use. (Like the AI version of Dreamweaver, I guess would be a comparison?) Or modern no/low-code offerings.

I've also seen already existing SaaS offerings integrating AI into their already existing product. How well that's going to work... I'm not sure. The economics of at least some of what I've seen is questionable (e.g. giving end users essentially unlimited token spend without passing any of the cost along), and at least one company in my field is clearly adding AI features because they're spooked that the existence of AI is damaging their moat/vendor lock in.

The shift might look like 'company Y contracts with AI companies A, B, and C, and as a result does more with less and therefore needs 30% fewer people'. In theory, companies A, B, and C are creating jobs so the job numbers shift, but your point about a certain level of understanding being needed to do those new jobs definitely stands.

The question is are there enough competent people to staff the middleman companies (I'd say yes specifically because entry level tech is a bloodbath atm) and how simple can these tools be made? Can they be dumbed down enough so that businesses can just buy a package from a vendor where they can give tool access to the people who can't program VCRs and trust that they won't shoot themselves in the foot? That, I don't know.

100% agree, the only people enthusiastic about it that I know are faang / startup folks here on HN. The rest, including all possible white collar jobs see it more as some medium to distant threat to their work, and life is too short to spend it enshitifying with worries about potential incoming doom, we had plenty of those. Many otherwise very capable folks do it anyway, to visible detriment of their mental health (a bit, or more than a bit, seeing it first hand).

Even managers just follow the trends and just say things others are saying, they understand that their position is not granted in case of middle management in case of bigger upheaval.

For me, I can't even have access to any recent model at work, just heavily constrained gitlab duo which is still fine for most stuff. I cost them a day much more than good monthly subscription, but so are the policies of higher management, so - I don't care. It will come, I can pick up those skills a bit later, they are not that wide and deep if one is just an agentic user. If I get fired in next few years it will be other multinational corporate forces, not this. Proper SW engineering skills and experience picked over past 25 years are not going away anytime soon, its the solid base I can build on for anything next decade or two can bring my way. Summer is here, time to enjoy the mountains, lakes and family, thats what matters long term much more.

I think to some extent is that the right candidates and employers are not meeting.

Working at a ~1k employee company, we have been trying to hire both junior and senior devs. Out of ~10 interviews I conducted for junior, only 2 was able to program a linked list, and even that was with hints. It was not much better for senior(more system design question instead).

I understand that leetcode questions are (and have been) outdated, but linked list for somebody fresh out of school seems reasonable.

And this overlooks all the people using ai to cheat on the interview.

I would expect in this market we would have better candidates. But for us it was a challenge to hire.

And let’s not even get started with all the ai generated resumes and candidates that don’t actually exist, or have the experience they say they do. Really a waste of my time to interview.

The recruitment process is not made for a world where anybody can just copy paste the job req and generate a resume that fits everything.

AI could be good enough to dampen hiring without being good enough to cause an apocalypse. for all we know it’s plateauing at its ability to write code to match predefined specs (simplification), which is not sufficient to replace most jobs entirely.

There are several things: * economic uncertainty (wars, energy shocks, etc) * policies chaos * end of free money (interest rates)

CEOs say we are in a low fire, low hire economy. They view AI as important but not transformative.

https://www.conference-board.org/topics/CEO-Confidence/

AI has the mind share but I guess it's not hitting the bottom line enough for tech companies to grow.

If anything it feels like AI has sucked the air out of the room as far as investment dollars goes.

It has been said here ad nausea - overhiring during covids, everybody was cargo culting amazon but there was only 1 amazon. Some folks were fired right when that whole charade with massive restrictions ended overnight, some were left around because times were good and money cheap. Thats over now so next waves.

In many corporate places including mine, software dev team's work is maybe 20% coding, and rest is simply getting things delivered to production and maintaning existing stuff. Nothing keeps working for long if left unattended. And there always multiple layers of test envs to manage, syncing with rest of the projects, troubleshooting/bugfixing, deliveries.

Llms won't help a nanometer here unless companies restructuralize their IT from ground up, firing entrenched teams/managers doing half-nothing. So ie if our team would went from 5->2, we would have 40% of the velocity, maaaybe 50%. Realistically, probably even less (since env maintenance is constant drag on productivity regardless on team's size)

>So jobs suck more

Be careful not to generalize from your job. The programmers I know do not have jobs that sound like yours.

Will you still hate AI when it discovers the cure for your cancer?

> When manufacturing turned into electrified factories and conveyor belts, there wasn't waves of massive layoffs. And AI these days come nowhere near close to conveyor belts or electrification at scale at all.

Nowhere near close, but on the high side. AI has propagated far faster, and is being adopted by a far greater proportion of businesses and individuals than electricity or conveyor belts at a similar age. AI is scaling faster than any tech in history. Exploding may be a better word choice.

"they" including this same publication, ex: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/25/ai-could-...

Panicked more like.