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.
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.
It's quite frustrating that they track average rather than median wages. As wealth inequality increases, average will be less and less representative of worker health.
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.
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.
key point, those 6 figures SWEs earn, they would spend to "local non SWE" economy.
your local datacenter does not care about local chickens or eggs, or private tutor, or pretty much anything at all. not even energy, it is has its own nucleaer reactor nearby. it is one-way economy from now on. you are only a consumer, not a producer. there is virtually nothing you (nor average joe) can provide that "datacenter" needs.
be careful with "real" hourly earnings. if they're using the CPI then it can be very misleading. One need only compare nominal wages vs nominal rents per square foot for the last 50 years to see that actual wages have dropped by 30% and yet the "real" hourly average wage calculated via the CPI is flat, falsly implying that actual wages have not dropped.
> if they're using the CPI then it can be very misleading. One need only compare nominal wages vs nominal rents per square foot for the last 50 years to see that actual wages have dropped by 30% and yet the "real" hourly average wage calculated via the CPI is flat, falsly implying that actual wages have not dropped.
Yes, if you get to pick prices of arbitrary items to compare against, it's easy to come to whatever conclusion you want[1]. That's why CPI uses a basket of goods, specifically to avoid cherry picking shenanigans.
What would cause an increase in the number of open lower paid and/or service industry jobs while simultaneously reducing the number of openings in tech?
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.
"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."
If you want an anecdote: the media company I work for just started hiring interns and juniors in software career tracks again after a lengthy hiatus.
> 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.
Yes, and juniors aren't known for their productive work in the beginning. That's not their purpose. Their purpose is to do the mundane work, because it is important for them to become less junior and more senior.
That is robbed of them.
Which in 5-10 years means the need for senior developers is gonna shoot through the roof.
>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.
Yup, that's reflected in the data as well, no need to invoke "vibes" or whatever.
> 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.
It's not so much a question of whether AI is strong or not. It's a question of whether the tradeoffs (theft of intellectual property, coal burning, lack of transparency, stealing water, rising energy prices, global surveillance, etc.) are worth the outcomes. It's not even a serious question.
If AI was truly strong, we would be seeing signs in the job market. And we would certainly be seeing a lot more subscriptions and demand for these services. For most people, AI does not improve their lives. For a lot of them, especially younger people, it makes their lives much harder and sadder.
The point is not whether it’s a mistake to not hire juniors, but whether it’s actually factoring into the hiring/layoff decisions at tech companies. Many claims are being made that no companies are actually changing hiring/layoff decisions on account of AI, and are using it as a distraction to avoid admitting their mistakes over hiring. That may be true, but many managers and execs actually do seem to consider AI a sufficient replacement for much of their engineering team, and are stalling hiring/prompting layoffs because of it.
> 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?
It's always been difficult to put a number on that value, which is the problem for the MBAs running the show. There's no number on the P&L assigned to tribal knowledge, and improvements that can be made by those with that knowledge and experience within the business.
It's a mistake that businesses keep repeating, over and over again, yet never actually learning the lesson. And now the industry is going to repeat it again, until there's enough pain that they realize that lost value and start rehiring again.
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.
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.
Me and most of my friends from school started in low paying consultant jobs, in fact most from my class dont do software at all only 5 of us had jobs after education ended, this is like 12 years ago, it was also hard back then to get a job, maybe people forgot or something.
The reality is most firms are running out of projects to take that make economic sense.
Note: ECONOMIC SENSE. This has nothing to do with refactoring for the sake of refactoring. Its all to do with earnings growth with respect to the cost of capital.
> If you're passionate about building stuff there's still room but the path forward is a lot murkier.
Definitely feel the murkiness. I've been programming as a hobby for over ten years and only recently started wanting to do it professionally. I'm actually wondering if there's a path for me.
What people don’t get that traditional software jobs are gone.
There is no need for developers, testers, PMs, TPMs, devops, leads anymore. Communication burden and structure imposed by these roles is too high when you have AI. It doesn’t make sense to tell somebody to do something and for them to type it into the AI. You can type it into the AI yourself without wasting the time.
There is new job - software creator. Think of it as a single person replacing a team. This job requires different mix of skills, and different level of autonomy. Hiring needs to be adapted to this really, and people need to adapt. Some will shine in this new world, and those who still narrowly think of themselves as specialists in the specific old role are going to be jobless.
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.
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.
As long as architectural decisions have long-term costs and you need human taste and judgement to speculate on what business needs will come about in the next few years you'll still need human engineers.
tbh, it was always kind of difficult to get a job as a Junior engineer, I had to work for free for almost a year to get the job then slowly grind my way up for higher salary
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
There are upward and downward revisions this year at least, it seems like a mixed bag with many policies juicing the economy. [1]
Job opportunities differ by state and de-growth hostility to business policies and crony investments. Where I am, layoffs and offshoring continues. I hear new grads are increasingly opting for the skilled trades, which is interesting given they aren't getting use out of their degrees.
It's not just that. It's anyone who wants to live longer and look younger. Pretty much anyone with the income to afford it. As society becomes wealthier , it means more $ spend on elective procedures and healthcare overall. Wellness clinics are a huge deal now.
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.
If there is an increased demand in healthcare jobs that will increase wages in healthcare which will pull people out of other jobs and into healthcare in a healthy labor market. I’m not saying whether or not the labor market is healthy, but this adjustment wouldn’t help you figure that out.
Also Gen X isn’t that much smaller than the boomers, and millennials are the largest generation ever. Plus all generations aster the baby boomers have fewer children per couple to take care of them, so demand for healthcare jobs isn’t going to drop anytime soon.
> 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.
Well... if you think in terms of a society spending its people on doing various things, spending more people on healthcare could be a good thing. It means we're getting food grown and stuff made with fewer people, so we can spend more people on making sure that everybody lives, and lives healthier.
Healthcare is a huge sink if you have the income to afford it . People will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on various protocols to look younger, beat aging, and so on.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Data : https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf
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
[2] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/realer.nr0.htm
Here's a new one. Musk goes to a concert. On average everyone there is a billionaire.
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
The average person earns an average salary doing something very different to the stuff we on HN stress about.
your local datacenter does not care about local chickens or eggs, or private tutor, or pretty much anything at all. not even energy, it is has its own nucleaer reactor nearby. it is one-way economy from now on. you are only a consumer, not a producer. there is virtually nothing you (nor average joe) can provide that "datacenter" needs.
Yes, if you get to pick prices of arbitrary items to compare against, it's easy to come to whatever conclusion you want[1]. That's why CPI uses a basket of goods, specifically to avoid cherry picking shenanigans.
[1] https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/cpi2022junea-...
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.
https://www.employamerica.org/labor-market-analysis/dont-bla...
The New York Fed has also released some research suggesting remote work has been a major factor differentially affecting early career workers.
https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2026/06/remote...
"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."
If you want an anecdote: the media company I work for just started hiring interns and juniors in software career tracks again after a lengthy hiatus.
Yes, and juniors aren't known for their productive work in the beginning. That's not their purpose. Their purpose is to do the mundane work, because it is important for them to become less junior and more senior.
That is robbed of them.
Which in 5-10 years means the need for senior developers is gonna shoot through the roof.
Yup, that's reflected in the data as well, no need to invoke "vibes" or whatever.
https://www.economist.com/content-assets/images/20260516_EPC...
https://www.economist.com/content-assets/images/20260516_EPC...
The likely explanation is that there's job losses happening in some sectors, but it's made up for in other sectors.
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.
If AI was truly strong, we would be seeing signs in the job market. And we would certainly be seeing a lot more subscriptions and demand for these services. For most people, AI does not improve their lives. For a lot of them, especially younger people, it makes their lives much harder and sadder.
Even if we assume it can then not hiring Juniors still doesn't make sense - where will seniors come from in the future?
It's always been difficult to put a number on that value, which is the problem for the MBAs running the show. There's no number on the P&L assigned to tribal knowledge, and improvements that can be made by those with that knowledge and experience within the business.
It's a mistake that businesses keep repeating, over and over again, yet never actually learning the lesson. And now the industry is going to repeat it again, until there's enough pain that they realize that lost value and start rehiring again.
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.
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.
The reality is most firms are running out of projects to take that make economic sense.
Note: ECONOMIC SENSE. This has nothing to do with refactoring for the sake of refactoring. Its all to do with earnings growth with respect to the cost of capital.
Definitely feel the murkiness. I've been programming as a hobby for over ten years and only recently started wanting to do it professionally. I'm actually wondering if there's a path for me.
There is no need for developers, testers, PMs, TPMs, devops, leads anymore. Communication burden and structure imposed by these roles is too high when you have AI. It doesn’t make sense to tell somebody to do something and for them to type it into the AI. You can type it into the AI yourself without wasting the time.
There is new job - software creator. Think of it as a single person replacing a team. This job requires different mix of skills, and different level of autonomy. Hiring needs to be adapted to this really, and people need to adapt. Some will shine in this new world, and those who still narrowly think of themselves as specialists in the specific old role are going to be jobless.
https://corvi.careers/blog/global_software-engineering_jobs_...
BTW, cool site!
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.
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.
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.
>> 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.
Job numbers get revised every month, in a negative direction.
New grad unemployment is high and trending higher.
New jobs exclusively are held up by addition in healthcare industry, almost every other sector is seeing some negative movement.
A lot of job openings, a good chunk of them, are just fake jobs where the company has no intention of filling them.
Pretty bold for someone to ignore all of that and come up with a claim like that.
Job opportunities differ by state and de-growth hostility to business policies and crony investments. Where I am, layoffs and offshoring continues. I hear new grads are increasingly opting for the skilled trades, which is interesting given they aren't getting use out of their degrees.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cesnaicsrev.htm#2026
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES6562000101
If you leave out healthcare, 2025 had massive job losses overall, with Boomer bedpan cleaning bringing the net number up to just above zero.
Also Gen X isn’t that much smaller than the boomers, and millennials are the largest generation ever. Plus all generations aster the baby boomers have fewer children per couple to take care of them, so demand for healthcare jobs isn’t going to drop anytime soon.
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.
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
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.
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.
You talk to any SE and it’s obvious we’re not running out of work to do since these tools became available
but of course, it is not just AI. Software is consolidating and automating even without AI, that's the whole point of software.
Further, the graph shown is pretty noisy and I'm not sure the upward move which counters the downward trent is statistically significant.
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
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.
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-stre...
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47174561
AI has grown dramatically in capability since last year as well so I'm not sure 2025 data holds today.
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.
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.
The disclosures are longer than the content