The answer is Ai and senior employees taking on junior employee level work.Â
Saved you a click.Â
Konukaame on
>Managers who once staffed projects with 10 junior coders now achieve the same productivity with a pair of senior developers and an AI assistant.
You don’t necessarily have 10 junior coders on a project because they’re super productive, but because otherwise in a few years you won’t have any new senior developers, and there will be a massive bidding war for the ones that are left.Â
But because no one wants to train or take care of employees any more, progress in five years is sacrificed in favor of job cuts and “efficiency” today.Â
freexanarchy on
What happens when senior coders go away?
Main_Bug_6698 on
Who will fill those senior level roles once the employees in those current roles retire? Are companies betting that AI will take over those roles before they need to be refilled?Â
rnilf on
The question that continues to be unanswered during this AI “boom”: Because so many consumers are currently or going to be jobless/underpaid due to AI, where is the cash needed to actually purchase AI-generated products going to come from?
B2C will obviously suffer, and this will ripple to affect B2B as well, because at some point, the money needs to come from consumers.
DoubleThinkCO on
Been in the dev space for a while. I haven’t met any actual software engineers that think AI replaces devs, even the ones that like it.
Dalebss on
I’m in the operational tech space and while ai could easily program new paths and connections, it can’t engineer or provision to customers unique situations.
There’s a crisis of leadership in my field and if you have half a brain and all of your teeth you’ll probably be okay.
grondfoehammer on
The article never mentioned outrage being sparked.
IndividualLimitBlue on
AI will have the same impact on services as the tractor had on agriculture. Same job will be done by 10% of the workforce
The problem is that the 90% who lost their job in agriculture went to the service industry.
FreshPrinceOfRivia on
Senior and mid-level engineers aren’t switching jobs every 18-24 months anymore. Back in the day, most companies were happy to replace an experienced engineer with somebody with little experience, since recruitment pipelines couldn’t keep up with the turnover. That’s how many of us got our first job in the industry.
Tremolat on
In related news, Microsoft (alone) has 14,000 H1Bs, imported because (according to program rules) no Americans could be found to fill those positions. Perhaps… that’s not entirely true.
saml01 on
They may have found the symptoms but they missed the causes and AI is only one of them. One overlooked factor is a lot of companies have leaned into SaaS. They no longer have to staff a department to build, maintain, update software they simply buy OOTB and they let the vendor worry about it.Â
They also realized that they dont have to adopt or upgrade every single tool on the market in the same year especially as improvements have stagnated because applications are so mature. So they can space it all out and use a smaller staff to support the users.Â
Another factor is DaaS and by that i mean aws/gcp/azure. They nearly eliminated in house data centers or colos. Where do all those people that used to manage that hardware go if you can just call those three and you get a dedicated team that will cost you the same as one person you had on staff previously?
Unfortunately, all these services hurt a lot of in-house jobs in tech and that means less jobs overall.Â
Blahkbustuh on
I’m 39. At school we started getting talks about careers and future stuff and college in 7th grade. That would have been 1999 or so. Everything computers was really hot in the 90s but then that all went sideways in the early 00s with the dot-com crash. I’m computer-minded and I stayed away from programming and went on to become an engineer in not computers.
I graduated college in May of 2009. The entire job market was crap. I went to grad school. Many other people did too. Becoming a lawyer is a common grad school thing. There were excess numbers of lawyers in the early 10s because of this. My sister jumped into this and got stuck with a bad job market for a few years. I did a masters and went out into the working world in 2011 and I was so happy and grateful when I found a job in my field, I accepted lower pay just to be working in my field.
Industries go up and down. During the pandemic big tech was hiring programmers like crazy the same as how regular people were rushing the toilet paper aisle. There’s likely an excess number of programmers right now. In a few years that’ll sort itself out.
All this stuff sorts out over a few years. It just really really sucks when you’re in the center of it and can’t simply go to sleep for a few years to try again later.
And also in normal times we have recessions every few years. It’s just been really weird since 2008 where we had a long period of not recession.
Extra-Try-5286 on
The real answer is that companies can no longer write off dev salaries as innovation. AI is just a convenient red herring to imply they aren’t needed.
Been a founder and executive in video games for a while. I’m watching this play out in real time. It impacts segments of the industry differently (PC/Console/Mobile), but it all comes back to the same math problem. There’s a much longer explanation on the relationship between distribution, labor costs, and how profit expectation drives decision making, but the upshot of all of it is a pretty rapid hollowing out of the talent model.
Most leaders don’t really know where things are going to end up, but the gains from applying AI in games are already real (20-30% efficiency) and picking up rapidly. Much of AI is taking the place of the basic routine work that a lot of people were trained on before (art in particular) or simply increasing the rate of output for senior people (engineering in particular, but beginning to have an impact on things like design).
Managing all of this is a bit of a nightmare. The rate of efficiency gain is so pronounced and turnover in tech so high that training junior people is super low yield (far more than it was before when there was a ton of work no senior person wanted to do but still needed to get done). If you decide to train anyway, you’re less efficient than competition that’s all in on AI and probably learning at a slower rate too. Meanwhile, 1/3 of your labor force actively hates the technology and a reasonable number of vocal consumers dislike it as well. Those headwinds aren’t enough to work on a less efficient model given how thin margins are in console and how expensive distribution is in mobile. PC is probably the only reasonably healthy segment due to Steam’s solid game discovery mechanisms, but that’s also a crapshoot.
It’s a massive (and tragic) talent disruption. Historically, technology has generally won out over time when economic incentives favor it so I’m not super optimistic right now. I’d suggest reading up on the early Industrial Revolution and the Luddites — there’s some shocking parallels there. I’ve been pushing people in my company to make the transition as quickly as they can. Anyone on the early end of their career should go all in on the tech (even if it proves to be pie in the sky, recruiters are trained to look for AI usage as a primary hiring filter).
I wish everyone good luck. Strange time to be alive.
daiquiri-glacis on
While I do believe the tech job market is terrible, I don’t believe that it’s directly or mostly caused by AI. The decline began before AI was that good.
I think it’s a combo of post-pandemic over hiring being corrected and a few major companies flooding the market with layoffs. Also, the economy is bad, and companies are holding back on research and innovation (aside from AI).
I work remotely, and I haven’t worked with an entry-level software engineer since 2014. Oversupply is just a continuation of a long trend.
OkCar7264 on
If you do layoffs and say it’s AI your stock goes up. You do layoffs because it’s a recession, your stock goes down.
senortipton on
In general, I hate that anybody is losing their job because they are getting pushed out by entities that don’t have to eat and sleep. That said, the sooner it all comes crashing down the sooner Americans will demand, not request, positive change in this country. Maybe I’m a piece of shit for thinking that, idk
mumford13 on
Junior engineers are bad at coding, especially at the enterprise level. It doesn’t matter what school they came out of. I’ve hired many of them but the magic is you work with them, you listen, you discuss, you let them make mistakes and… Now you have a senior engineer. AI can write quality code for your application today but being a senior engineer is about so much more than code quality. Modularity, business direction, market direction, adaptability, anticipating technology changes, readability etc.
It’s not going to be good for anyone if we don’t give these kids any exposure to all of that.
PrintExtra822 on
This article is such garbage. They are offshoring the jobs. It’s like the article was written by ai to provide cover as corporate America rug pulls US workers
justplaydead on
It’s not even because of AI, it is because management realized the business still work even without new hires… we will see how they’re doing 5 years from now after not developing any talent. Management doesn’t care though, they’ll have collected their bonuses and moved on by then.
Potential_Ice4388 on
We’re heading towards a French Revolution 2.0 innit. And if the ppl can figure it out sooner that the culture wars are a made up thing by the rich and the powerful, the quicker we can all agree that there’s only two sections of society – the rich, and the fucked.
Until then all you motherf*ckers will continue to be coerced by the rich and powerful to care about shoving down religious texts down each others throats, fighting about bs like men in womens toilets/sports, etc etc. Not to mention, all this is going to get unimaginably worse with climate change (which will make things SIGNIFICANTLY worse for the poors).
C0rinthian on
Oh no, the school that gave us Elizabeth Holmes, Sam Bankman-Fried, and Sam Altman isn’t producing hireable graduates? I am shocked.
AllMikesNoAlphas on
Let’s not pretend that the people making these same personnel decisions and ultimately driving companies into the ground aren’t also Stanford MBA’s. But hey today’s profits/margin are what’s important right?!
GadreelsSword on
They built the machines that replaced them.
OriolesMets on
I’ve been looking for a job for 8 months now. Truly an ego-shattering, miserable experience.
auburnradish on
Based on my experience, it’s more about jobs typically done by entry level engineers being outsourced to cheaper countries.
imforit on
> AI can help optimize clean energy grids
Not *that* AI. The energy grid optimization thing isn’t that hard and is proposed to be done with basic neural nets and can run with, like, one good GPU. No need to boil to ocean for it.
Every single article criticizing AI seems to have to throw a purported upside in, and a whole lot of them aren’t even about the AI that the article is about.
It’s disingenuous and keeps helping the case for an overhyped tech that could ruin us.
devildog2067 on
> A Stanford study found that jobs held by coders between the ages of 22 and 25 shrank by close to 20% after peaking at the end of 2022
Sounds like maybe things are just returning to normal after the hiring frenzy during the pandemic…?
RaiseWide5460 on
U.S. companies can hire 3 or 4 coders for the price of a single U.S. employee. So all new junior coders are now competing with the wage scale and acceptable standard of living in India.
PepperDogger on
It’s not that simple, obviously. There was a time when there was of a covenant of employment, where companies would be loyal and employees would be loyal, so investment in employee development made sense for companies. In THAT context, it might all still work.
Whether you argue that employees began job-hopping, or that companies failed to maintain their end of the loyalty bargain (my strong opinion), this is the nearly inevitable result–a prisoner’s dilemma where a company won’t develop employees because they won’t stay, and employees won’t stay because they know the company would fart them out to in a minute to make quarterly numbers.
It may be a shock that the hottest degree of yesterday is the first to be rendered unemployable, but that’s just an acceleration of a phenomenon that was occurring anyway, and it’s fully being exposed.
Next phase is how it all grinds to a halt because people won’t have jobs to be able to afford to pay for the goods produced with less and less human input.
Bottom line is our current economic model is completely worthless for the situation we’re about to be facing, with the value of human inputs heading toward zero. What should be utopian abundance will otherwise be a distopian nightmare.
31 Comments
The answer is Ai and senior employees taking on junior employee level work.Â
Saved you a click.Â
>Managers who once staffed projects with 10 junior coders now achieve the same productivity with a pair of senior developers and an AI assistant.
You don’t necessarily have 10 junior coders on a project because they’re super productive, but because otherwise in a few years you won’t have any new senior developers, and there will be a massive bidding war for the ones that are left.Â
But because no one wants to train or take care of employees any more, progress in five years is sacrificed in favor of job cuts and “efficiency” today.Â
What happens when senior coders go away?
Who will fill those senior level roles once the employees in those current roles retire? Are companies betting that AI will take over those roles before they need to be refilled?Â
The question that continues to be unanswered during this AI “boom”: Because so many consumers are currently or going to be jobless/underpaid due to AI, where is the cash needed to actually purchase AI-generated products going to come from?
B2C will obviously suffer, and this will ripple to affect B2B as well, because at some point, the money needs to come from consumers.
Been in the dev space for a while. I haven’t met any actual software engineers that think AI replaces devs, even the ones that like it.
I’m in the operational tech space and while ai could easily program new paths and connections, it can’t engineer or provision to customers unique situations.
There’s a crisis of leadership in my field and if you have half a brain and all of your teeth you’ll probably be okay.
The article never mentioned outrage being sparked.
AI will have the same impact on services as the tractor had on agriculture. Same job will be done by 10% of the workforce
The problem is that the 90% who lost their job in agriculture went to the service industry.
Senior and mid-level engineers aren’t switching jobs every 18-24 months anymore. Back in the day, most companies were happy to replace an experienced engineer with somebody with little experience, since recruitment pipelines couldn’t keep up with the turnover. That’s how many of us got our first job in the industry.
In related news, Microsoft (alone) has 14,000 H1Bs, imported because (according to program rules) no Americans could be found to fill those positions. Perhaps… that’s not entirely true.
They may have found the symptoms but they missed the causes and AI is only one of them. One overlooked factor is a lot of companies have leaned into SaaS. They no longer have to staff a department to build, maintain, update software they simply buy OOTB and they let the vendor worry about it.Â
They also realized that they dont have to adopt or upgrade every single tool on the market in the same year especially as improvements have stagnated because applications are so mature. So they can space it all out and use a smaller staff to support the users.Â
Another factor is DaaS and by that i mean aws/gcp/azure. They nearly eliminated in house data centers or colos. Where do all those people that used to manage that hardware go if you can just call those three and you get a dedicated team that will cost you the same as one person you had on staff previously?
Unfortunately, all these services hurt a lot of in-house jobs in tech and that means less jobs overall.Â
I’m 39. At school we started getting talks about careers and future stuff and college in 7th grade. That would have been 1999 or so. Everything computers was really hot in the 90s but then that all went sideways in the early 00s with the dot-com crash. I’m computer-minded and I stayed away from programming and went on to become an engineer in not computers.
I graduated college in May of 2009. The entire job market was crap. I went to grad school. Many other people did too. Becoming a lawyer is a common grad school thing. There were excess numbers of lawyers in the early 10s because of this. My sister jumped into this and got stuck with a bad job market for a few years. I did a masters and went out into the working world in 2011 and I was so happy and grateful when I found a job in my field, I accepted lower pay just to be working in my field.
Industries go up and down. During the pandemic big tech was hiring programmers like crazy the same as how regular people were rushing the toilet paper aisle. There’s likely an excess number of programmers right now. In a few years that’ll sort itself out.
All this stuff sorts out over a few years. It just really really sucks when you’re in the center of it and can’t simply go to sleep for a few years to try again later.
And also in normal times we have recessions every few years. It’s just been really weird since 2008 where we had a long period of not recession.
The real answer is that companies can no longer write off dev salaries as innovation. AI is just a convenient red herring to imply they aren’t needed.
https://qz.com/tech-layoffs-tax-code-trump-section-174-microsoft-meta-1851783502
Been a founder and executive in video games for a while. I’m watching this play out in real time. It impacts segments of the industry differently (PC/Console/Mobile), but it all comes back to the same math problem. There’s a much longer explanation on the relationship between distribution, labor costs, and how profit expectation drives decision making, but the upshot of all of it is a pretty rapid hollowing out of the talent model.
Most leaders don’t really know where things are going to end up, but the gains from applying AI in games are already real (20-30% efficiency) and picking up rapidly. Much of AI is taking the place of the basic routine work that a lot of people were trained on before (art in particular) or simply increasing the rate of output for senior people (engineering in particular, but beginning to have an impact on things like design).
Managing all of this is a bit of a nightmare. The rate of efficiency gain is so pronounced and turnover in tech so high that training junior people is super low yield (far more than it was before when there was a ton of work no senior person wanted to do but still needed to get done). If you decide to train anyway, you’re less efficient than competition that’s all in on AI and probably learning at a slower rate too. Meanwhile, 1/3 of your labor force actively hates the technology and a reasonable number of vocal consumers dislike it as well. Those headwinds aren’t enough to work on a less efficient model given how thin margins are in console and how expensive distribution is in mobile. PC is probably the only reasonably healthy segment due to Steam’s solid game discovery mechanisms, but that’s also a crapshoot.
It’s a massive (and tragic) talent disruption. Historically, technology has generally won out over time when economic incentives favor it so I’m not super optimistic right now. I’d suggest reading up on the early Industrial Revolution and the Luddites — there’s some shocking parallels there. I’ve been pushing people in my company to make the transition as quickly as they can. Anyone on the early end of their career should go all in on the tech (even if it proves to be pie in the sky, recruiters are trained to look for AI usage as a primary hiring filter).
I wish everyone good luck. Strange time to be alive.
While I do believe the tech job market is terrible, I don’t believe that it’s directly or mostly caused by AI. The decline began before AI was that good.
I think it’s a combo of post-pandemic over hiring being corrected and a few major companies flooding the market with layoffs. Also, the economy is bad, and companies are holding back on research and innovation (aside from AI).
I work remotely, and I haven’t worked with an entry-level software engineer since 2014. Oversupply is just a continuation of a long trend.
If you do layoffs and say it’s AI your stock goes up. You do layoffs because it’s a recession, your stock goes down.
In general, I hate that anybody is losing their job because they are getting pushed out by entities that don’t have to eat and sleep. That said, the sooner it all comes crashing down the sooner Americans will demand, not request, positive change in this country. Maybe I’m a piece of shit for thinking that, idk
Junior engineers are bad at coding, especially at the enterprise level. It doesn’t matter what school they came out of. I’ve hired many of them but the magic is you work with them, you listen, you discuss, you let them make mistakes and… Now you have a senior engineer. AI can write quality code for your application today but being a senior engineer is about so much more than code quality. Modularity, business direction, market direction, adaptability, anticipating technology changes, readability etc.
It’s not going to be good for anyone if we don’t give these kids any exposure to all of that.
This article is such garbage. They are offshoring the jobs. It’s like the article was written by ai to provide cover as corporate America rug pulls US workers
It’s not even because of AI, it is because management realized the business still work even without new hires… we will see how they’re doing 5 years from now after not developing any talent. Management doesn’t care though, they’ll have collected their bonuses and moved on by then.
We’re heading towards a French Revolution 2.0 innit. And if the ppl can figure it out sooner that the culture wars are a made up thing by the rich and the powerful, the quicker we can all agree that there’s only two sections of society – the rich, and the fucked.
Until then all you motherf*ckers will continue to be coerced by the rich and powerful to care about shoving down religious texts down each others throats, fighting about bs like men in womens toilets/sports, etc etc. Not to mention, all this is going to get unimaginably worse with climate change (which will make things SIGNIFICANTLY worse for the poors).
Oh no, the school that gave us Elizabeth Holmes, Sam Bankman-Fried, and Sam Altman isn’t producing hireable graduates? I am shocked.
Let’s not pretend that the people making these same personnel decisions and ultimately driving companies into the ground aren’t also Stanford MBA’s. But hey today’s profits/margin are what’s important right?!
They built the machines that replaced them.
I’ve been looking for a job for 8 months now. Truly an ego-shattering, miserable experience.
Based on my experience, it’s more about jobs typically done by entry level engineers being outsourced to cheaper countries.
> AI can help optimize clean energy grids
Not *that* AI. The energy grid optimization thing isn’t that hard and is proposed to be done with basic neural nets and can run with, like, one good GPU. No need to boil to ocean for it.
Every single article criticizing AI seems to have to throw a purported upside in, and a whole lot of them aren’t even about the AI that the article is about.
It’s disingenuous and keeps helping the case for an overhyped tech that could ruin us.
> A Stanford study found that jobs held by coders between the ages of 22 and 25 shrank by close to 20% after peaking at the end of 2022
Sounds like maybe things are just returning to normal after the hiring frenzy during the pandemic…?
U.S. companies can hire 3 or 4 coders for the price of a single U.S. employee. So all new junior coders are now competing with the wage scale and acceptable standard of living in India.
It’s not that simple, obviously. There was a time when there was of a covenant of employment, where companies would be loyal and employees would be loyal, so investment in employee development made sense for companies. In THAT context, it might all still work.
Whether you argue that employees began job-hopping, or that companies failed to maintain their end of the loyalty bargain (my strong opinion), this is the nearly inevitable result–a prisoner’s dilemma where a company won’t develop employees because they won’t stay, and employees won’t stay because they know the company would fart them out to in a minute to make quarterly numbers.
It may be a shock that the hottest degree of yesterday is the first to be rendered unemployable, but that’s just an acceleration of a phenomenon that was occurring anyway, and it’s fully being exposed.
Next phase is how it all grinds to a halt because people won’t have jobs to be able to afford to pay for the goods produced with less and less human input.
Bottom line is our current economic model is completely worthless for the situation we’re about to be facing, with the value of human inputs heading toward zero. What should be utopian abundance will otherwise be a distopian nightmare.