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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
[2] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/realer.nr0.htm
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 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
wonder how much of it is K-shaped. if is payouts for execs, capital gains and alike are boosting aggregate.
In absolute terms AI is nibbling on a fairly small slice of the global pie of jobs - junior coders, lawyers, accountants, bankers.
The average person earns an average salary doing something very different to the stuff we on HN stress about.
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.
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.
The decline in junior hiring began before ChatGPT had wide adoption, so AI is not a likely cause.
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.
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.
the job description of a junior engineer can change. junior engineers can use AI to make themselves more productive too
They probably weren't hiring any junior coders to begin with.
> 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.
>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?
That's a problem for the next CEO of course
> 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.
Anecdotally, there's an AI job crisis for juniors right now
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.
This has less to do with LLMs than people think.
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.
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.
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.
that is what CEO of NVIDIA is telling everyone. "everyone is a programmer now".
This is a good point. So many stories on Reddit of college grads in computer science unable to find work despite being qualified.
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_...
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!
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
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.
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.
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
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.
It’s so frustrating that someone with a title of “Chief Economist” puts things like this out there.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
I guess there are those who might say, "Well, hang on, give the crisis a minute to unspool..."
It's always 2-3 years away. 2027 was supposed to be the inflection point. That was 1-2 years ago.
same. I was expecting it to recover in 2025. but it only gets worse.
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://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1WPjJ
Wow, zooming out really puts the 2021-2022 hiring frenzy into perspective.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
don't know whom you talk to. I see people laid of left-and-righ, in FAANG, banks, startup, pretty much everywhere.
oh, you mean the interest rates crisis...
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.
That little arrow on the right of that graph is wishful thinking.
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.
AI will make those folks much more productive. They'll push a lot more paper around.
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.
What kind of jobs are these? Volume is just one factor.
AI Has Broken Hiring https://hbr.org/2026/06/ai-has-broken-hiring-heres-how-to-fi...
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.
Not really a question of linear versus non-linear change when we see, in aggregates, almost no change at all.
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
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.
We're still going through the post-ZIRP job crisis.
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.
Can a crisis exist within noise?
You can also look at the BLS unemployment rate. Its also low. The predicted mass joblessness due to AI shows no sign of happening
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.
So what do they look at?
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.
How many businesses were surveyed?
As many as was required to find statistical significance. This S in BLS stands for statistics, after all.
What are the flaws in this methodology?
Wrote about this https://julienreszka.com/blog/robots-create-more-jobs-than-t...
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-stre...
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47174561
This is a spin piece from a private equity firm. Hardly the most unbiased and credible source for this kind of reporting.
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.
You can look at the official unemployment rate, too. It's still low despite rapid advances in LLMs
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.
Shallow. Who's upvoting this dross
The disclosures are longer than the content