Comment by ike2792

Flat at 60% of pre-covid hiring while the number of graduates continue to increase and there's still a backlog of people who were laid off. That's not a particularly optimism inducing hiring market.

There have been a lot of headlines the past couple years about companies stating they are doing layoffs or slowing hiring because of AI. I would bet the average adult pays way more attention to news headlines than FRED reports.

I also don't see why everyone would dismiss the statements of large company CEOs about why they are making hiring/firing decisions, regardless of what some statistics say.

The companies doing the layoffs are themselves stating AI as a reason; that’s the news people are responding to. The parent didn’t claim that it’s based on reality, but it informs public opinion.

>According to FRED/Indeed[1], software job openings have been roughly flat for 2-3 years, and they've actually been slightly increasing again.

None of this contradicts OP's claim, because at least anecdotally, juniors/interns are getting disproportionately squeezed by AI. Why hire an intern to write random scripts/tests for you, when claude code does the same thing? Therefore overall job posting could be flat or slightly rising, but that's only because everyone is rushing to hire senior/principals staff to wrangle all the AI agents, offsetting the junior losses.

They are increasing, but the level is still lower than it's been since Oct 2020. In my experience at two different companies since 2020, hiring more or less stopped sometime in 2022 to early 2023. In early 2025, some hiring started again but it's still a very low rate compared to pre-COVID, particularly for new college grads. While I don't believe that AI has actually taken any significant number of jobs in the software field, I do think it's being used as a convenient excuse by executives to lay people off. Regardless of the actual numbers though, the general perception in tech is "lots of layoffs are happening with not so much hiring" and "AI has something to do with it (either directly or as an excuse)."

"Opening" doesn't mean anything. An actual job where someone is working and is being paid a salary means something.

Separately, I'm curious how that URL (IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE) is encoded.

Software job openings are mostly bullshit. Companies post ghost jobs en masse, while refusing to hire people. You can ask anyone that's had to look for a job recently and see how bad the market is.

Is that data useful at all? Indeed postings are a poor proxy for how many people actually get hired. One of the major problems we have is that employment statistics are largely just estimates, and don’t reflect reality on the ground. Factor in the Trump admin firing most of the BLS and other agencies for not giving him the numbers he wants, and there really is no reliable data.

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Today's juniors are tomorrow's seniors, or more importantly today's seniors' yesterday.

They do the dirty, repetitive work, learn the systems inside out, take note of the flaws, and fix them if they are motivated and the system/process allows.

Thinking them as replaceable, worthless gears is allowing your organization rot from inside. I can't believe people can't see it.

It's not that juniors are replaceable, but that hiring them is a high variance move. Few, if any, know whether a candidate is just memorizing leetcode and is going to be a dud, costing you effort before they get a PIP, or you are hiring a very talented individual that will be contributing in 2 weeks . With seniors, you risk less, just because the track record makes the very worst candidates unlikely.

Not a universal view: Claude has added all the fun back into my job.

> overhiring after Covid

How long after COVID are we going to be able to keep using this excuse? This is starting to feel like the politician blaming his predecessor even though he's been in office for years. In the year 2033, Company X lays off another 10,000, just as it did each year since 2023, again blaming massive over-hiring during COVID, ten years ago.

  > It is as if you had a group of execs determining what IDEs people could use.

its worse than that; its more like determining what ide you use and also mandating how much time you spend in it, and then chewing you out at review time because you used jira and confluence too much instead of writing md files in the blessed ide of their choice

Covid was six years ago man. Don't insult people's intelligence.

A friend of mine has copilot integrated with his storage appliance that all the business docs are hosted on for his firm. He says it's amazing.

My company uses Sharepoint, and can digest all of the documents I have access to on that, one drive, teams, outlooks, etc. across my tenant. Most of the time, it's pretty useless.

There must be some reason for these two disparate experiences. It's the same product offering. I couldn't tell you.

Tell claude what you do and ask it where it can be the most helpful. It is true that the tool has to be learned, and won't help everywhere. If you are doing web dev just to make a tool, it is purely magical. I've found it to be mostly useless in making geed helm charts.

If the majority of engineers decide to rot their brains and abandon best practices, the industry will eventually implode. Stay true to your beliefs and use the bare minimum of AI to keep your job.

We’re in what I would call the “dark ages” of tech. There will be a new renaissance led by those who used this as an opportunity to build skills and tools that are genuinely useful and ingenious.

If you keep a long-term horizon this is the perfect opportunity to work on a solo project in stealth mode. Or build professional connections with others who see things the way you do.

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Early stages of any major disruptive technology will have hype due to get-rich-quick folks. Dot-com boom & bust of 2000 is similar. But the underlying technology (internet) defined our lives forever.

I don't know why people are comparing the Day-1 of one technology with the Day-1000 of another. Yes, AI is useless in many fields - NOW. But you can't imagine doing any work without in a couple years.

Like the kids used to ask - 'How did they build Google without Google?'

Now their kids will ask - 'How did they build chatGPT without chatGPT'?

You replace half of a team with AI. Salary cost go immediately down, but team output can keep up for some time. You don't see the technical debt, the security issues and the prompt injection which will result in wrong invoices being sent. In six months suddenly there will be a big problem, but this quarter a lot of shareholders are happy about the cost-cutting. You may even be promoted by the time shit hits the fan, and it won't even be your problem anymore.

On the other hand there probably also is a general correction in the market after the covid hiring spree.

You assume CEOs are completely rational actors.

The reality is most of them are so divorced from reality that they think they are infallible and AI will pick up the slack because they want it to be true.

No, layoffs happen due to leadership’s expectations. It’s never been about reality, layoffs and both massive hiring to ramp teams are based on vibes.

The lack of results is felt by those using it to assist with their work daily.

It can be both if for the majority of layoffs, AI is just a scapegoat to act as cover for cuts made for financial reasons or offshoring and not the actual cause.

Executives don't need actual results or data to lay people off.

AI could be a huge net benefit, and justify large layoffs.

AI could be a huge short-term benefit, justify layoffs now, so long as you (the exec doing the laying off) don't have to worry about the long term

AI could have middling net benefit, but be a great excuse to justify layoffs now. In this scenario, the people laid off and those that remain bear the cost (one, losing their jobs; those that remain, burning out with the extra workload) etc etc, many scenarios to consider...

When Block laid off 40% of their staff Jack Dorsey said it was because of AI. Whether or not you believe him is a different question.

Not if the actual vs stated reasons for the layoffs have nothing to do with AI.

Organisations happy to reduce costs, perhaps with greater output but with lower quality?

and surely, all of those companies are being entirely truthful about the reason for the layoffs.

can happen at the same time when businesses speculatively fire workers to replace with AI. The lack of results might bite them in the ass and the bubble might pop. Or not, but they are going long on their AI position

AI hype -> layoffs -> AI underperforms -> ????

Hilariously, it's the exact same playbook as the big third-world-country-outsourcing hype from a few years ago.

Running with this analogy, the two sides of the AI argument are the people who think they can fire their plumber and electrician now that they have a drill driver, and the people who know it doesn't work that way...

No and it has been said already elsewhere in this thread: decision makers are not entirely rational, they might fire entire departments even if the AI revolution isn’t here quite yet

Smart guy phoning it in now - realized a few weeks ago that he “notices” something interesting to share, but is really paraphrasing a recently released paper that found it - without giving paper credit.

Wasn't Karpathy the guy who used to work for tesla and that tried to convince everyone that you only need cameras for self-driving and that by 2025 there wouldn't be anymore cars without self-driving capabilities to sell?

What's that?

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This is basically how most engineers talk to their managers, politely implying - "can you see how this decision has a short term payoff but a long term consequence?"

Before LLMs I only worked at one place that "only hired seniors and above" and now its the most commonplace thing in the world.

Nobody owes me anything, I already have the skills I need, where will the juniors come from that these companies are going to need in a few years? We don't need extremist stances in either camp, we need balance.

I imagine the reality lies somewhere in between the two extreme takes that you present here.

> If it's true that AI is just a big 'ol scam and it doesn't even work, then I guess we'll see the companies that insist on nothing but the finest artisanily hand-typed organic code rocket to the top of the charts on app downloads, sales, revenue, and market cap.

AI works fine to get a vibe coded BS version of the app. No doubt there. But eventually, especially once scale hits your app, it will devolve into an unholy mess of low performance and (extremely) high cost if you do not have a bunch of senior talent able and willing to clean up after the AI mess.

Unfortunately, our capitalist economy only rewards the metrics you mentioned... but by the time the house of cards collapses, either from financial issues stemming from the above or because the tech debt explodes, it's too late to turn the ship around.

I am a strong believer and selected as power user because of AI usage metrics, but I also see perverse incentives -- a colleague was desperately searching for me on the Claude token usage leaderboard (I was part of a different group he did not have access to) -- it was clear he was actively trying to climb that leaderboard.

Meanehile our average PR loc balooned to ~2000loc -- generated with Claude, reviewed with copilot but colleagues also review it with Claude because it gives valid nitpicks that bump up your github stats, while missing glaring functional/architectural issues, overenginerring issues.

No way this doesn't blow up down the road with the massive bloat we're creating while getting high on the "good progress" we're making.

Yes, your 3 minutes prompt got merged. So was my friends(ex-programmer now manager) non-ai generated PR that a technical TL got stuckstuck on for 2 weeks. Different perspective? Survivor bias? High authority?

  > But then I'm like "hmm actually let me try this real quick" and I prompt Claude for 3 minutes, and 30 minutes later it has one-shotted the whole "two weeks project". It then gets reviewed and merged by the "non-believers". This happens repeatedly.

this is a nice anecdote but i think the real issue is the forcing and kpi-nization of llms top-down for nearly everything

there are still code-quality issues, prompting issues for long-running tasks, some things are just faster and more deterministic with normal code generators or just find-and-replace etc

people are annoyed at the force-feeding of llms/ai into everything even when its not needed

somethings can be one-shotted and some things cant, and that is fine and perfectly normal but execs don't like that because its not the new hotness

I believe that this has happened in some cases but am very skeptical that it is widespread and generalizeable at this point. My own experience is that software engineers thinking they can easily solve a problem in a domain they know nothing about overrate their ability to do so ~99% of the time.

Well "non-believers" don't see any gain from being faster, right? That'll just set expectations of "do a lot more for same". Fear of being "toast" will get you the loyalty you'd expect from fear.

the best way I found to deal with non-believers is to have claude run code reviews on their own work. I’ll point it to an older commit and get like 3-page markdown file :) works really, really well.

on one-shotting 3 minute prompt in 30 minutes though, software is a living organism and early gains can (and often result) in later pains. I do not use this type of argument as it relates to AI as the follow-up as the organism spreads its wings to production seldom makes its way to HN (if this 30 minute one-shot results in a huge security breach I doubt you would be back here with a follow-up, you will quietly handle it…)

Unsure of this really tracks tho. How are you evaluating for the bias that they’re not merging it because you’re “their leader of 1000 people org” and not because you’re actually an engineer deep in the trenches that knows the second or third order effects of slop?

This is a genuine question btw, I see plenty of instances of this in my own org.

I've been on this ride about three or four times over decades. Every new major wave of technology takes a surprisingly long time to be adopted, despite advantages that seem obvious to the evangelists.

I had the exact same experience with, for example, rolling out fully virtualized infrastructure (VMware ESXi) when that was a new concept.

The resistance was just incredible!

"That's not secure!" was the most common push-back, despite all evidence being that VM-level isolation combined with VLANs was much better isolation than huge consolidated servers running dozens of apps.

"It's slower!" was another common complaint, pointing at the 20% overheads that were the norm at the time (before CPU hardware offload features such as nested page tables). Sure, sure, in benchmarks, but in practice putting a small VM on a big host meant that it inherited the fast network and fibre adapters and hence could burst far above the performance you'd get from a low end "pizza box" with a pair of mechanical drives in a RAID10.

I see the same kind of naive, uninformed push-back against AI. And that's from people that are at least aware of it. I regularly talk to developers that have never even heard of tools like Codex, Gemini CLI, or whatever! This just hasn't percolated through the wider industry to the level that it has in Silicon Valley.

Speaking of security, the scenarios are oddly similar. Sure, prompt injection is a thing, but modern LLMs are vastly "more secure" in a certain sense than traditional solutions.

Consider Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policy engines. Most use nothing more than simple regular expression patterns looking for things like credit card numbers, social security numbers, etc... Similarly, there are policy engines that look for swearwords, internal project code names being sent to third-parties, etc...

All of those are trivially bypassed even by accident! Simply screenshot a spreadsheet and attach the PNG. Swear at the customer in a language other than English. Put spaces in between the characters in each s w e a r word. Whatever.

None of those tricks work against a modern AI. Even if you very carefully phrase a hurtful statement while avoiding the banned word list, the AI will know that's hurtful and flag it. Even if you use an obscure language. Even if you embed it into a meme picture. It doesn't matter, it'll flag it!

This is a true step change in capability.

It'll take a while for people to be dragged into the future, kicking and screaming the whole way there.