1. The tax deduction change where costs couldn't be classified as an expense.
2. The saturation in people joining coding. At one point in time everyone wanted to be part of a bootcamp to earn that sweet coding salary.
3. Rising interest rates means the era of borrowing at low costs is over.
etc.
AI is last on my list for the reasons that people are being laid off. And its not because AI isn't helping people, rather it isn't helping people enough to justify the current layoffs.
And lets be honest - AI and employment is the hot topic right now. You should expect executives to say that they are jumping on the AI bandwagon and looking at time savings.
Once upon a time everyone wanted to add ML to their product. This is just going with the flow. Otherwise their stock prices will take a massive hit. Others yet want to showcase that they are doing everything to extract better margins. These statements can be slightly deceiving.
What does 30% of the code mean exactly? How much of it is going into the products and making into the market?
For now, AI is a convenient scapegoat. Maybe it becomes a force to reckon with and truly leads to people being laid off. Not today.
AI is on the top of rumors, but it's not a real cause of layoffs, just a nuance. And a great excuse. "Salesforce says AI bots now do 50% of the company's work" is highly exaggerated. Only AI tools approved for employee are Gemini, NotebookLM, Cursor, Warp 2, plus a few other. AI generated github PR review is a joke most of the times, and Slack AI is like a slot machine: sometimes got right, mostly not.
When the article mentions "tech-adjacent," I think it is worth keeping in mind that this includes a broad swath of jobs that would never had qualified for amortizing salaries as R&D. For example, I'm skeptical that the tax change will have an impact on the number of television and film producers that are currently unemployed due to a huge slowdown in greenlighting projects from streaming services. I feel there is a contraction happening (though, practically, it doesn't always appear that way) that is a greater source of consternation than amortizing developer salaries will alleviate.
AFAIKT 1. was reverted in the OBBB. And I suspect my recent influx of recruiter outreaching email is related to that. Give it 3 more months and things may trend upward.
Don't worry -- soon after that, there will be high demand for human coders as companies scramble to hire to rewrite all the buggy and vuln-ridden AI-hallucinated software. We're on the verge of two revolutions in tech, not one.
I shared your view a year ago. Hell half my posts here on HN are arguing against the annoying hype. Today I make heavy use of AI and my code quality has gone up, not down. It's better tested, better factored, with better error handling covering more edge cases
AI code is only buggy if no-one is guiding or reviewing it
I'm not sure how long we'll need someone in the middle to actually review the code
The lack of devs that understand the domain knowledge and the codebase will be the main issue.
I would say that the current capabilities of genAI is like a junior dev, sometimes even a mid-level. But one main difference is that a dev is slowly learning and improving and at some point will become a senior dev and also domain specialist.
If there is a codebase created by genAI, then it’s equivalent as if all devs left the company, so no one knows why some piece of code was created in a certain way, if it was part of the business logic or some implementation detail
The rate at which AI is capable of producing code is intractable for humans to deal with. Right now the bottleneck is human reviewers. If AI ever becomes effective at generating provably correct code, it's joever.
nah, just throw more hardware at it. never rewrite buggy code, increase processing power is the winner almost always. That's one of the things that is nice about opensource. You can't hide the crap code unless the users don't care at all.
Referencing Marc Benioff making bold claims about AI isn't much evidence, he's pulling these numbers out of thin air. Despite claiming they won't hire software engineers in 2025, there are plenty of positions open at Salesforce for software engineers.
Agreed. I still think we're seeing layoffs due to _overhiring_ in 2020. AI makes a nice excuse when laying these people off because CEOs can say their huge investments in AI are starting to pay off because they don't need the humans.
Turns out, they never needed those humans in the first place.
That doesn't answer the other side of the problem though, that it's so hard to find work right now, even for folks who would typically be very easy to employ.
If it was just Marc Benioff preaching then it would indeed not deserve much attention. However, most big companies at this point have internal roadmap to reduce workforce by large amounts.
Assuming it's not already too late. By the time my dad started exercising, he already had stage 4 cancer (without knowing it). He only did it for half a month, and was gone 6 months later. Speed of execution matters.
I agree with many of the author's observations. I see a lot of the same thing in my circles.
Where my views differ are when it comes to the leap between layoffs and AI.
Corporate leadership is eager to reduce the biggest source of cost (employees) and happy to use AI as cover. But it's not the reality. AI isn't adding productivity to the company's bottom line in numbers big enough to rationalize the layoffs.
I can point to zero tech roles eliminated where AI performed the same function. Despite the fact me and everyone in my circles use AI on a daily basis and are big proponents of it.
I think the author's biggest incorrect assertion is accepting corporate PR as gospel like this:
>Salesforce says AI bots now do 50% of the company's work. They're pushing what they call a "digital workforce" where AI agents handle customer service, sales, and even coding tasks.
All of these companies have great incentive to say AI is replacing workers. But so far no proof has been offered.
Eventually we will get a recession. For a lot of people that work in tech it feels like we are already in one.
But I do not share the author's concerns with AI taking everyone's jobs in the next few months or years.
But not because of tech, AI, or things like that. It's the rate of pay.
When prosperity is the thing that's receding, money counts more than ever because lack of money threatens more than could be imagined.
And even though it's not as common as it should be, employees can be fairly valued as an asset. In a good way, where you're much happier being valued like that than not.
So even a company that values their people more so than most, will have to make sacrifices on all fronts when the going gets rough, like they don't have to do for years in a row when things are merely non-ideal.
This can cause some of the highest-paid people to get kicked out much earlier, like few have seen before. Even in companies that are not trying to preserve as much head-count until things turn around, they may have no real choice.
A lot of non-tech high-dollar people are also being shed, and it looks like on the increase. Consumers may not have enough accumulated wealth any more to be able to bail out a consumer economy.
I share the concern based on the current productivity expectations but I did stumble across something recently which makes me feel a lot better. There was a change in the tax code that coincides with the beginning of the post-pandemic layoffs[1]. This was changed back last month by the BBB which likely means a bunch of new R&D spend for big tech. I think this is why we are seeing intense M&A activity and if we can keep the AI hype under control it will probably lead to new hiring as well.
1. There are fewer new products normal people want to buy, especially in tech.
2. Inflation is making the everyday things people need more expensive.
3. VC money for the most popular products ran out and companies are jacking up prices.
4. Concerns over tech's impact on health is limiting tech use and more negative sentiment.
All of this is causing a slowdown in tech and AI could be the perfect fix:
1. Shiny new product for people to buy.
2. Reduce costs and increase margins right when it's most needed.
3. Justify more investment in the space (super intelligence = best VC investment ever).
4. Solve bread and butter problems in health, education, etc. if safety is prioritized.
My guess is that this need for AI is causing a lot of the tech sector to overestimate how quickly AI will revolutionize things, similar to getting "flying car" predictions right at the top of the automotive s-curve.
I believe AI will have a big impact in the long-term but no where close to as quickly as most people believe, and that the short-term impact will be limited to more narrow use cases. I also believe we're going to see a big rebound to people doing work in the next few years.
Many here likely disagree with me and it will be interesting to see how everything plays out.
I was wondering how much was due to over hiring during the crazy 2020-2021. Multiple companies increased their headcount by more than 50%, or even by 100% during the two years. That does not make business or technical sense at all, as tech companies are supposed to scale their services with technology instead of people. Companies add people only if they want to invest in new areas, but exactly how many new areas can we get in merely two years?
50% or 100%? Which companies? All the biggest companies increased by some durin 2020~2022, but not really all that much more than their historical growth rates.
What did happen uniformly is that all essentially stopped hiring after 2022.
It might be informative to compare this with what happened when retailers introduced automated checkout machines. It seems that the net effect on staff sizes was not that dramatic. These stores need more anti-theft security people and some oversight. Not to mention the people they need for technical support. I wonder if there will develop a new category of skills for checking that AI produced code is correct, effective and optimal?
They also need more people to restock abandoned carts because I'm not going to wait for two other people who got stuck in their automated checkout lines to get help from the one ineffective person who is stuck with the job of making this stupidity work.
AI will definitely have an impact of non physical jobs, and it is hard to see it slowing down. Anyone in any big enough company can easily see right now that there is a top level initiative to reduce employee count by never before imagined margins. And the AI is already good enough to achieve some large reductions. It is hard to see how this will all unfold.
In tech, change is the only constant. From embedded software in assembly to mobile/web development in javascript to jit-compiled python. This is not easy on engineers or on businesses as they have to keep reskilling at all times. The silver lining to AI is that it is poor at reskilling itself which is why the data-cutoff is circa 2024 for some models.
It’s constant, sure, but the rate of change is not. We’re still in the explosion brought about by silicon-based microprocessors, and that appears to be slowing down significantly as we’ve eked out all the easy gains in performance, power, and efficiency. I’m in the camp that believes, within my lifetime, tech innovation as we view it today will gradually slow and stagnate, resulting in a collapse of languages, models, and products into a handful of standards - and which every business, school, government, and person builds on top of or around until the next big explosion happens. It’s why Big Tech is so adamant about selling walled gardens: deep down, they know everyone is pining to be the next IBM juggernaut.
I think we’re seeing the early signs of that now, as everyone giddily trips over each other to rush into the “next big thing” rather than invest into the serious R&D necessary to make real gains. We’re managing modern technologies with centuries-old methods of corporate and political governance, complete with infighting and backstabbing. In a vacuum, no rational person would have ever backed the current explosion of LLMs given the more prescient problems facing the species, yet here we are squandering water and energy on prediction machines instead solar farms, battery storage, materials science, and infrastructure replacement.
I already see personal evidence in the IT side of things. For all the bickering supporters do between VMs and Containers and K8s and Public Cloud, all I see is just different ways of packaging software with differing sets of limitations or use cases. Everyone is so fiercely competing to make their chosen tech reign supreme over all that they pay no attention to us IT folks just wishing someone would make their container or Helm chart as easy to deploy and support as a modern Linux VM might be and integrating disparate tech instead of seeking to replace and dominate their competitors. There’s a very real attitude among my peers that, despite their advantages, containers are often little more than packages with extra steps and infrastructure for their existing use cases. Whether they’re right or wrong is irrelevant, because they’re making the decisions in their employer.
Change still feels fast and explosive because folks are focusing on niche research papers, extravagant moonshots, and the various implementations of things in SV circles. Outside those, however?
It’s slow. It’s stagnant. It’s boring, because nobody actually listens to what the physical majority has to say about products - only what the biggest paying customers (economic majority) want.
I can see the author's point but im failing to link it to ai. The ai im using now is a good as a productivity booster for otherwise already well defined problem-- and decently good engineers.
I dont think the layoffs are due to that. It is affecting entry jobs rather badly, but that (anecdotely) constitutes minority.
ADP's June employment report was pretty dismal, much worse than the blowout BLS report that came out the next day. It was more in line with the revision that came out 2 months later.
The ADP Chief economist said that the problem wasn't that companies are laying off, is that they aren't replacing attrition - - that they can get the same work done without doing so and hinted at AI productivity boost as a reason.
I know it's a raging battle here, but just simply having a search engine that works again is a huge productivity gain...
If humans are replaced en masse by AI agents, companies will save billions until there is nobody left who can pay for their products and/or services because we're all destitute and on the dole. I'm scheduled to retire in about 9 years. I'm not sure I'm going to make it that long.
Very true, If you take the number of tech jobs lost over the last couple years(in article) and multiply out, say, roughly $125K gross salary yearly, cut that in half for taxes (and things i missed) and you still are out tens of billions of dollars that people wont have to spend on things, big things.
I don't see how nobody will feel that loss of purchasing...
Then again, we all know how detached the market is, someone from Schwab just yesterday telling me how things have "never been better."
Owners of capital and machine labor can continue making bank and driving demand, even if there are no more human laborers making any money.
Humans are not necessary for an economy. It’s an easily missed assumption, because until now we are the only intelligent units of labor, capital ownership and demand.
But corporations long ago become units of all three, and AIs effectively become citizens simply by acting through an umbrella corporation. Corporations are (in)famously already first class political participates, via their money.
As long as AIs/corporations are motivated to compete and survive, demand from humans won’t be necessary for the economy to keep growing.
If anything, the ease with which AI/robotics will adapt to space habitats, and the vast resources untapped in the solar system, will enable a potentially human-independent economic explosion.
Solid summary I think, but reading “what the country does if some significant percentage of our 100 million knowledge workers gets laid off because of AI” confused me deeply.
Does verifying the difference between whole milk and oat milk qualify the barista as a knowledge worker?
The quote links to a BIS report which establishes that, yes, the 170-million strong US workforce really does have 100 million (actual) knowledge workers and baristas don't count. Service workers are outnumbered by computer jobs.
I've been wondering when the other shoe was going to drop as well. I'm not in a panic, but let's just say that when I occasionally look to re-balance my finances I am no longer moving anything into the stock market.
Interesting that the author doesn't mention a reduction in working hours as a solution because I see that as THE solution. Federally mandate an 18 hour work week and job demand will soar. It's just as fanciful a thought as his other suggestions given how little power we have over the federal government to exercise our will.
Our entire economic system is built around ensuring we have scarcities of necessities (housing, mostly) so workers need to outcompete their peers to have access to said necessities. This results in reduced work weeks being a non starters as those who would like to avail of them are outbid by those who forego them.
Yeah that’s interesting. Imagine what could happen if AI allowed us to work fewer hours and in exchange there was a program to enable people to pursue volunteer programs in their communities
Some “it takes a village” type of mentoring for children. Or programs to spend time with the elderly. Get outside and get involved in public works projects like repairing parks and waterways.
Total fantasy, for sure, but that’s what revolutionary new tech like AI could actually benefit society by letting humans be more human.
The trades sure aren't hurting. Where I live, a county of about 120k in the Rockies, appliance repair shops are booking six weeks out, and roofers can book out as long as six months.
This is going to change fast once the recession hits. Because what happens during recessions is that households abandon all but the most critical home repair and home improvement projects, and trade businesses shutter in large numbers.
I have no idea where this will go but I'm really not optimistic about the future of software development work. AI is already scarily good today. Sure I can still add value as a senior right now.. but there's no reason why that has to continue to be the case
So, the guy who's a founder of an AI company and makes money if he convinces people to buy into his AI project, is making some alarmist/doomer post about how crazy AI has gotten and how many jobs it's supposedly taking. He presents such thoughts as if they're some gnawing worry he just randomly needs to share.
Well, what do you know, the author just happens to sell an AI system that aims to "make humans better, rather than replacing them".
Surely his takes on the topic of how good AI is, and AI taking jobs, is impartial and objective, and not tied in any way to how he makes money if he manages to convince people of such thoughts.
Just because there is a conflict of interest doesn’t completely invalidate the argument being made. Marketing slop routinely makes it to the front page here and elsewhere with nobody batting an eye, but someone posting a personal take on their personal blog is now somehow a self-serving plug for…remind me where the product link is in that document again? I couldn’t find it.
Part of recognizing bias and conflicts of interest is also being able to recognize when, despite that, they’re still right.
> A very large number of people dread Monday, and that's not because they show up Monday morning and bring all their creativity and brilliance. It's because it's clocking in and clocking out on a job they'd rather not be doing.
This is a management problem. I don't think it's that hard to figure out how to motivate people. Give them some autonomy and respect. This isn't even hidden knowledge.
But businesses and managers for some reason totally forget this, and treat everyone as cogs in a machine and completely replaceable, monitored by metrics.
I'm curious at which point the AIs are doing all the jobs of corporations, so that they can sell their products and services to... no one, since everyone is unemployed ?
Or is the strategy of everyone to sell to the same 0.01% of the population ?
(Also, hilarious that the author mentions UBI as a potential solution. UBI is a massive transfer of wealth. Governements are elected nowadays on the promise of guaranteeing wealth is not transfered - see the recent tax bill in the USA ; and any mention of "taxes" in a political campaign.)
Why would he? I’ve been hearing concerns about national debt my whole life (including the 80s when interest rates were a hell of a lot higher than now), and I’m retirement age. I’m not saying those chickens won’t eventually come home to roost, but probably not anytime soon. The U. S. has become quite skilled at giving that tin can a swift kick down the road.
The OBBB, championed by the so-called "fiscally conservatives", accelerated this, but this will largely get ignored until/if a Democrat is in office again. Then large swaths of people will suddenly start caring about the national debt.
While I have tremendous sympathy for anyone who loses their job, this feels very industry specific. Embedded and hardware spaces (like satellites) are doing really well, lots of advancement and hiring going on, while things such as data science are struggling to get relevant interviews. I'm also not a huge fan of industry specific hiring data, because it's usually tied to a specific HR/hiring software (like indeed), which holds hidden variables (like big companies may be more likely to use one hiring software than the other).
As a final note, however, most engineers will find a point in their career where the skills they've developed are obsolete or outdated, and that is terrifying to me.
How do you jump from “not attributable to AI“ to “must be a recession”? I think it would be true for jobs that are not separable from companies economic activity, but it isn’t true for a good portion of tech jobs. A car manufacturer can’t sell the same amount of cars while reducing a half of assembly workers, but most tech giants can maintain profitable parts of their business with a fraction of their workforce (if not indefinitely then at least for some time). Some work can be eliminated altogether, some might be outsourced to other countries, some split among existing workers. I think that’s what’s happening.
Why it is happening, though? Hard to say for sure, but I don’t see why it couldn’t be a combination of tighter availability of capital, shrinking addressable market (due to deglobalization & demographics) and AI competition requiring huge capex
The rich have been very effective at convincing the poor to use those guns against each other (and scientists) instead of the people responsible for their poverty.
It’s a cycle that is always interrupted by war or revolution. The wealthy in the US do not understand what a revolution is, they believe that laws written on paper are as unbreakable as the laws of physics. Laws only function when the vast majority of society agrees to abide by them. Once people have nothing left to lose, it will be too late.
I'm worried too. I share most of his concerns, but I'm going to go one step further.
We have a president who is 1) prone to make seat-of-the-pants decisions and 2) prone to over-reach presidential power. And we're going to have a population that is 1) desperate for a quick fix and 2) not willing to let anything stand in the way. The combination is a recipe for further erosion (or the complete destruction) of separation of powers, and also for catastrophic mistakes. If we slide into tyranny (whether or not it keeps a democratic facade) and have Trump - with no restraints - trying to fix the economy, God help us all.
He's worried about what it says about the state of the industry and hiring. If people like that can't get jobs, those less talented who have been making less money, certainly won't.
Daniel's freaking out about an ongoing correction still playing out from '21, and finding struts to support his argument like the "30-50% of the work" is being "done by AI" nonsense lines spouted by talking suits. This is hogwash. It's standard corporate brain fart miss the actual point. Yes, 50%+ of code written might be done by AI, but pretending this is "AI doing the work" reveals the tumor that is management misapprehension of what's going on.
There's a correction coming, but not the one Daniel's fearmongering about.
I'm not a fan of UBI, but long term inflation is primarily determined by money creation rates. If UBI was funded by taxes, not printing, then we wouldn't expect any significant effect on long term inflation rates, although there might be some disruption in the short term.
UBI is just wealth flowing from the government to all individuals. The goal is redistribution. As a government, you can explicitly specify who wealth is being taken from by paying for UBI in taxes.
If you don't raise taxes to balance the budget, your choice is between kicking the can down the road with debt or printing money. Printing money is really just another form of redistribution drawn from the wealth of everyone holding that currency.
Naturally, doing so can lead to a crisis of confidence where the value of the currency collapses as people flee to other assets that are less likely to be devalued.
UBI, like any government spending, needs to be paid for. By taxes or financial disaster. I prefer taxes, personally.
UBI is a more efficient allocation of already existing government services. Instead of a program for each and ever need a person may have, they're just given cash and those programs would be deprecated. It's more efficient. The rebuttal is sourced from those that have existing vested interest that these antiquated piece-meal programs continue to operate.
I've never been a fan of UBI (and I'm often downvoted for that, ha ha). I like the idea of mandating an 18 hour work week or similar though. It still keeps the incentive to work — still rewards those who want to achieve more.
One wonders though what impact that will have on society — so much additional free time. More television binging? I hope not.
If we look back at all types of mechanization, all that happens is we keep our jobs, they get more complex and the jobs get harder and more technical.
in 2-10 years if my job as a software engineer is speedily porting and upgrading banking code with AI assitants then cool.
But I don't think we're going to see a crash. Human development doesn't stop. We're going to keep making new stuff and that takes people.
Take the even more global view of the United States. We can grow more than enough good food for everyone, and there is plenty of land. We have water, working infrastructure, and all the other ingredients.
The rest is just giving people money to do what they please. Really. Do we need faster technology? Do we need to alloy new metals or develop new medicines?
No. We could live the spartan life of fifty years ago, or a hundred. The population will keep reliably replenishing. The rest is all just fashion.
When, not if, AI takes over crummy jobs that people don’t want to do, and society makes a mass change to deal with that, you’ll be surprised how fast it goes back to whatever equilibrium there is.
I've said this before, but the only thing that will convince me that these companies are actually laying people off due to AI will be when they start replacing their leadership staff with it.
Until that happens--IMO it's just an excuse to reduce the overhired workforce without tanking their stock.
The layoff chart, created by AI, would be more impactful (and simultaneously less confusing, which is rare!) if it expressed the 2025 value as an extrapolated run-rate, or as a predicted range.
This article has been written once a week since the beginning of capitalism. Just insert your preferred $flavor_of_the_week global issues as supporting evidence for it.
Unfortunately we know from hundreds of years of experience now that the only actual way of identifying a recession is in hindsight. Everything else is just doomerism.
Sure, it wasn't bad when IT caused automation and elimination of many job positions and entire occupations, both manual and office. Now that we're on the receiving end of it, it is a bad thing all of a sudden.
As for the upcoming crisis, there's an increase in inequality and further accumulation of wealth among fewer and fewer individuals. As long as these individuals continue to spend their newly acquired wealth to compensate for lower spend by the less fortunate (which is exactly what's been happening), the economy will be fine.
> Homelessness skyrockets because people can't pay their rent, but now it's whole families on the streets
> We start to see unrest and/or riots against "the rich" because there are no jobs, and people are being evicted
> Crime goes up significantly
Arguably once a good percentage of people become unhoused, we are no longer living in a fair society. IT SHOULD break down into violence. But then so say "Crime goes up significantly". What crime? There is no society where a crime can be defined.
We’re damned both ways with AI. Either it’s a massive bubble that will pop or it does what it’s intended to do and automates a large portion of the workforce.
Edit: removed a comment about Ai investors getting bailed out because it was secondary to my main point
Investors weren't bailed out following the pop of the dot com bubble. I don't think that AI investors will be bailed out afterward if this is another bubble.
Soon developers will wish they unionized or had a culture of collective bargaining and rights. You're labor, you just thought you were above it all. I'm not spiteful. I wish you luck and hope you guys organize.
after 30y of this business, i’m dumbfounded we haven’t organized. doctors, lawyers, plumbers etc seem to benefit hugely from professional orgs and unions in their corner.
i guess we are too well paid.
(all of the above make more than you do, and it’s because they are organized)
I share the same concerns as the author. People like to dispute individual issues by saying they’re caused by X or will even out with Y or the government can just do Z if the people voted for it, or that this is all irrelevant anyway because it’s never happened in the data before and therefore extremely unlikely or impossible to ever happen in the future.
And I just stare slackjawed at these people, at how they’re so focused on a narrow vertical or “historical data”, that they fail to even consider the larger picture. It’s why I trot out and bang my drum of “if we replace all the workers with AI then who is going to have money to spend to continue propping up the economy” every time boosters dismiss any social or economic concerns.
By a combination of neglect, malice, misinformation, partisanship, ignorance, and a cadre of new gods (“Big Data”, “the Algorithm”, the myriad of Rationalist cults, “AI”, crypto, etc), we have effectively stockpiled a warehouse full of leaking fuel barrels and dynamite and been commanded to take up smoking by our leaders and Capitalists, assured everything will turn out okay.
And you know what? Maybe it will turn out okay. Maybe this all is just a giant nothingburger. Maybe this is the start of a Golden Age of humanity, where dreams are attainable and fortune is infinite. Maybe this is just a speedbump on the path to extended lifespans, curing diseases, solving climate change. Maybe we’re just overreacting.
But the data sets, the lived experiences, the tone of existence doesn’t lie. Things are presently bad. The current patterns and trends suggest this will get a lot worse.
Maybe we’re wrong, but what I fear more is that we might be right and have done nothing.
I think some of his worries are well founded and others are not. I believe AI is not going to replace everyone or even most. Instead, it will eventually be seen for what it is - not actually intelligent, and the bubble that was built on those hopes and dreams will collapse, kicking off a market crash. At the same time, Trump's tariffs are going to spike inflation, preventing the Fed from cutting. That will further Trump's fight with Powell, which will lead to him installing a puppet. Said puppet will cut rates, leading to record-setting inflation that could lead us into something resembling the Great Depression. That is a very likely outcome, in my opinion.
Life has many stresses, but things can actually be OK with each of us, despite commotion and problems. In my church of 17.5 million members in most countries, we have made promises with God to help each other and we try to help others in need, in many nations ($1.5 billion last year and growing). That is far from the total level of need, but God has also promised to help us and guide us as individuals and families if we really strive to keep our promises and do our part; He has promised peace in this life and eternal life in the world to come. And there are programs for developing and serving in employment, education, resilience, service to community, etc. And very local congregation has a bishop (unpaid) with access to resources to help meet needs and achieve self-reliance.
More at my site (in profile; no sales and low stylistic ambition), if you click on "Things I want to say" (about 1/2-way down), then "On peace amid commotion" (also about 1/2-way down), then skim that page and click at least the last link. Then read the entire page and click the links that seem most interesting.). We really can be OK despite things. (Thoughtful comments appreciated with any downvotes.)
I don't want to come off as insensitive, and as a developer with a few years of experience and about to graduate, I'm obviously a bit worried about AI as well. However, this reads like an American overpanicking because they're used to living with a certain employment and economic stability that is just not the norm in most of the world, and are coming to terms with instability for the first time.
I come from a country where emigrating in search of new work, or trying to reinvent yourself and switch jobs, driving an Uber or flipping burgers if necessary to stay afloat, etc. is the norm. We've had a lot of political and economic instability, science and health defunding, etc., and yes, it's not great, but also people just... live on, and manage to do okay.
Yes, I know about the recent advancements in AI, but barring the AGI case which I believe is a bit overblown in this article, I think the rest, especially the Trump situation, tariffs, unrest, etc., will pass as well.
I think there's some truth to this. There's lots of room in the middle of the pack.
But that would be a serious, violent, downgrade from the American self-image. We are bred on American Exceptionalism. If this myth is destroyed, we don't have a replacement ideology.
The ROW can decide that Americans are silly people who should get over themselves. But that will not convince Americans to accept the change calmly. And when Americans are not calm, the ROW suffers too. One way or another.
I think the so-called elites are already smelling blood in the water, from the way some billionaires are investing in doomsday bunkers.
What strikes me as odd as that, even with all the signs of an impeding crisis, US's oligarchs still double down on eliminating the little social safety nets that the US managed to provide to it's population. It's as if they learned nothing from the french revolution, and they think they can exist in a world where society succumbs to poverty and mysery. No wonder we're seeing tech bros pushing for a US dictatorship.
I’m not confident that AI can be used in place of human knowledge workers.
If you’re in software and maintaining a React application front end I can see the appeal: it takes so much code just to add a button. And it’s not like the web platform is going to get good.
It’s automated copy-pasting from stack overflow and GitHub. That can be useful.
But it’s also pretty meh. Humans stop reading code deeply enough to catch errors when they read more than a couple hundred lines of code in an hour. Someone still has to be liable for those errors when they cause harm to customer businesses and assets. Maybe AI and agent tooling will get good enough to keep that error rate low enough to be tolerable.
But maybe not.
What is concerning is that capital is getting so much support from the state. Labourers are being left in the lurch. I think part of that “redistribution of wealth,” needs to involve getting capital to support and work with labour instead of just exploiting it and squeezing everyone dry.
It’s wealth inequality and climate at the end of the day.
I read this article and thought "Thanks heavens the US Federal government is appointing a highly-qualified and unbiased head of their Bureau of Labor Statistics so we all have perfect confidence in their future employment numbers".
Those people will go back to doing whatever they would have been doing before the technology revolution, which actually wasn’t so long ago…
Like maybe go work at a shipyard. We can only build two ships a year it seems…
The technology revolution was so long ago that tech is all I’ve done, and I’m retired now. You think shipyard workers woke up one day in the 80s and said, “fuck welding, imma gonna go program me some computers?”
I’ll just skip over the part where you ignored a lot of those jobs going overseas and are not coming back.
We can talk about excessively wealthy individuals all day, but I'm pretty sure that most knowledge workers are not going to be on the receiving side of wealth redistribution. This is even more likely to be true for the programmers affected by these tech layoffs.
thisisit|6 months ago
1. The tax deduction change where costs couldn't be classified as an expense.
2. The saturation in people joining coding. At one point in time everyone wanted to be part of a bootcamp to earn that sweet coding salary.
3. Rising interest rates means the era of borrowing at low costs is over.
etc.
AI is last on my list for the reasons that people are being laid off. And its not because AI isn't helping people, rather it isn't helping people enough to justify the current layoffs.
And lets be honest - AI and employment is the hot topic right now. You should expect executives to say that they are jumping on the AI bandwagon and looking at time savings.
Once upon a time everyone wanted to add ML to their product. This is just going with the flow. Otherwise their stock prices will take a massive hit. Others yet want to showcase that they are doing everything to extract better margins. These statements can be slightly deceiving.
What does 30% of the code mean exactly? How much of it is going into the products and making into the market?
For now, AI is a convenient scapegoat. Maybe it becomes a force to reckon with and truly leads to people being laid off. Not today.
alexsmirnov|6 months ago
adregan|6 months ago
yegle|6 months ago
mholt|6 months ago
AstroBen|6 months ago
AI code is only buggy if no-one is guiding or reviewing it
I'm not sure how long we'll need someone in the middle to actually review the code
ponector|6 months ago
curiousguy|6 months ago
I would say that the current capabilities of genAI is like a junior dev, sometimes even a mid-level. But one main difference is that a dev is slowly learning and improving and at some point will become a senior dev and also domain specialist.
If there is a codebase created by genAI, then it’s equivalent as if all devs left the company, so no one knows why some piece of code was created in a certain way, if it was part of the business logic or some implementation detail
xlbuttplug2|6 months ago
snapplebobapple|6 months ago
cosmicgadget|6 months ago
aaomidi|6 months ago
generalpf|6 months ago
maxehmookau|6 months ago
Turns out, they never needed those humans in the first place.
That doesn't answer the other side of the problem though, that it's so hard to find work right now, even for folks who would typically be very easy to employ.
crop_rotation|6 months ago
Swizec|6 months ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwMVMbmQBug
Here’s the thing: We’re in the complaining stage. It doesn’t hurt enough yet. When it does, we’ll stop complaining and do something.
Complaining is a good first step! That’s how it starts.
Herring|6 months ago
ncr100|6 months ago
- "knowing is half the battle" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c71nqMqmiaw
- "be the change you want to see in the world" - https://josephranseth.com/gandhi-didnt-say-be-the-change-you...
Personally I want a more human-first world, and a less money-first world. This touches on many areas needing change.
OldfieldFund|6 months ago
strict9|6 months ago
Where my views differ are when it comes to the leap between layoffs and AI.
Corporate leadership is eager to reduce the biggest source of cost (employees) and happy to use AI as cover. But it's not the reality. AI isn't adding productivity to the company's bottom line in numbers big enough to rationalize the layoffs.
I can point to zero tech roles eliminated where AI performed the same function. Despite the fact me and everyone in my circles use AI on a daily basis and are big proponents of it.
I think the author's biggest incorrect assertion is accepting corporate PR as gospel like this:
>Salesforce says AI bots now do 50% of the company's work. They're pushing what they call a "digital workforce" where AI agents handle customer service, sales, and even coding tasks.
All of these companies have great incentive to say AI is replacing workers. But so far no proof has been offered.
Eventually we will get a recession. For a lot of people that work in tech it feels like we are already in one.
But I do not share the author's concerns with AI taking everyone's jobs in the next few months or years.
fuzzfactor|6 months ago
But not because of tech, AI, or things like that. It's the rate of pay.
When prosperity is the thing that's receding, money counts more than ever because lack of money threatens more than could be imagined.
And even though it's not as common as it should be, employees can be fairly valued as an asset. In a good way, where you're much happier being valued like that than not.
So even a company that values their people more so than most, will have to make sacrifices on all fronts when the going gets rough, like they don't have to do for years in a row when things are merely non-ideal.
This can cause some of the highest-paid people to get kicked out much earlier, like few have seen before. Even in companies that are not trying to preserve as much head-count until things turn around, they may have no real choice.
A lot of non-tech high-dollar people are also being shed, and it looks like on the increase. Consumers may not have enough accumulated wealth any more to be able to bail out a consumer economy.
vishvananda|6 months ago
[1]: https://qz.com/tech-layoffs-tax-code-trump-section-174-micro...
ponector|6 months ago
1. Layoffs and slowdown are global, not only in US.
2. Expenses are still deductable, but over longer period. It makes no difference for big corporations.
chaseadam17|6 months ago
1. There are fewer new products normal people want to buy, especially in tech.
2. Inflation is making the everyday things people need more expensive.
3. VC money for the most popular products ran out and companies are jacking up prices.
4. Concerns over tech's impact on health is limiting tech use and more negative sentiment.
All of this is causing a slowdown in tech and AI could be the perfect fix:
1. Shiny new product for people to buy.
2. Reduce costs and increase margins right when it's most needed.
3. Justify more investment in the space (super intelligence = best VC investment ever).
4. Solve bread and butter problems in health, education, etc. if safety is prioritized.
My guess is that this need for AI is causing a lot of the tech sector to overestimate how quickly AI will revolutionize things, similar to getting "flying car" predictions right at the top of the automotive s-curve.
I believe AI will have a big impact in the long-term but no where close to as quickly as most people believe, and that the short-term impact will be limited to more narrow use cases. I also believe we're going to see a big rebound to people doing work in the next few years.
Many here likely disagree with me and it will be interesting to see how everything plays out.
hintymad|6 months ago
I was wondering how much was due to over hiring during the crazy 2020-2021. Multiple companies increased their headcount by more than 50%, or even by 100% during the two years. That does not make business or technical sense at all, as tech companies are supposed to scale their services with technology instead of people. Companies add people only if they want to invest in new areas, but exactly how many new areas can we get in merely two years?
rsanek|6 months ago
What did happen uniformly is that all essentially stopped hiring after 2022.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/numb...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/num...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/number-...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/META/meta-platform...
ziofill|6 months ago
This is the really scariest part to me.
_hcuq|6 months ago
cwmoore|6 months ago
herodotus|6 months ago
Zigurd|6 months ago
edoceo|6 months ago
crop_rotation|6 months ago
bwfan123|6 months ago
stego-tech|6 months ago
I think we’re seeing the early signs of that now, as everyone giddily trips over each other to rush into the “next big thing” rather than invest into the serious R&D necessary to make real gains. We’re managing modern technologies with centuries-old methods of corporate and political governance, complete with infighting and backstabbing. In a vacuum, no rational person would have ever backed the current explosion of LLMs given the more prescient problems facing the species, yet here we are squandering water and energy on prediction machines instead solar farms, battery storage, materials science, and infrastructure replacement.
I already see personal evidence in the IT side of things. For all the bickering supporters do between VMs and Containers and K8s and Public Cloud, all I see is just different ways of packaging software with differing sets of limitations or use cases. Everyone is so fiercely competing to make their chosen tech reign supreme over all that they pay no attention to us IT folks just wishing someone would make their container or Helm chart as easy to deploy and support as a modern Linux VM might be and integrating disparate tech instead of seeking to replace and dominate their competitors. There’s a very real attitude among my peers that, despite their advantages, containers are often little more than packages with extra steps and infrastructure for their existing use cases. Whether they’re right or wrong is irrelevant, because they’re making the decisions in their employer.
Change still feels fast and explosive because folks are focusing on niche research papers, extravagant moonshots, and the various implementations of things in SV circles. Outside those, however?
It’s slow. It’s stagnant. It’s boring, because nobody actually listens to what the physical majority has to say about products - only what the biggest paying customers (economic majority) want.
adonese|6 months ago
I dont think the layoffs are due to that. It is affecting entry jobs rather badly, but that (anecdotely) constitutes minority.
readthenotes1|6 months ago
The ADP Chief economist said that the problem wasn't that companies are laying off, is that they aren't replacing attrition - - that they can get the same work done without doing so and hinted at AI productivity boost as a reason.
I know it's a raging battle here, but just simply having a search engine that works again is a huge productivity gain...
xunil2ycom|6 months ago
jofla_net|6 months ago
I don't see how nobody will feel that loss of purchasing... Then again, we all know how detached the market is, someone from Schwab just yesterday telling me how things have "never been better."
Nevermark|6 months ago
Humans are not necessary for an economy. It’s an easily missed assumption, because until now we are the only intelligent units of labor, capital ownership and demand.
But corporations long ago become units of all three, and AIs effectively become citizens simply by acting through an umbrella corporation. Corporations are (in)famously already first class political participates, via their money.
As long as AIs/corporations are motivated to compete and survive, demand from humans won’t be necessary for the economy to keep growing.
If anything, the ease with which AI/robotics will adapt to space habitats, and the vast resources untapped in the solar system, will enable a potentially human-independent economic explosion.
pupppet|6 months ago
cwmoore|6 months ago
Does verifying the difference between whole milk and oat milk qualify the barista as a knowledge worker?
OgsyedIE|6 months ago
JKCalhoun|6 months ago
9999px|6 months ago
CalRobert|6 months ago
mingus88|6 months ago
Some “it takes a village” type of mentoring for children. Or programs to spend time with the elderly. Get outside and get involved in public works projects like repairing parks and waterways.
Total fantasy, for sure, but that’s what revolutionary new tech like AI could actually benefit society by letting humans be more human.
mongol|6 months ago
sys32768|6 months ago
enraged_camel|6 months ago
ct|6 months ago
There's no trickle down just trickle up. Giving Bezos, Zuckerberg, Benoiff, corporations more money isn't going to create more jobs.
If there's no money for consumers to spend these B2C companies will have less need for B2B software that most of us build.
dsr_|6 months ago
AstroBen|6 months ago
thegrim33|6 months ago
Well, what do you know, the author just happens to sell an AI system that aims to "make humans better, rather than replacing them".
Surely his takes on the topic of how good AI is, and AI taking jobs, is impartial and objective, and not tied in any way to how he makes money if he manages to convince people of such thoughts.
stego-tech|6 months ago
Part of recognizing bias and conflicts of interest is also being able to recognize when, despite that, they’re still right.
rez0__|6 months ago
thisisnotauser|6 months ago
cholantesh|6 months ago
Assuming that's a reasonable analogue - I'm not super knowledgeable about that era of US history so can't say for sure
unknown|6 months ago
[deleted]
tayo42|6 months ago
This is a management problem. I don't think it's that hard to figure out how to motivate people. Give them some autonomy and respect. This isn't even hidden knowledge.
But businesses and managers for some reason totally forget this, and treat everyone as cogs in a machine and completely replaceable, monitored by metrics.
phtrivier|6 months ago
Or is the strategy of everyone to sell to the same 0.01% of the population ?
(Also, hilarious that the author mentions UBI as a potential solution. UBI is a massive transfer of wealth. Governements are elected nowadays on the promise of guaranteeing wealth is not transfered - see the recent tax bill in the USA ; and any mention of "taxes" in a political campaign.)
CalRobert|6 months ago
mikestew|6 months ago
myvoiceismypass|6 months ago
The OBBB, championed by the so-called "fiscally conservatives", accelerated this, but this will largely get ignored until/if a Democrat is in office again. Then large swaths of people will suddenly start caring about the national debt.
xlbuttplug2|6 months ago
CalRobert|6 months ago
guywithahat|6 months ago
As a final note, however, most engineers will find a point in their career where the skills they've developed are obsolete or outdated, and that is terrifying to me.
OgsyedIE|6 months ago
If the effect size isn't attributable to AI, then it must be the case that we have been in an unacknowledged recession for over a year.
tsvetkov|6 months ago
otikik|6 months ago
I am surprised this has not already happened. The combination of rampant inequality and lax gun laws (in some states) is very explosive.
hungryhobbit|6 months ago
lossolo|6 months ago
lif|6 months ago
we're never had more effective 'circensis' (Tiktok, video-games, etc.)
the 'panem' part? yeah, that might be a problem, given (further) inflation
dingnuts|6 months ago
hyperliner|6 months ago
[deleted]
insane_dreamer|6 months ago
> 2022: 93,000 employees laid off
> 2023: 200,000 employees laid off (peak)
> 2024: 150,000 employees laid off
> 2025: 70,000 employees laid off (through July)
Any figures on how this compares with the COVID surge in hiring? As in, are we at a net-negative and if so by how much?
AnimalMuppet|6 months ago
We have a president who is 1) prone to make seat-of-the-pants decisions and 2) prone to over-reach presidential power. And we're going to have a population that is 1) desperate for a quick fix and 2) not willing to let anything stand in the way. The combination is a recipe for further erosion (or the complete destruction) of separation of powers, and also for catastrophic mistakes. If we slide into tyranny (whether or not it keeps a democratic facade) and have Trump - with no restraints - trying to fix the economy, God help us all.
tasuki|6 months ago
Oh, ok, these are the people the OP is worried about. If they have been at all reasonable with their money, they'll be fine...
insane_dreamer|6 months ago
He's worried about what it says about the state of the industry and hiring. If people like that can't get jobs, those less talented who have been making less money, certainly won't.
itsalotoffun|6 months ago
There's a correction coming, but not the one Daniel's fearmongering about.
arduanika|6 months ago
amilios|6 months ago
logicchains|6 months ago
johnecheck|6 months ago
UBI, like any government spending, needs to be paid for. By taxes or financial disaster. I prefer taxes, personally.
waynesonfire|6 months ago
JKCalhoun|6 months ago
One wonders though what impact that will have on society — so much additional free time. More television binging? I hope not.
gonzo41|6 months ago
unknown|6 months ago
[deleted]
brothrock|6 months ago
https://careers.salesforce.com/en/jobs/jr307625/software-eng...
This was one of the top jobs listed. Of course I have no idea if they are hiring people or not, but it’s at least listed.
AstroBen|6 months ago
hyperhello|6 months ago
The rest is just giving people money to do what they please. Really. Do we need faster technology? Do we need to alloy new metals or develop new medicines?
No. We could live the spartan life of fifty years ago, or a hundred. The population will keep reliably replenishing. The rest is all just fashion.
When, not if, AI takes over crummy jobs that people don’t want to do, and society makes a mass change to deal with that, you’ll be surprised how fast it goes back to whatever equilibrium there is.
mritterhoff|6 months ago
andyfilms1|6 months ago
Until that happens--IMO it's just an excuse to reduce the overhired workforce without tanking their stock.
preommr|6 months ago
There's a ton of middle managers and high-ranking roles whose jobs are to basically supervise other people.
If the people go, they do too.
FredPret|6 months ago
aaomidi|6 months ago
t0bia_s|6 months ago
Whole point is contradiction of entire article.
quesera|6 months ago
ramesh31|6 months ago
Unfortunately we know from hundreds of years of experience now that the only actual way of identifying a recession is in hindsight. Everything else is just doomerism.
ivape|6 months ago
glaarinee|6 months ago
jmaestrooper|6 months ago
As for the upcoming crisis, there's an increase in inequality and further accumulation of wealth among fewer and fewer individuals. As long as these individuals continue to spend their newly acquired wealth to compensate for lower spend by the less fortunate (which is exactly what's been happening), the economy will be fine.
righthand|6 months ago
> We start to see unrest and/or riots against "the rich" because there are no jobs, and people are being evicted
> Crime goes up significantly
Arguably once a good percentage of people become unhoused, we are no longer living in a fair society. IT SHOULD break down into violence. But then so say "Crime goes up significantly". What crime? There is no society where a crime can be defined.
quesera|6 months ago
A society always exists, even in a total dissolution of the previously-existing social order (which we are not truly contemplating here).
outside1234|6 months ago
an0malous|6 months ago
Edit: removed a comment about Ai investors getting bailed out because it was secondary to my main point
philipkglass|6 months ago
LurkandComment|6 months ago
mml|6 months ago
i guess we are too well paid.
(all of the above make more than you do, and it’s because they are organized)
stego-tech|6 months ago
And I just stare slackjawed at these people, at how they’re so focused on a narrow vertical or “historical data”, that they fail to even consider the larger picture. It’s why I trot out and bang my drum of “if we replace all the workers with AI then who is going to have money to spend to continue propping up the economy” every time boosters dismiss any social or economic concerns.
By a combination of neglect, malice, misinformation, partisanship, ignorance, and a cadre of new gods (“Big Data”, “the Algorithm”, the myriad of Rationalist cults, “AI”, crypto, etc), we have effectively stockpiled a warehouse full of leaking fuel barrels and dynamite and been commanded to take up smoking by our leaders and Capitalists, assured everything will turn out okay.
And you know what? Maybe it will turn out okay. Maybe this all is just a giant nothingburger. Maybe this is the start of a Golden Age of humanity, where dreams are attainable and fortune is infinite. Maybe this is just a speedbump on the path to extended lifespans, curing diseases, solving climate change. Maybe we’re just overreacting.
But the data sets, the lived experiences, the tone of existence doesn’t lie. Things are presently bad. The current patterns and trends suggest this will get a lot worse.
Maybe we’re wrong, but what I fear more is that we might be right and have done nothing.
sub7|6 months ago
IAmGraydon|6 months ago
lcall|6 months ago
More at my site (in profile; no sales and low stylistic ambition), if you click on "Things I want to say" (about 1/2-way down), then "On peace amid commotion" (also about 1/2-way down), then skim that page and click at least the last link. Then read the entire page and click the links that seem most interesting.). We really can be OK despite things. (Thoughtful comments appreciated with any downvotes.)
dysoco|6 months ago
I come from a country where emigrating in search of new work, or trying to reinvent yourself and switch jobs, driving an Uber or flipping burgers if necessary to stay afloat, etc. is the norm. We've had a lot of political and economic instability, science and health defunding, etc., and yes, it's not great, but also people just... live on, and manage to do okay.
Yes, I know about the recent advancements in AI, but barring the AGI case which I believe is a bit overblown in this article, I think the rest, especially the Trump situation, tariffs, unrest, etc., will pass as well.
quesera|6 months ago
But that would be a serious, violent, downgrade from the American self-image. We are bred on American Exceptionalism. If this myth is destroyed, we don't have a replacement ideology.
The ROW can decide that Americans are silly people who should get over themselves. But that will not convince Americans to accept the change calmly. And when Americans are not calm, the ROW suffers too. One way or another.
p3rls|6 months ago
motorest|6 months ago
What strikes me as odd as that, even with all the signs of an impeding crisis, US's oligarchs still double down on eliminating the little social safety nets that the US managed to provide to it's population. It's as if they learned nothing from the french revolution, and they think they can exist in a world where society succumbs to poverty and mysery. No wonder we're seeing tech bros pushing for a US dictatorship.
coreyh14444|6 months ago
agentultra|6 months ago
If you’re in software and maintaining a React application front end I can see the appeal: it takes so much code just to add a button. And it’s not like the web platform is going to get good.
It’s automated copy-pasting from stack overflow and GitHub. That can be useful.
But it’s also pretty meh. Humans stop reading code deeply enough to catch errors when they read more than a couple hundred lines of code in an hour. Someone still has to be liable for those errors when they cause harm to customer businesses and assets. Maybe AI and agent tooling will get good enough to keep that error rate low enough to be tolerable.
But maybe not.
What is concerning is that capital is getting so much support from the state. Labourers are being left in the lurch. I think part of that “redistribution of wealth,” needs to involve getting capital to support and work with labour instead of just exploiting it and squeezing everyone dry.
It’s wealth inequality and climate at the end of the day.
ropable|6 months ago
/s
billfor|6 months ago
mikestew|6 months ago
I’ll just skip over the part where you ignored a lot of those jobs going overseas and are not coming back.
Thrymr|6 months ago
xlbuttplug2|6 months ago
Sebb767|6 months ago
> - Redistribution of wealth
We can talk about excessively wealthy individuals all day, but I'm pretty sure that most knowledge workers are not going to be on the receiving side of wealth redistribution. This is even more likely to be true for the programmers affected by these tech layoffs.