SWE figures dropped mid-2022 (almost magically in line with interest rate hikes) and LLM-copilots werent introduced for another year. The paper notes they did an adjustment for the end of ZIRP. I dont know enough econometrics to understand whether this adjustment was sufficient, but the chart doesnt make sense since the labor efforts seem to be leading the actual technology by over a year or more. From informal surveys, LLM-copilot usage didnt become widespread until late 2023 to mid 2024, certainly not widespread enough to cause macro labor effects in mid-2022.
For customer service, my explanation is that companies literally do not care about customer service. Automated phone trees, outsourced call centers whose reps have no real power to help a customer, and poorly-made websites have been frustrating people for decades, but businesses never seem to try to compete on doing better at it. It's a cheap win with investors who want to hear about AI initiatives to lay off yet even more of this department, because it doesn't matter if the quality of service declines, there are no market or regulatory forces that are punishing this well enough to ever expect firms to stop breaking it, let alone fix it
For a software engineering business, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017 significantly impacted how software costs can be expensed under Section 179. While Section 179 previously allowed for the immediate expensing of many software purchases, TCJA reforms restricted this deduction primarily to "off-the-shelf" software. Custom-developed software and internal development costs are no longer eligible for Section 179 expensing and must now be capitalized and amortized.
Under the TCJA, Section 179 cannot be used for software that a company develops for itself. This includes the direct costs for the engineers, programmers, and other personnel involved in the development process.
The report not addressing this elephant in the room is a disappointing.
Of note, the OBBB reinstated the ability to deduct R&D, so businesses are no longer required to capitalize and amortize R&D expenses (including software development).
https://warrenaverett.com/insights/one-big-beautiful-bill-se...
However, that's back for tax year 2025, so why aren't we seeing the jobs come back? Maybe it really was 174 then, but AI now?
I think if your willing to go to the sf bay and work in an office there are lots of opportunities. Remote and high pay doesn't have alot of options.
My own career progress was much slower and topped out lower than (in my enlightened opinion) much less qualified folks in office.
That said, it's a tradeoff. I -still- wouldn't move to work in office knowing this. I value my family, time, and lifestyle I'm able to afford in a place I want to be more than making tons of money.
In another 10 or 20 years I'm half sure I'll run the numbers and regret that, but so far so good.
I don’t have 2 different 1 hour commute blocks on my calendar. While you’re fighting traffic, I’m working. While you’re rushing through your morning routine, I’m sitting at my computer catching up on slack. While you’re finding the meeting room, I’m reading the meeting prep material. While you’re getting distracted by Sales in your open office, I’m locked in, midway through a 2 hour coding session.
Or did they give you a title and say, great job — now we have higher expectations of you!
What you’re talking about seems like an attempt to placate rather than reward.
I did the sf thing and don't want to go back. Don't want to live in NYC or Seattle or commute over an hour from NYC suburbs.
It was only just reinstated, so it's probably too early to see the effects.
I also expect that despite the restoration of Section 174, companies realized that they not only overhired during ZIRP, but also that they don't actually need that headcount, given the outcome of Musk's Twitter layoffs. There were so many prognostications that Twitter would imminently implode after downsizing from ~8k to ~1.5k employees, and when these claims never came to pass, it was a wake-up call to the rest of the industry [0].
[0] https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/elon-musk-fired-80-p...
So there was just this general pressure from the middle up to grow instead of paying more to existing staff or finding some other way to spend the money. After all, investors generally want you to spend the money you have access to, otherwise they’ll put it to use elsewhere.
It seems that there is external pressure right now from investors, and on to executives, to push headcounts down as there is a general feeling that good companies should be able to leverage AI to become much more efficient, and higher headcounts just burn money and bog things down. Whether or not that’s true is another question, but the perception exists.
I’m not sure if this is a fundamental change in the dynamic, or just a temporary push against it that will eventually lose steam.
I feel like this should be a “both and” situation. AI is not a panacea. If your company has 10 good engineers and a ChatGPT subscription, and my company has 100 good engineers and a ChatGPT subscription, we are going to move considerably faster.
Until someone gets an exclusive contract with AGI, it doesn’t change things.
But that "everything app"? It hasn't happened. The money transfer app ("Twitter Payment Platform")? Still MIA.
Oh, they sure did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34617964
Even in that thread, a lot of people were saying "it's only been three months, give it a bit more time."
But more importantly, X has not released any substantially new features within the last 3 years. And I bet that it won't release anything new for a while, and anything they _do_ try to release will be laughably broken.
Besides that most basic functionality, many times notifications are not sent when the notification settings would suggest they should be. And of course, moderation has fallen by the wayside, although that's more of a policy shift than a technical failure.
(Occam says deficit of institutional capability is the most likely cause. But that could also turn into a feature.)
Just on top of my head, there's the ability to write longer texts, the AI integration (that seems fairly popular in there). There was also some revenue sharing scheme where accounts can get paid for engagement. And from the point of view of management, making it impossible to view threads without login would also be a feature (as in "something we have to deliberately implement").
It's not a lot, but I don't think the pre-Musk Twitter changed even that much in the 3 year period before the acquisition.
[1] - https://archive.is/evLAL (WSJ archive)
[*] This one I believe - https://commoncog.com/cash-flow-games/
Also plenty of racists and homophobes, more than I see just about anywhere else on the internet. And more wild, rabid hate surrounding trans people than I see anywhere outside of narrow, festering cesspools in wastelands like 4chan.
although I think entry level is still in shambles, for now
Note that the reversal only applies to American software jobs, not offshore ones. So maybe tech hiring is going to pick up again soon. Those changes should've been reversed before they took effect in 2022 by the govt at the time.
Once Trump won and was in place for 2025, they defused it so that (they hoped) the economy would pick up.
Huge amounts of coordinated lobbying by the tech industry concentrated on three topics (crypto, section 179, ai deregulation)
I was working in Europe for a big American company, which will remain nameless, and they started shutting down most, if not all, of their European operations.
A change in the US tax code made software development amortize over 5 years in the US and over 15 years overseas. It was later changed instant deduction in the US but still 15 years for overseas. It no longer makes sense to outsource software development in many cases.
There's also some argument that, if people cannot get customer service to "help" they stop asking for help - driving that cost down.
And not having to remedy issues in the product = no repair/replace cost
And people are then left with only a few options, one of which... buy a replacement... which in a restricted market is a WIN because more money coming in...
Also, the 2017 tax cuts and the recent bill have provided substantial tax cuts to these corporations too.
Usually this subject comes up where people (at least on HN) are telling people to mail their Congresspeople and Senators to get a bill passed to "fix" this and my question is always this:
"What tax cuts are you going to give back to pay for this?"
If we want to end this ridiculous IP transfer to Ireland and royalty payments to offshore profits to avoid taxes at the same time, I'm 100% on board with fixing the deductability of engineering salaries.
That's just not how big companies look at their budgets, it isn't all one big pool of funds coming in and going out everything has a cost center and is accounted for individually end to end. This tax change made certain jobs suddenly 20% more expensive on paper. People in corporate finance look at these numbers and make recommendations that get implemented.
Sure, but that doesn't necessarily change the marginal cost of hiring another dev if the tax incentives have worsened.
The time value of money over 5 years is significant, especially in a fast moving industry like tech. The correlation between this change passing and tech hiring dropping is strong so I'm inclined to think there's some signal there.
It's already been fixed for US workers.
The only companies this affected are those right at the margins of becoming profitable. It doesn't affect new startups and it doesn't affect established businesses. And if you are at the margins of becoming profitable you have likely accumulated more than enough tax credits for all your losses.
The changes to Section 174 is not the explanation of why software engineering jobs were lost in 2022. They were lost because every company overhired from 2020-2022 and they have to absorb it given the drop in activity once the Pandemic was over.
Historically, the R&D payroll just wiped out same year revenue and you essentially did cash accounting. After Section 174, you had to finance the R&D by borrowing or just hiring less.
It also affects wildly unprofitable companies that have burned lots of cash and never made any money.
And you do “lose” the tax credits upon acquisition - they’re not only time-shifted, they are company-shifted.
Yes, from a value perspective you do not lose the tax credits. But from a "cash" perspective, how do I pay my tax bill in years 1, 2, 3, 4?
Some sort of cultural zeitgeist occurred, but in terms of symptoms I saw with my own eyes, I think ZIRP ending (projects getting axed) and layoffs starting (projects getting filled within ~24 hours) were huge drivers. I have no proof.
The Twitter layoffs perhaps?
So there's a bit of circular causality here. AI is a cause of the Twitter layoffs, and others are arguing that the Twitter layoffs may be a cause of other labor force shrinkage. If so then the Twitter layoffs are a costly signal that AI will impact the labor force and the shrinkage downstream of them is AI related.
The Twitter layoffs were because the company was hemorrhaging money and Musk is an egomaniac.
Can you walk me through your thought process here?
Elon talked shit online and then fought hard to wriggle out of buying Twitter after promising to pay the funny weed sex number for it.
And he fired employees because he's cheap and only keeps people who yes man him. You can read the complaint yourself:
https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/twitter-employee-laws...
The value they add is their corpus of previous work to lean on and sell. And anybody at the firm can reference that. But it's always almost the junior level consultants doing the work, and a bunch of c-suites trying to manage it and sell it.
So when you work with a firm like this, you are going to get a team who has managed a similar project as yours, but it usually ends up being generic and trying to repeat past successes.
I really think that's where some of the boutique firms are being different.
Instead of just saying "here is our Lean Six Sigma team", they can say "we've got these four people who are perfect for technical implementation, and here is a project manager who has done almost exactly this before, and here is a RevOps person who has worked in your actual industry".
Maybe someone is an expert on some super obscure domain. They might not qualify for a full time consultant position at a big 3 firm, can suddenly be pulled in on projects that are their specialty.
Mostly these boutique firms can put together a more highly specialized and focused team than the prebuilt teams at a place like Bain or McKinsey.
Oct 2022 recorded the lowest for S&P 500 since COVID (till now).
COVID assistance was over. Vaccination reached a critical majority. On Sep 2022, Biden declared "COVID-19 pandemic was over" [1].
Businesses got a reality check.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_the_Unite...
All the more reason to believe that while correlated, LLMs are certainly not the largest contributor, or even the cause of the job market weakness for young people. The more likely and simple explanation is that there are cracks forming in the economy not just in the US but globally; youth employment is struggling virtually everywhere. Can only speculate on the reasons, but delayed effects from questionable monetary and fiscal policy choices, increasing wealth gaps, tariffs, geopolitics, etc. have certainly not helped.
Interesting point. With Baby Boomers retiring everywhere and fertility falling everywhere, one would expect fierce competition for young workers.
Anecdata: I spent quite a bit of time driving around office parks in Eagan, MN. Most of them are dead--really, really dead. Vacant offices everywhere, the hotel that used to cater to business travelers is shuttered and the parking lot looks like a jungle. I can't peg exactly when all this took place because I haven't worked in that area in several years, but probably the effects of 2020, the remote work culture, and now the layoff hangover. I see a lot of people in their 50s and 60s working retail jobs right now. They often look like folks who would have been working in an office someplace.
Looking at the paper [0], they attempted to do it by regressing the number of jobs y_{c,q,t} at company c, time t, and "AI exposure quintile" q, with separate parameters jointly controlling for company/quintile (a), company/time (b) and quintile/time (g). This is in Equation 4.1, page 15, which I have simplified here:
log(y_{c,q,t}) ~ a_{c,q} + b_{c,t} + g_{q,t}
Any time-dependent effects (e.g. end of ZIRP/Section 174) that would equally affect all jobs at the company irrespective of how much AI exposure they have should be absorbed into b.
They normalized g with respect to October 2022 and quintile 1 (least AI exposure), and plotted the results for each age group and quintile (Figure 9, page 20). There is a pronounced decline that only starts in mid-2024 for quintiles 3, 4, and 5 in the youngest age group. The plots shown in the article are misleading, and are likely primarily a reflection of ZIRP, as you say. The real meat of the paper is Figure 9.
A potential flaw of this method is that ZIRP/Section 174 may have disproportionately affected junior positions with high AI exposure, e.g. software engineers. This would not be accounted for in b and would thus be reflected in g. It would be interesting to repeat this analysis excluding software engineers and other employees subject to Section 174.
[0] https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/...
Most people didn't start taking ChatGPT/gen-AI seriously until mid-2023, when GPT-4 became widely used.
[0] https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/format:webp/1*yJs...
[1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fpl09fAakAE1cFW?format=jpg&name=...
Some of the highlights include:
* Building a Virtual Machine Inside ChatGPT https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33847479 (Dec 3, 2022; 2029 points; 919 comments)
* Disputing a Parking Fine with ChatGPT https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33937753 (Dec 10, 2022; 606 points; 348 comments)
* ChatGPT passes the 2022 AP Computer Science A free response section https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33858844 (420 points; Dec 4, 2022; 455 comments)
* ChatGPT is a ‘code red’ for Google’s search business https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34086462 (396 points; Dec 23, 2022; 636 comments)
* Build your front end in React, then let ChatGPT be your Redux reducer https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34166193 (395 points; Dec 28, 2022; 142 comments)
I wasn’t aware of ChatGPT in 2022 but I was aware that we could not keep data scientists hired long term because several faangs like meta were just dropping 100% increases in salary as the opener to our people for some mega project related to machine learning based on the skill set of the people being hired
because 2020-2022 COVID happened and forced everything remote. world didn't end.
the offshoring boom was the 90s and 2000s, and generally ended not amazing, but now a new generation of leadership saw it could be done, and done better -- video calls to the other side of the globe work far better than in 2004, speaking from experience.
American Express
And a large bank headquartered in Virginia
I think USAA but that was two years ago
I called bank of america’s credit card line and asked for a support agent. A friendly lady answered, she had a southern accent. :)
the economy actually creates all the jobs ever since hunt and gather. the buggy whip jobs did eventually dry up, but the economy continues to create other jobs, paid for by ever increasing surpluses.
The economy neither creates nor destroys jobs. The economy is the aggregate of the jobs.
It was pretty clear by late 2022 that AI assisted coding was going to transform how software development was done. I remember having conversations with colleagues at that time about how SWE might transform into an architecture and systems design role, with transformer models filling in implementations.
If it was clear to workers like us, it was pretty clear to the c-suite. Not that it was the only reason for mass layoffs, but it was a strong contributor to the rationale.
Many large companies were placing a bet that there were turbulent times ahead, and were lightening their load preemptively.
Every one of my engineer friends says the same thing. "My team is 80% indians" and more than half are not qualified for the job they have.
The whole thing is a fucking scam for them, every company, top to bottom. Recruiters, hiring managers, referrals, CEO's. All one thing in common.
I'll take my downvotes, I don't care, everyone here knows I'm right. And those with their head up their ass can enjoy getting replaced and spending years looking for another role.
The idea is they think the current value of the institution and IP is higher than their ability to innovate, so the try to outsource and reduce labour cost as much as possible intending to do the bare minimum maintenance for as long as possible.
This gets compounded by every layer trying to get the most out of the company as fast as possible, hiring in a way that has no long term outlook.
1. layoffs after web3 hiring spree
2. End of Zirp
However I think now, in 2025 is it impossible to reasonably claim AI isn't making an impact in hiring. Those who disagree on here seem to be insistent on some notion that AI has no benefits whatsoever, thus could never cause job loss.
I sense some conflation of causation/correlation at hand.
I see a few explanations for what you're saying, and those might be true, but I strongly believe part of it is investment (particularly VC, less so PE) has hit diminishing returns in tech and which means less subsidized "disruption", which means less money to hire people. AI becoming hugely popular right when this was happening is not a coincidence. And it's not just startups, less investment in startups also mean less clients for AWS and Azure. A16Z / Sand Hill switching to AI is not them just chasing the latest trend, it's a bid to reduce cost on people, which is the most expensive part of a tech company, as the only way to extend their unicorn-focused investment strategy.
My understanding is the same thing recently happened to pharmacists.
so, so many jr hires with no-name online degrees.
There was also other factors, there were covid booms, covid busts, overcorrections, Elon shoes you can cut by 90% and still keep a product running (kind of) and with X taking the flack other people followed suit without being as loud. There is a fairly major war in Europe ....
Still, even fine tuned gpt2 was an eye opener.
And 2022 (chatgpt) fits time wise- the hype came before mature solutions.
Nothing to do with thr mass exodus and offshoring of US jobs.
The BPO industry is GROWING the opposite of standard AI understanding ideas.
Also call center is a good one I was doing research myself and call center jobs overseas have GROWN pretty rapidly over time these jobs are moving not vanishing.
I don’t know why everyone remembers how the manufacturing went to China, and at the same time forgets about it when we are talking about office jobs.
Would not be the craziest considering that AI has to make a ROI. Even if it's not up there yet to do so organically. If you annihilate the entry labor market, then after some time, you have no choice but to use AI because there is no one remaining with the skills. AI is lower than entry level -> No one is hiring new grads -> There is no new talent being developed -> use AI for everything!
I have no idea what this means.
And the second paragraph details the conspiracy is to work together to remove a certain type of employee in large numbers, so that AI tools have to be used in order to make up for that loss.
Personally, don't need that much evidence; are we old enough to remember the hiring gentleman's agreement in big tech?
Let's also not forget one of the main functions of HR, as an industry, these days: friction. You think salaries (and inflation) wouldn't go up if hiring managers had more freedom?
Somehow it has become a heuristic that if caste in, the collusion is instantly dismissed as fiction. Even better that the person who thinks collusion is happening must have a lower IQ than those who don't. How convenient for those who are colluding.
Makes zero sense.
You completely misunderstand corporate incentives.
cf. Matt Levine's thoughts on how Blackrock optimizes whole industries beyond the company level.
have you seen the behavior of CEOs?
the market is doing it, and there is no way for a CEO, CIO, CTO, CISO, et al, to not do AI in 2025. the gains to stock price from the hype alone could be worthwhile, and even if not "everyone else was doing it"
It’s really as simple as that. But people would like to believe that West GDP is higher than global south GDP by xxx amounts and so all of this couldn’t be possible.
If you want an insight inside their heads, there is a Biden speech after the assets freeze where he declares that the Russian economy/country will collapse in a few weeks under the measures. None of this materialized and their bet have failed which is why Trump is trying to pull the US out of the mess.
Of course all of this is my personal opinion. So take it from the grain in my bag of salt.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1z0l0rNebCTVWLk77_7HA...
We can make the model way simpler to make it clearer. Say in 2020 we hired 1000 20-24yo, 1000 25-29yo etc and then we didn't hire anyone since then. That was five years ago, so now we have 0 20-24yo, 1000 25-29yo, 1000 30-34yo etc and 1000 retirees who don't show up in the graph.
Each individual year we hired the exact same number of people in each age bracket, and yet we still end up with fewer young people total whenever hiring goes down, because all the people that got hired during the big hiring spike are now older.
The ZIRP era made companies hire people as if there was no tomorrow, and companies started "poaching" engineers from others, including juniors. I saw some interns with 2 years of experience getting offers as seniors. I had friends being paid to attend boot camp.
Then everyone realized they were training junior engineers who would quickly get offers from other companies as “Senior" and leave. So companies stopped hiring them.
A technology is a tool you can adopt in your toolchain to perform at task, even if in this case it's outsourcing cognitive load. For a subscription company, well, as long as the subscription is active, you get to outsource some of the cognitive load. When Anthropic's CEO says that white color jobs will disappear, he means that he is selling Enterprise subscriptions, and that companies will inevitably buy it.
The only thing that could stop this commodification is some sort of vendor lock-in, but that looks to be technically challenging.
Companies just can't seem to stay focused on their own core competencies after a few decades. On the other hand, even when open projects "die" they can be resurrected ad infinitum.
Just my gut feeling but it seems like closed wins out big in the short term, but open wins in the end. Not applicable to everything I know.
It starts with the kids saying I hate Windows. Then the adults. Then finally the grandmas. Windows will be evaporating marketshare for decades, like a long-half life on an unstable isotope.
And the data for the two decades before that obviously needs to be tossed out because of the one-off nature of the dot-com boom, the dot-com crash, 9/11, and so on.
And before that... point is, you don't get clean data in economics. There's always something big going on, there are no double-blind trials to run, etc. It's called the dismal science for a reason. But that doesn't make it useless.
There will always be something going on, but there won't always be this specific thing going on, and if 100% of your data comes from during one specific crisis (nonetheless multiple concurrent crises), then it is 100% useless. Even with longer periods of data, reconcilliation with longer trends is technically challenging. We've had enough recessions to correct for them in our data, but until we've had a half dozen global pandemics you can't use pandemic data in your analysis.
"AI" dives in and disrupts and then it turns out that AI isn't too I. The disrupt phase where HR dumps staff based on dubious promises and directions from above takes a few months. The gradual re-hiring takes way longer than the dumping phase and will not trigger thresholds.
I've spent quite a while with "AI". LLMs do have a use but dumping staff is not one of the best ideas I've seen. I get that a management team are looking for trimmings but AI isn't the I they are looking for.
In my opinion (MD of a small IT focused company) LLMs are a better slide rule. I have several slide rules and calculators and obviously a shit load of computers. Mind you my slide rules can't access the internet, on the other hand my slide rules always work, without internets or power.
So my advice to high school kids of 2025: right now is the perfect time to enrol in CS. 5 years from now, the AI hype will be over, and employers will be short on grads.
alterative view: the AI hype is real, AI takes over, and no one has any jobs anyway
also a thought: in 5 years the boomers will be retiring in droves as will the first series of GenX and the market, in most fields, should be opening up anyway
It's fun to play with, but LLMs can't reason and are fundamentally unreliable. They cannot be made reliable.
The actual market uses for large quantities of human-like text is, like, autocomplete and spam.
I use copilot as fancy autocomplete and like it, but ~all claims that it will replace SWEs are by people selling AI or people who fundamentally do not understand what SWEs actually do.
It'll probably replace some offshoring, ironically lol
how is that different from the previous decade(s)? How often do you invert a redblack tree in your daily programming/engineering job?
A CS degree is a degree for thinking computationally, using mathematics as a basis. It's got some science too (aka, use evidence and falsifiability to work out truths and not rely on pure intuition). It's got some critical thinking attached, if your university is any good at making undergraduate courses.
A CS degree is not a boot camp, nor is it meant to make you ready for a job. While i did learn how to use git at uni, it was never required nor asked - it was purely my own curiosity, which a CS degree is meant to foster.
You might think you’re disagreeing with the parent comment but in fact you’re disagreeing with the top level comment.
There is a lot of low-level drudgery work which is currently outsourced or assigned to non-employees (mostly young) in most companies. For example, the IT support and maintenance is mostly done outside of the West. This works requires a lot of back and forth. Don't think AI taking over this area.
Also, some work is assigned to young workers to spread the accountability and risk ownership. Not sure if you can hold AI as accountable as humans.
Also, young workers are generally preferred for their agility, flexibility and ability to work hard. There were easier to exploit and if they were unmarried, they won't mind giving all of their time and attention to work for less pay. I used to work in teams that stayed overnight at office to complete projects. Young people are also very cohesive and they team up well.
So, looking at the situation purely from a knowledge perspective may not give the full picture.
AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45052423 - Aug 2025 (629 comments)
We have a stream of cookie-cutter candidates. As if they are clones of each other, it's uncanny. They typically have a BS degree in some foreign university, then a CS Masters' in the US, experience with robotics, then several years of experience in large companies.
And they completely fold during in-person coding tasks. Like, not being able to explain the difference between DFS and BFS (depth/breadth-first search). Or being able to write a simple custom metric and train a network in Pytorch.
And a similar story for the frontend developer position.
We now literally have to add more filters to not get inundated by underqualified candidates. These filters will make it harder for beginners to even _get_ to the resume review stage.
No conclusions from me, but something's been broken in the CS jobs market for a while.
Oh wait, wrong distopian future.
Education is an externality.
They can, if they practice with feedback 8 hours a day.
Typically, young people, as a group, are not famous for practicing something 8 hours a day.
This means, for the group as a whole, it is true.
Children can work open source and rack up experience there. This is like the most humane way in any job ever to get experience as a minor.
While open source may be okay for coding, there are other skills which may not be so easy to do from your own home. In practice they will not just do open source and people will exploit them for free work
> The strategic thinking that goes into longer-horizon tasks may be something LLMs aren’t as good at, which aligns with why entry-level workers are more affected than experienced workers.
I think the article is talking in generalities, so on average entry-level software engineers have less experience with long-horizon tasks (e.g. months-long development), though there are definitely the exceptions that prove this rule.
Did Section 174 changes accelerate tech job losses? It's unclear from the paper because they only look at the data excluding tech firms, not only tech firms.
I want to see cause-and-effect: the cause being tax changes, the effect being tech firm layoffs, but they don't analyze the effect.
This does not mean I otherwise would have hired a few juniors. More likely I would not have taken that business beyond the idea stage.
But direct massacres I can personally observe are in translation, copywriting and illustration. Yes, a good person can do better, but for a majority of cases AI has already become "good enough".
Then there is an onslought from just non-AI automation, in e.g. retail and finsncial services. This had been building for over a decade, but the pandemic lockdows exponentially accelerated it.
eng—has twitter really changed much since acquisition? it seems to me like twitter had really great eng to begin with. keeping the lights on is much different from building new product.
I could understand if, given enough time for all of the factors involved to occilate that you could pick out a signal, but that's not the data that exists right now. Surely the only way to identify the first time instance of a cause of decline could only by accumulating a count of clear instances where the cause occurred and measuring those as a proportion of other cases.
The creation of package managers and the widespread availability of open-source repos means developers don't need to write as much from scratch.
The creation of search engines and Stack Overflow did (and still do) much of the useful things that people use AI for (boilerplate, debugging obscure error messages).
Machines have gotten exponentially faster for the last several decades. This means devs need to spend less time optimizing code. And the time to compile and run speeds up, meaning you can prototype things faster.
Why is it, that somehow none of these inarguable improvements to the speed and efficiency of development haven't lead to a a massive decrease in the number of developers? If we take it as axiomatic that AI significantly improves productivity, why, for the first time in history, does that not result in more programming jobs?
Take node.js for example, devs can just sling code out as fast as they can and shit gets done. Then the node.js core devs can optimise certain paths/features after the fact to negate many of the efficiency problems.
However it does annoy me that what this has meant is that many of my colleagues don't know anything about memory management, debugging, or any other more traditional concepts, so we see bloat & OOMs over time that need to be resolved.
Nope coding is definitely augmentive for Sep 2025 and before. Maybe more so than managing.
Then every 2-bit president, leader, manager, CEO out there regurgitates the same thing.
So yes, companies want to save money and do more with leas. It certainly won’t help job seekers or the economy.
>Companies will spend $375 billion globally in 2025 on A.I. infrastructure, the investment bank UBS estimates. (nyt)
which means they have less money to hire and train recruits.
Aside from this there simply doesn't exist another mechanism in which AI can meaningfully affect employment in the long term.
If it wasn't working now, though, we would see those graphs going back up.
One thing that confuses me is that the anti-AI movement has adopted several talking points saying that nobody wants AI. (e.g. nobody wants it, the AI companies are pushing it on us, management is pushing it on us, it just creates low quality slop, the demand is fake, etc).
But if there's no demand, then there's no threat to jobs. On the other hand if there is a threat to jobs then there must be demand (since it competes with human labor in the job market). I'm not sure why they're taking this particular tactic, but it's going to lead to strange comment sections where people won't know how to stay on message as it becomes clearer that AI is impacting the labor force.
A lot of people intuitively imagine that to compete with humans there's some sort of 1:1 exchange ratio. But initially the calculus will be something like a 10 team with plus AI performs about on par with a 12 person team (or whatever the details work out to). So we will see AI impacting job numbers well before AI can do your entire job.
That is what true "AGI" is.
So in conclusion, while AI does have an impact, personally if I would quantify it, it probably won't exceed 25% of the issue. Other factors make up the rest, but everyone is distracted by AI for all sorts of reasons.
My whole career in the UK I’ve noticed a similar thing in HR harems - in many places, particularly recruitment companies but it’s common everywhere, 90%-100% of the HR staff are women who then employ more and more women over men while having a generally poor understanding of the requirements for a role. I can’t help but feel like a group of women will have a natural disposition for adding extra women rather than men, while prioritising communication and networking over competencies like creative thinking, problem solving, generalism, and self-starting.
As an example, consider the claim, "Steam shovel adoption is destroying entry level jobs in ditch digging"
Yes, we want more productive technologies to be used where applicable. We want workers to specialize and become more productive with less hours worked. This isn't destructive at all. Framing it as such is either deliberately misleading or demonstrates a misunderstanding of basic econ.
AI is not even remotely close to the point where it can replace a human working for you, that's just not it. Everybody keeps screaming "NOT YET", and perhaps that's true, but either case, it's not currently true.
However, economic conditions are so that companies now want to not hire, because price rises due to tariffs mean much less spending happening, with the outlook steeply downward. It will very mean widely spread layoffs soon. The first to suffer are new entrants to the job market and the close-to-pension near-the-exit people as well, but let's not kid ourselves: they will hardly be the only ones.
The irony is that to me, this seems to be the reverse of what people think they see: AI is a clear investment target at the moment. It's being accused of killing jobs, but reality? It's one of the few clear investment targets. It is a portion of the economy that is entirely opposing the general trend. AI is not just not causing of firings, but actually is putting a break on the firings (by providing jobs funded by investment). It's a huge positive for the economy at the moment, and I bet it's a huge positive for jobs at the moment. Like most investments, the gains it promises have barely materialized right now: it's promising to replace people but it isn't. Frankly, the only other large investment target I see is weapons. And, while AI can be used in weapons, it's still leagues better than making actual weapons in my book. Nobody is literally blowing off anyone's head by firing an AI model at them.
I find this an obvious insight once you look at what companies are actually doing: they're not killing jobs and providing the same services. They're killing jobs and providing less services, for less money, to try to survive. If AI was replacing people, they'd be providing more service for less money. Money is the problem here. Money is artificial, entirely a decision of society. Where is the money going? Look at the stock market: it certainly isn't going to investors (look at an EU stock market, outside of weapons manufacturers)
And there's the key, fundamentally, businesses' desire to replace people is not a desire of business. It's a government decision. A tax decision. A very large portion of government income is income tax of various kind. People-based taxes. This means: you generate revenue from the means of production, capital (ie. "a factory"), input goods, and people's labor? It's people's labor that is taxed. Everything else is actually tax-exempt. Capital is free (you can spend 100% of your investor's money on buildings, no tax, assuming you follow standard practice). Input goods are free (VAT/Sales tax exempt, you don't even have to pay it initially). You want to keep more of your company's revenue? I don't think enough people realize this: but you lose a LOT more on the people than on anything else. In fact you only lose on people in some sense (because capital and input goods can at least theoretically be sold or more likely subleased for similar value as you got them for, they're "free", or only historically low interest is required). You almost only pay the government for the privilege of getting labor from someone else.
In France, the actual tax is over 70%, if you measure it fully. By that I mean: let's say I pay you $100. Any tax, patronal (employer tax), income tax, insurance, pension (which are all government), import tax, VAT, ... is all to be paid from the $100. You like the product my company makes. You buy all you can from it, you spend all of that $100 on my product. How much do I see on my bank account? $28.7, by my last count. That amount, by the way, is then taxed at 40% before it goes into my bank account, so it's comfortably under $20. The $28.7 is what I could reinvest into my company (and need to buy the input goods in the first place). Even this is not counting many forms of tax that are effectively mandatory for everyone, such as rental tax, garbage tax, park tax ...
In other words, if I didn't have to pay any tax at all, I wouldn't bat an eye to have your work done by 3 or even 4 people, as that would be a much better deal. I'd be looking for extra services people would pay for and provide them.
Now I get that government is necessary, but we're paying for government services in the west by artificially increasing the cost of labor 500%. That is where tax comes from. There's other taxes, but they're perhaps not rounding errors, but obviously it's not what I'm worried about. And you are complaining that CEO's, or AI, or greed, or ... is costing jobs?
No. The fact that in at least one view something like 80% of all efforts (all "economic value", mostly labor) in France is just keeping the government running, nothing more, that is making it critical for the private sector to avoid using labor, to avoid providing jobs like the plague. Oh, and of course, then the government allows foreign (read: US) companies to come in and "use contractors", in other words: to not pay labor tax (Uber, Deliveroo, ...), which they of course don't allow for French companies.
And then, because the government is never happy with a big disaster unless it grows into a nice huge well-fed catastrophe, government makes it really hard to stop spending on people, so over hiring is a huge, extremely expensive, mistake. 100-person companies go bankrupt due to 5 unnecessary hires at the wrong time. I get that this is people's lives we're talking about, but given that the government gets 80%+ of the value of people's labor, I feel like it's perfectly reasonable to ask the government to take care of these people. Of course, they don't, not well.
Of course, it's "companies' greed" that gets blamed for all the effects. Truth is this just isn't true, frankly not even at huge companies like Total. Or, to put it differently, if party A's greed is not even 20% of the total, and B demands over 80%, I feel like a healthy amount of blame needs to go to party B.
The company also dropped 80% in value [1]. I don’t think Musk his value destruction at Twitter is that inspirational.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/02/business/elon-musk-twitter-x-...
And that's what buying it was really about.
The point I made is that firing 80% of the workforce was not showing other CEOs that that is such a value generating move (as the person above me implied).
I think there's also a pinch of "we've run out of ideas / high margin projects" or "we're tired of funding 'platform 2.0' projects that end up creating more problems than they solve".
But generally I agree with your assessment. Especially the Musk effect I think gets underplayed.
As one of the Andreis: they already had us all working for them a long time ago and with fertility rates as they are (and have been for three decades now) around here, there's hardly any new talent to choose from.
Also we got hit with job cuts all the same. For instance, my team is currently working half its usual hours per week. It's not enough to cover all my family's expenses, but I was actually anticipating a layoff, so I count my blessings.
So yeah, 80% sounds about right. :(
Since that time HBO Max was acquired into an org that was an order of magnitude larger. I was downsized out when they cut 20% or so off, but honestly they could have cut another 40% and been Just Fine if the architecture and infrastructure had been built properly.
The backend stuff was super stable. My team had ~3 on call incidents across 3 years.
The front end and catalog systems had more issues. The front end basically used an in house system that was the same idea as react native but originally built before react native, and it was never given enough engineering resources so it kind of hobbled along. The other issue is that we had to support a lot of different platforms, and some used the in house system, some used bespoke systems, and one used screens rendered on a server farm streamed to the underpowered set top boxes because those boxes were complete pieces of trash.
The backend stuff was all amazing though, best dev ops tooling I've seen so far in the industry. True CI/CD, teams deployed to prod multiple times a day w/o issue.
General greater economy malaise over tariffs
> 25% musk (getting rid of 80% of twitter showing every CEO that at least half the staff is sleeping)
That was just a signal to the rest of the capital class that the labor class had gotten too big for their britches and needed to be shown their place. Twitter and all other companies that followed his lead have devolved into toxic cultures due to fewer staff being burdened with more work and asked to "be scrappy" and "do more with less."
Section 174 allows businesses to deduct their domestic R&D expenses.
In 2017 Trump made businesses have to amortize these expenses over 5 years instead of deducting them, starting in 2022 (it is common for an administration to write laws that will only have a negative effect after they're gone). This move wrecked the R&D tax credit. Many US businesses stopped claiming R&D tax credits entirely as a result. Others had surprise tax bills.
Trump's second term work is now to undo the disaster he caused (S.O.P.). Congress has reversed the amortization rule and businesses can again deduct R&D expenses immediately.
This is a good thing rolling back a bad thing. The bad thing might have been responsible for layoffs a few years ago, but it will have only positive impact on 2025.
BBB reverses the changes for years 2025-2029 (what happens after that, who knows) and provides retroactive relief to small businesses under a certain income cap. Large businesses can accelerate amortization, but remain impacted for those years.
I had an internship at a place like that and the first disabled woman of color to apply would have been practically guaranteed a job. Needless to say I didn't end up working there after the internship - if they're willing to break labor laws just to improve metrics then what's stopping them from trying to cheat their employees.
Also, establising a link between DEI, a vague group of very mild and mostly ineffectual incentives, and the rise of right wing ideology is really dumb. No one would care about DEI if it hadn't been made a major talking point by right wing propagandists. If DEI didn't exist it would be something else that would "turn young men to the right".
Don't fall for such basic propaganda. The war on these supposedly unfair hiring practices is being led by rich heirs that never did an honest day of work in their entire lives. Those disenfranchised young men buying the hate are made to turn against their own interests by the very same ones that fucked their opportunities in the first place.
“When you’ve been in the majority for a long time, equality can feel like oppression.”
Just because a system desires proportional representation does not mean it’s discriminatory against the majority. It just means it’s no longer preferential toward them.
I feel the latter option is more likely than abandoning something that is often shaping one's own identity
You can strive for excellence and equality at the same time. It’s not zero sum.
Colleges decide what ratio will be used (and if any special requirements are needed), and in most cases it's 60% standardized test results, 40% grades + some formula to turn that into 0-100 score. This is known well in advance, before even applying to the college.
College has 150 open spots, 230 people apply, 20 fail the last year of high school, the other 210 are put on a ranked list by the points they've achieved, at 150th place "a line is drawn" and that's the cuttof for who gets accepted and who doesn't. They just publish "86.5 points needed to be accepted", and you can do the math at home and don't have to wait for the post to arrive.
How is that not equal? It has worked since literally the commie times.
Private institutions have the job of selecting the best candidates, and they don't have the right to discriminate against any candidates on the basis of race.
In one breath, supporters of affirmative action in this thread will deny that such discrimination exists, and in the other they will justify its existence. Clearly you must acknowledge on some level that it's not really defensible.
It’s like gerrymandering districts and then when people want to move things back to a more normal partition you say “let’s just leave things as they are and not tinker”. But you’re now just advantaging the group that tinkered last.
“The system” itself was incorrect before. This is why it’s called systemic racism/sexism/etc.
Is collective punishment of kids for something they had nothing to do with really the answer?
That's a circular argument (post hoc ergo propter hoc/begging the question). It also sounds backwards.
This is how your argument sounds to me:
1. DEI is made into a major talking point by right wing propagandists
2. How do you tell if someone is a right wing propagandist? They make DEI a major talking point.
This is backwards! Politicians adjust their messaging for the most votes[1].
TBH, this whole talking-point mess was not completely made up. The politicians aren't creating talking points and then trying to convert people, they are adjusting their talking points to what matters to the voters.
If DEI didn't matter, and we weren't constantly under a barrage of "If you disagree you're a nazi", the Trump campaign would have found something else to make one of the major talking points.
===================================
[1] Well, the Trump does, anyway. The major difference I, as an outsider, saw between the two parties in the most recent presidential election was in the adjustment and delivery of messaging.
The Left's message was "This is what we stand for. You need to fall in line in order for us to win".
Trumps message was "This matters to you? Okay, then it matters to me too".
It's not hard to see that one of those are backwards.
1. DEI is made into a major talking point by right wing propagandists.
2. DEI suddenly becomes a core issues for right wing voters.
Conservative politicians didn't adjust their messaging to address what matters to the voters, they made up an issue to galvanize hate against minorities and turn it into political goodwill. It's like the Jews under nazi Germany (but far, far less extreme). DEI/Jews aren't actually making that much of a difference in society, they're just a convenient scapegoat to point to and command hate from the masses.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...
As for your note: yes, the democrats are severly lacking in the populism area. But don't mistake Trump's populism for any actual interest in voters' issues. After all, only a fool would think MAGA stands for equality and against discrimination.
Except for the 6 that just died, right before a local election [1].
[1] https://www.thetimes.com/world/europe/article/germany-afd-ca...
Luckily it gives us the most critical bit of info we could ask for, that Musk tweeted "!!"
In summary this article is shit.
Nobody knows how to actually hire competent staff because it's a constantly changing bar: if you give people leetcode, they start cramming leetcode; if you review their GitHub profile, they start spending disproportionate amounts of time on projects; if you give them take-homes, they spend 5x the recommended time; if you give them real-world problems in a timed interview, that's probably harder to game, but some candidates will send a completely different person along. On top of that, some people just interview really well but aren't good 9 to 5. At a big enough company, you've always got a list of people who you incorrectly hired and want to get rid of.
DEI is a minor barrier to doing that for some cohorts. It's not that you hired incompetent people in XYZ groups to bump up your diversity numbers, it's that you hired incompetent people in every group and now you're unable to get rid of some of the ones in XYZ.
Also, let's not forget that some people are just genuinely sexist and/or racist and/or whateverist, either consciously or unconsciously. What happens when those people aren't held back by HR as strongly?
C-level executives would flag certain job openings as only eligible for women or minorities. I clearly remember a meeting where our CTO declared that he had rejected an extremely qualified male candidate because "we have enough of those".
When some people complained they started hiding the details, but it was still obvious. There would be hiring rounds where the only candidates coming from HR were dozens of women for a specific role. After interviewing all of them and giving several second chances we couldn't find anyone qualified in that batch of candidates, so there was a very tense meeting where we were heavily pressured to just pick one.
You could tell a lot of the candidates involved in this process were catching on and/or being pandered to and they really didn't like it either.
I referred someone incredibly qualified for a Chief of Staff role at a company. Their resume was well beyond what the company could have hoped to find. The executive recruiting firm was over the moon with him. However, they basically told him that this company was looking for a 'more diverse background' and as a straight white guy, he wasn't it - but they were excited to take him around to other clients.
For a few years, the hiring process seemed broken overall, and in retrospect, it didn't do much to actually help the people it claimed to.
I'm all about strength from diversity, but you can't throw away everything to get there.
Depending on what industry you are in, absolutely. I can offer one anecdote that I can personally attest actually occurred. (though I was not the protagonist).
There was an opening for a new, salaried, full-time faculty member after the unfortunate death of the previous position holder. During the hiring discussion at a staff meeting at this (private) NYC college the Dean stated, "we aren't hiring or promoting any more straight white men". They said this openly, and without shame, in front of a room full of people including a well-credentialed adjunct (who happened to be a straight, white man) who had worked there for several years, without an annual contract or any of the accompanying benefits. And, in fact, they ended up hiring a completely unqualified black, LGBTQ woman for that position. The woman was so unqualified and out of her depth that she stopped showing up entirely just a month into the semester. The passed-over adjunct tried to file an EEOC complaint but was told (rightly or wrongly) that since he wasn't part of a protected class he didn't qualify. For the next several years, of the ~10 people that were hired or promoted at this NYC college, none were straight white men.
They never did DEI as for me as a gay man anyway, only for women & PoC.
1) CEOs of AI and AI adjacent companies, like the Anthropic CEO quoted in the article, Sam Altman(till recently atleast), Perplexity CEO, Microsoft CEO etc. It brings them new VC money, investment, and customers who "don't want to miss out on this big trend".
1.5) Media heavily pushing the above CEOs quotes, probably just for clicks and engagement, brings them money. The angle pushed is that these CEOs would know the next trend, because they're developing better models in secret right now.
2) BlueSky appears to really hate on anything AI to the point of personal attacks, putting AI related tweeters on blocklists and bans etc. Maybe coz artists are overrepresented and AI is having a real or perceived effect on artists?
3) Reddit, especially the antiwork side
Has anyone? Other than anecdotes here and there?
* https://www.perplexity.ai/search/what-research-is-there-into...
* https://www.perplexity.ai/search/what-research-is-there-into...
In the episode they aren’t making fun of a regional accent, they are making fun of an affected accent from certain classes. I’m from the area of Colorado where the episode takes place. There is no regional accent for Colorado.
If I’m wrong I’ll accept that. If I’m right nope we learned a valuable lesson about making the worst assumptions about strangers in the internet.
As someone who grew up in the country however, fuck em
Out of control AI is a common sci-fi trope because it’s a convenient allegory for the uncaring systems that determine the quality or continuation of human life.
Of course, investors are loving this because there is no such thing as bad press.
Perverse.
I think the concept that AI sellers are trying to push is that we can work less and be more productive.
Not sure its there yet :-P
And yeah I've seen they are the first to jump on ai anti intellectualism, for the reasons i've stated
It's vibes all the way down.
NYT reported the WHO's early (and high) estimate of 3.4% CFR (way way below the 4% IFR that you claim) in March 2020 [1] but even in that same article noted that this was probably a high over-estimate.
> Is 3.4 percent a misleading number? We spoke to a number of experts in epidemiology, and they all agreed that 1 percent was probably more realistic (the W.H.O. has also said the number would probably fall)
The real CFR ended up being somewhere between 0.5% and 1%, which is way closer to both the 1% CFR the NYT reported and to the 3.4% CFR the WHO reported than your alleged 4% IFR. Which... again... was never reported by the NYTimes.
Neither the WHO's 3.4% nor NYTimes' 1% estimates are "multiple orders of magnitude" above 0.5% - 1%.
It seems like you lost trust in reputable institutions because you've been lied to incessantly on the Internet about what they said when. It might be worth reconsidering the trust you place in whatever pulled your trust away from these institutions!
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/07/upshot/how-de...
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Just for context of how insanely made-up your 4% figure is, in March 2020 when NYTimes was reporting "probably close to 1% CFR," our testing infrastructure was extremely lacking. It would be reasonable to estimate less than 25% of cases were detected. If so, a 4% IFR would imply a CFR of at least 16%. But yeah, as mentioned, the NYTimes was reporting a CFR of 1%. Which is pretty close to what it ended up being.
