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Comment by AbsurdCensor | Hacker News Reader

This isn’t the first study showing this though. It’s pretty simple, programmers and IT were severely overhired during the pandemic, there are massive job losses now, and it’s easy to blame AI when in reality there are a lot of economic factors and AI isn’t increasing productivity as much as anyone would think.

Maybe the future will change that for very specific things, but I think people should be learning and preparing for that, which isn’t any different than what everyone has been told in every job market since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

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I personally hope that AI continues not to result in a noticeable negative impact on employment and that pandemic over-hiring turns out to be the major factor for all of the layoffs.

I'm nervous that the studies which show that so far don't seem to be taking the 2026 improvements in coding and general agents into account.

Is this genuine concern or is it stealth-marketing? It's hard to tell when someone is so publicly benefiting off the hype.

What the heck would I be "stealth-marketing" here?

It's genuine concern. I do not want to live in a dystopia where AI results in mass unemployment. That would suck, even for the people who manage to stay employed.

I trust you when you say that.

> What the heck would I be "stealth-marketing" here?

Cynically, "thought-leaderishness".

I've been spending a lot of my time these days outlining why we can't "just make an agent for it" to CEOs who read blogs like yours. They can't distinguish a production system from a quick HTML tool from a guy whose job doesn't depend on it working.

One of the goals of my blog is to help CEOs who read it not make stupid decisions. I aim to be a counter to the breathless LinkedIn hype they are exposed to everywhere else.

Looking foward to the generated images of a CEO riding a toilet

No offense but wouldn’t being an AI booster run contrary to this goal? I imagine being an Ed Zitron type would be more conducive with that, albeit dishonest if you don’t genuinely believe it.

I wrote about this back in March 2023: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Mar/11/llama/#use-this-for-go...

> I think this is going to have a huge impact on society. My priority is trying to direct that impact in a positive direction.

> It’s easy to fall into a cynical trap of thinking there’s nothing good here at all, and everything generative AI is either actively harmful or a waste of time. [...]

> I’m going to continue exploring and sharing genuinely positive applications of this technology. It’s not going to be un-invented, so I think our priority should be figuring out the most constructive possible ways to use it.

That's been my focus ever since: try and use whatever influence I have to nudge things in a positive direction, and help people figure out how they can use this technology in a way that is beneficial both to them and to other people.

>programmers and IT were severely overhired during the pandemic

1) I hesitate to believe that losses were disproportionately technical roles as opposed to administrative.

2) Over-hired by what metric? It's well known that hiring never fully recovered after the GFC; was the recruitment post-pandemic just bringing us to parity with where we had been 20 years earlier?

Not to say that I disagree with your following point. The AI overspending and the layoff cost-cutting are not in a direct causal relationship; both are rather symptoms of a common corporate pathology.

They were hired at a higher rate than anytime since the 90s. In the US they ballooned by almost 50%. So when you take layoffs in consideration, the US is still has 25% more programmers than it did prior to the pandemic. And looking at the hiring rates and who is getting hired in programming, it looks like companies aren’t hiring entry level basically at all at this point, so shows the market is still over saturated. No wonder coding camps and CS majors are not being pushed any longer because it’s not a great market for them.

The hiring rate can be high while companies are still understaffed, and I think that's the case. A US that has 25% more programmers than it did prior to the pandemic is likely still some double-digit or triple-digit percentage short of the number of programmers it SHOULD have in order to house productive businesses that aren't constantly burning through workers (and consequently missing out on the development of deep institutional knowledge). I'm unconvinced that burning capital on data centers and seven-figure ICs was the right move, compared to building a solid and stable workforce.

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