AI didn't cause the tech jobs bust, but it explains why there's no recovery | Hacker News Reader

AI didn't cause the tech jobs bust, but it explains why there's no recovery

vithushansylvester.com

99 pointshacker_v_s64 comments

I've seen multiple other sources that report software jobs are on the rise again. One example: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/11/ai-software-developer-jobs.h...

A different story being told is that the industry over hired during COVID and lockdowns, then over corrected with Ai, and now we are returning to normal levels.

Evidence for that is Apple. The one company that didn't go on a hiring binge during the Covid years is also the only company not doing mass layoffs. What a curious coincidence.

AI is providing a cover story for incompetent executive management decisions at firms worth trillions of dollars. I'm not saying anything about how useful or not useful AI will actually be, but it's clear that these geniuses funded a bunch of dead-end projects chasing fool's gold, and then they needed to free up capital to get in on what could be an actual gold rush.

They are on the rise but that rise is slower than and has not yet made up for the jobs lost despite growth in revenues returning to the industry

give it a little more time and don't put the lost before the gain, we had an overage and then walked that back, it's a different perspective, we don't have to get back to peak soon, the peak was way out of bounds

Your link says the postings are on the rise. The article also says postings are on the rise.

I've heard it's on the upswing again, but then became depressed when I actually looked into job listing.

Senior Prompt Engineer (10 years)

I don't see a reason it can't be multiple facets of varying magnitude.

- AI has made, at the very least, the illusion of not needing software engineers anymore

- The cost of money is both going up in the sense of interest rates, but also in the general availability of it / opportunity cost due to inflation eating into dispoable / investable income and also because mag10 cashflow is all going into more physical stuff like Datacenters and gpus.

- The investing environment is unstable, iran instability, 1000s of tariff changes in a couple years, US demand for loans (to fund their own interest payments)

Given the interest rates a valid explanation is that we are not done with the employment contraction still.

But it looks to me that the layoffs are due to AI but not because the positions are replaced, because capital is flowing to hardware instead of new hires. The growth engine of the tech industry used to be people, now it is clearly gpus. If you have 10 billion in the bank you are not going to aggressively expand your workforce, you are going to build datacenters.

The tech sector is one of booms and busts. Humans tend to extrapolate the present into the future but often these extrapolations are wrong due to unforeseen factors. I was around in the dotcom bust and many people thought the profession was done and "that time was different".

The boom bust thing is a policy choice. The issue are not unforeseen factors, but the legal/tax/financial system with predictable bubble bust consequences.

US monetary policy itself is a bubble. Essentially boomers take a lot of debt, profit off the spread between opportunity and cost of money, simultaneously promising themselves trillions in entitlements on the backs of those who do not get the same starting conditions.

The entitlements might not have been so bad if exponential population growth could last forever, but even a middleschooler knows that has to end eventually.

It’s not the boomers that you should be blaming. It’s the new Robber Barons, and their manifesto destiny to turn the clocks back to 1826, so that they can have their slaves back.

Interestingly, software jobs are recovering:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE

It's an interesting take, thank you for that.

But for the love of Linus please remove that background animation or give me the possibility to disable it, it's distracting.

The writing style is very AIy, as a feedback.

Point taken. thanks for the feedback

More detailed data by company. Ai is most likely the cause. Saying that that layoffs started before does not prove that it is not continuing because of Ai.

https://layoffs.fyi/ai-layoffs/

But aren't these data points based on statements made by companies, a contentious premise because of the competing claim that AI isn't really driving layoffs (rather economic conditions for capital), but rather AI is a convenient excuse as how companies can achieve similar results, with a smaller headcount?

Right. The statements are not at all trustworthy.

No one is going to say "we over hired because we had cheap capital and got careless and over-ambitious" or "we were overstaffed because we were inefficient".

Yes it is the declaration by companies. Capital or whatever that is Ai related is Ai. Are they going to have more capital to hire people again?

"Most likely" based on what?

Look at the data that I referenced.. They have references cited for each layoff from the news.

The citations are from companies passing the blame so they don't look bad.

I have yet to see a big corp using AI to reduce work and therefore not need the employees. It's an endless pit of work generation!

However it's now an excuse to cut head count because of executive poor decisions, and a poor economy due to having bad leadership.

Strange that this page has weird distracting "gnats" flying around in the background. A key rule as a communicator is: never compete for attention with yourself! If you want people to read your words, why add distracting gnats?

Are bees okay? https://beeswax.getflourish.org/

Your username is slop and was created 19 days ago. LOL

jealous

I don't have that. How do I get that?

The “tech sector” is not one thing. “Developer” is not a single kind of job. Groupings like this are not very useful.

Perhaps it’s easier to define companies that are not in the tech sector better than ones that are.

Either way, I think the category still has a non-zero amount of meaning.

If your primary product is computer hardware or software and you serve more than one market, you’re probably in the tech sector.

E.g., Epic Systems is not a tech company, even though all they do is make software, since they only serve the healthcare industry.

We can’t say the same thing about Apple even though they make healthcare products and services.

Even companies like Epic Systems or other customer-specific tech industries like FinTech can get lumped in the tech industry umbrella in the right context, and I generally think that makes sense.

Developer is where I disagree with you more strongly. It is much more straightforward as “a single kind of job” in the sense that almost all of them are affected in the same ways by AI. It doesn’t really matter what company you work for: if you’re a Java developer and AI is increasing output/decreasing hours, that affects your employment status regardless of your industry.

I guess I don’t see the value in a category that includes a web/ui person at a mid sized bank, a backend Java programmer at Amazon and a kernel engineer at intel.

I would say that 90% of the category is doing roughly the same job from a structural standpoint and only a small 10% like those kernel engineers are actually doing something “exotic” so to speak.

Even if you have outliers the category still has value.

Essentially think if we start thinking about “backend versus frontend” or getting down to distinctions between individual programming languages we are almost too dismissive of the ways in which these jobs are essentially exactly the same

There seems to be an analogy here between these kinds of programmers and the many types of "machinist" that were coded in earlier economic studies.

But, these are job categories, not separate industries. I think the industry category would be more about the employer or the product category, not the individual job codes of their employees..?

For C suites, they are all the same, developer guys that do things with computers, and are handled the very same way on their HR Excel sheets.

"computer touchers"

The difference between these roles is prestige among other programmers. I don't know why we want to categorize by vanity.

I have also seen a lot of retirements in the last 18 months. You combine the stock market being on a tear with a paradigm shift in how we work and it's not surprising.

Some proportion of them will be back if we get a 50% pull back.

Probably not. They rebalance their portfolios after retirement to be in safer assets.

Most I know have done a 2-3 year bond ladder to avoid that.

3 months in future and a lot will change.

what we see could be an illusion and next 3 months will be a test of whether it can stand reality check.

Could you elaborate?

>cooked

>youngest workers most affected

Time to resort to agemaxxing.

[flagged]

There is a significantly bigger ethnic cartel manufacturing jobs in US: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50019237

Almost all of these jobs (onshore/offshore) are bullshit jobs. I've been asking people for ~25 years: what do people offshore do? Nobody knows. Jobs are created, people are hired, after that ...

Now, the new craze is GCCs (Global Capability Centers).

Source? In my personal experience what you’re describing has nothing to do with race. Managers / leaders I’ve encountered who want to save money are just as happy to hire in China, Poland, or anywhere else compared to the place you’re thinly veiling your allusion to if the price is right.

> In my personal experience what you’re describing has nothing to do with race.

I have no dog in this fight, but they didn't say "race", they said "ethnic cartel". Using race and ethnicity interchangeably seems as lossy in terms of information as the concept of race was invented to be

Don't play dumb. Cisco and others have already had to litigate intra-caste nepotism disputes between dalits and brahmin--in America--and lost.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23697083

My company made the big mistake of hiring a Vietnamese into upper management. Now he's offshoring and laying off natives and hiring new teams in his home country. Only a handful of devs and software support are still here, hundreds of devs in east Asia.

Have you considered the alternative hypothesis that he was in fact hired into upper management specifically to lead a planned pivot to offshoring, so the company leadership can pretend their hands were clean without acknowledging the plan to rank and file.

Is there data supporting this: "ethnic cartel who refuses to hire anyone but their own people"? I've worked with plenty of folks from this "ethnic cartel" in my chain of leadership and my anecdotal experience is nothing of the sort.

Good luck, you'll just get sinister vagueposting like "If you know you know" because it's much easier to spread these claims without the burden of actual evidence that could undermine the unfalsifiable "common knowledge".

You have said the actual truth

Definitely part of the issue (and the vast majority of people who ignore it because they're too PC to call it out are as well) however it's a small piece of the total pie. There are other bigger economic choices that are worse and causing more immediate harm

Sure, it's not the capitalist vore machine that needs to increase growth every quarter, so it does to tech industry what was done to automobile industry in the 60s.

We're not allowed to talk about it.

Is there data supporting this: "ethnic cartel who refuses to hire anyone but their own people"?

I cordially invite you to take a tour of Equifax's entire development floor, or any AT&T campus in the metro Atlanta area.

We're not allowed to talk about it.

You keep saying that but you're talking about it. Surely there are reports or something. Given the Republican trifecta and all the anti-DEI initiatives from the federal government who is the one not doing the allowing in the first place?

Onshoring as the lesser form of offshoring

We looked at 73K Upwork jobs posted in September. 27.6% mentioned AI, but only ~3.5% were actually AI-focused projects.

Seems like there's still plenty of demand for regular dev work. AI is often just a buzzword in job descriptions.

Curious, did you look at freelance/contract work too, or just full-time jobs?

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