Hacker News Reader

Comment by malfist | Hacker News Reader

Seriously? People still trot out that "over hired during the pandemic" line six years later?

If you look at Microsoft's total headcount over the past decade, it's really not that outlandish, especially if you combine "over hired during the pandemic" with "end of the ZIRP era". In 2019 employee count was 144k, now it's about 223k.

That said, for the past 3 decades at least, tech was a hugely growing sector that provided ever growing employment opportunities. It seems like that time is now over. Even if you take the "Jevon's paradox view" of AI, that is that the cheaper cost of writing software will feed a demand explosion, it's just hard to imagine that many more people will be needed to fulfill that extra demand.

This is why I think it's fair to think "this time it really is different". In past technological revolutions, it really wasn't that hard to see where the new jobs would come from. Now even the leaders of the AI revolution think it will kill tons of jobs. I get a bit worried about the number of young people and friends' kids who decide to major in "business" in college now. It just feels very difficult to imagine a white collar career that will be stable over the next 10 years or so, let alone an individual's 40 year career.

> In past technological revolutions, it really wasn't that hard to see where the new jobs would come from.

I think this is an extremely pollyannaish view of how technological revolutions have happened. In fact, it is always the exact opposite, people always fail to predict where new jobs would come from.

I'll just speak for myself then. The "PC revolution" launched in the 80s. A primary goal of the PC (from a business perspective) was to allow individual workers to do much more by themselves, e.g. in the 60s and 70s you had legions of secretaries and assistants for basically every mid level or higher worker.

It was completely obvious in the 80s, and I say this because I lived it, that you would need tons of people building software and in tech generally as PCs and related tech killed off a slew of those admin assistant jobs.

I'm careful to not make any assumptions here - as it might very well "be different this time" - but by the same logic, you could say it's totally obvious that we will need tons of people to build and diffuse AI systems and workflows into large orgs and SMEs. I have so many friends (in traditional industries) who could easily 5x their efficiency with AI but they have no idea and they need help. I don't see this changing nearly as quickly as AI becoming more capable.

I mean, in the very short term I could buy that scenario - there are a host of "AI consultants" selling their wares.

But even then, I would only buy that for the very short term, because AI is designed to (eventually) implement that step, too. As an analogy, I always wonder who is paying for these "how to use agentic AI" courses I see pop up all the time now. Literally just ask it! I asked Claude to build a course for me to get comfortable understanding agents and harnesses and it did a fantastic job.

I think it was obvious that more programmers would be necessary, but if you look at BLS forecasts from 1985, they expected +~250k programmers/computer analysts each over 10 years, which is basically what happened. Secretarial employment was 3m at the time and predicted to stay basically flat, which is basically what happened.

Typists and data entry work cratered, but overall admin support actually went up.

There are hundreds of millions of workers in the US, and about 5 million computing professionals right now. There are 3.5m workers in admin assistant roles.

The growth in computing employment is totally overshadowed by parts of the workforce. BLS' "Management, business and finance" grouping grew by 19m since the early 80s.

Nobody knows what the equivalent to this is going to be until the economy starts reorganizing itself.

You can't just look at the number from 7 years ago and compare it to today and say "see pandemic over hiring" look at it with more resolution. Microsoft indeed increased hiring during the pandemic, but they laid people off and then rehired more than they laid off. Since the 2022 layoffs tech companies have consistently increased staffing levels.

This isn't pandemic over hiring, its layoffs to create fear and give them an excuse. I guarante you, and I'll put money on this. No matter how many people they let go with this, in six months they'll be employing even more than they do today.

Google has only about 2% more employees than 2022. Management decided that's the biggest the company is going to get.

It impacts absolutely everything. The dynamism from a growing org is gone. Managers have very slim opportunity for promotion. If you need people, you have to find them from another team. I'm relatively new on my team with 5 years there.

Since 2022 Google has killed off like 50 products and services, so it's pretty impressive that they've added employees at all.

GCP has grown a lot.

I mean they added close to 50% to their headcount over Covid. Is Microsoft doing 50% more stuff?

They over hired and are still no where near their pre-pandemic numbers.

Prolly gonna hear it for the next 16

> Prolly gonna hear it for the next 16

Look at this optimist over here thinking people will still have jobs to lose in 16 years.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com