Can anyone convince me this is truly an effect of AI, and not just pullback from the mass hiring during and following ZIRP in 2021-23ish? I understand either cause makes it a bad time to be a junior, but would like to hear the argument _against_ "AI is taking our jobs".
(I suspect some very junior jobs have genuinely been taken by AI, but it seems to me that the driving factor is still a return-to-mean after ZIRP).
If it were 2018, I personally would have made 3 SWE hires in the last 12 months. The reason I didn't need to is because of LLMs. Not budget, not anything else. I don't think AI is so much to blame for layoffs, but I do think it is a huge component of the slow hiring. There's just less demand for coders.
I was the first dev at my current company to experiment with Claude Code back when it first came out. Some of my coworkers tried it, and some didn’t like it at all.
But now literally all of us are using it. The company gives us a $100 monthly stipend for it. We’re a small dev team, but our CEO is thrilled. He keeps bragging about how customers are gobsmacked by how quickly we’re delivering new features and he’s been asked if we’ve made a ton of hires in the last year. We’re actually down two developers from when I started.
I don’t love the code it writes, but the speed is unbeatable. We still need devs, and I don’t think that’s ever going to change. But we don’t need as many devs. We’re shipping like crazy with a small team. I don’t think more people would speed us up much at all.
It feels to me like everyone is holding their breath to see how the wholesale "AI can replace people" notion pans out. Whether it proves true or not, betting on the wrong result will hit hard so few want to go all in (outside of the companies that produce the tech itself). If there's anything "AI" has been able to ship at scale, it's uncertainty.
Personally I think it’s “None of the Above”. Frankly I own several projects that I really wish AI would do better at maintaining or enhancing (please don’t reply with “you’re holding it wrong messages”).
At least with my org and a lot of my friends companies, they’ve just kind of stopped building (non-AI) features? Not completely, but like a 70% reduction. And that’s apparently fine with the market, since AI promises infinite productivity in the future. As an example Amazon had a massive outage recently, like a world-scale, front page news outage. Then they followed it up with a massive layoff. In 2018 logic the markets probably would have been like “this company is fucked people are going to start moving out of AWS if they can’t promise reliability”. In 2025 logic, it barely even registers. I guess the assumption is that even with less employees they’ll be AWS can be even more stable in the future because of better AI. Even companies who _should_ be more concerned with reliability aren’t because _they’re too concerned about their next big AI move_.
I guess in the end I still think it’s about AI but more about how companies are reacting to AI rather than replacing too many jobs.
AI is increasing the capacity of existing employees and I think we're all still discovering, everyday, better ways to leverage it even more. So when the question comes of hiring a new teammate, the value they'd bring to the table needs to be convincingly more than what I can expect to achieve alone with AI.
I think the glut is ZIRP, but the lack of recovery (or very slow pickup) is AI.
My rule on this is that you can only judge your coworker’s productivity never your own. People are horrible at judging their own productivity, and AI makes it really easy to just dump a bunch of work on someone else.
It’s mostly ZIRP hangover. The over hiring in those years was ludicrous.
AI is having some effect at the margins but it’s mostly an excuse.
Companies always prefer to avoid saying they are just laying people off. It can be a negative market signal to investors, which is paradoxical, since it might indicate lower growth expectations. It also creates possible exposure to lawsuits depending on the circumstances and state.
The nice thing about AI as an excuse is you can say to your investors and board “we are shedding cost but still growing and in fact our productivity is up because we are leveraging AI!”
As companies tighten their belts, they’re quicker to cut low performers that had been hanging around for too long anyway because:
1) cost reduction
2) companies had been lazy at getting rid of low performers when the market was hot and they didn’t need to cut (and couldn’t find better devs to replace them anyway)
3) with the market this skewed towards employers, you can replace low performers with better talent anyway because everyone’s looking
Maybe they are just calling the jobs by different names? It seems like names of roles are constantly shifting. "Data scientist" is a term that is going out of fashion.
Jobs don't have to be exclusive to a single site. Pretty much every job gets posted everywhere (usually done automatically by your HRIS/ATS software). Job boards will even scrape each other for postings. LinkedIn is notorious for this, which is why it has so many outdated listings.
Those are not "tech jobs" for the most part, they are business support jobs.
Data scientist is an exception based on title, but in my experience there are a large number of people with that title who have never heard of the scientific method, let alone could apply it with any rigor.
I'm sure LLMs are taking some of these jobs, but a lot of the decrease is probably due to general cutbacks on overhead and a realization that they produce limited value.
We were told that "everyone needs to learn how to code", to the thunderous applause of all corporate stooges.
It is hard to tell what is really going on. No company will admit that they are firing, e.g., DEI hires from 2023. I have seen some open source CoC loudmouths being fired, but that is not enough to establish a large trend.
I’d recommend talking to people in the trades first. Not saying it can’t be a good move, but it is definitely hard and has its own huge downsides like poor working environments, long hours, and years to actually get into decent paying roles.
Faddish career advice is usually bullshit, or it’s too late and the bus it’s telling you to jump on left the stop years ago.
Can anyone convince me this is truly an effect of AI, and not just pullback from the mass hiring during and following ZIRP in 2021-23ish? I understand either cause makes it a bad time to be a junior, but would like to hear the argument _against_ "AI is taking our jobs".
(I suspect some very junior jobs have genuinely been taken by AI, but it seems to me that the driving factor is still a return-to-mean after ZIRP).
If it were 2018, I personally would have made 3 SWE hires in the last 12 months. The reason I didn't need to is because of LLMs. Not budget, not anything else. I don't think AI is so much to blame for layoffs, but I do think it is a huge component of the slow hiring. There's just less demand for coders.
I was the first dev at my current company to experiment with Claude Code back when it first came out. Some of my coworkers tried it, and some didn’t like it at all.
But now literally all of us are using it. The company gives us a $100 monthly stipend for it. We’re a small dev team, but our CEO is thrilled. He keeps bragging about how customers are gobsmacked by how quickly we’re delivering new features and he’s been asked if we’ve made a ton of hires in the last year. We’re actually down two developers from when I started.
I don’t love the code it writes, but the speed is unbeatable. We still need devs, and I don’t think that’s ever going to change. But we don’t need as many devs. We’re shipping like crazy with a small team. I don’t think more people would speed us up much at all.
It feels to me like everyone is holding their breath to see how the wholesale "AI can replace people" notion pans out. Whether it proves true or not, betting on the wrong result will hit hard so few want to go all in (outside of the companies that produce the tech itself). If there's anything "AI" has been able to ship at scale, it's uncertainty.
Is it that LLMs are making your devs that much more efficient?
Personally I think it’s “None of the Above”. Frankly I own several projects that I really wish AI would do better at maintaining or enhancing (please don’t reply with “you’re holding it wrong messages”).
At least with my org and a lot of my friends companies, they’ve just kind of stopped building (non-AI) features? Not completely, but like a 70% reduction. And that’s apparently fine with the market, since AI promises infinite productivity in the future. As an example Amazon had a massive outage recently, like a world-scale, front page news outage. Then they followed it up with a massive layoff. In 2018 logic the markets probably would have been like “this company is fucked people are going to start moving out of AWS if they can’t promise reliability”. In 2025 logic, it barely even registers. I guess the assumption is that even with less employees they’ll be AWS can be even more stable in the future because of better AI. Even companies who _should_ be more concerned with reliability aren’t because _they’re too concerned about their next big AI move_.
I guess in the end I still think it’s about AI but more about how companies are reacting to AI rather than replacing too many jobs.
No. ZIRP hangover all the way.
AI is just a plausible scapegoat that sounds hip.
AI is increasing the capacity of existing employees and I think we're all still discovering, everyday, better ways to leverage it even more. So when the question comes of hiring a new teammate, the value they'd bring to the table needs to be convincingly more than what I can expect to achieve alone with AI.
I think the glut is ZIRP, but the lack of recovery (or very slow pickup) is AI.
I think smart use of free LLM chat tools has increased my productivity by maybe 50%.
Nothing fancy. No Claude code, Codex, Cursor, Etc. Just focused Q&A with mostly free Gemini models.
I've been writing software for 25 years, though.
My rule on this is that you can only judge your coworker’s productivity never your own. People are horrible at judging their own productivity, and AI makes it really easy to just dump a bunch of work on someone else.
It’s mostly ZIRP hangover. The over hiring in those years was ludicrous.
AI is having some effect at the margins but it’s mostly an excuse.
Companies always prefer to avoid saying they are just laying people off. It can be a negative market signal to investors, which is paradoxical, since it might indicate lower growth expectations. It also creates possible exposure to lawsuits depending on the circumstances and state.
The nice thing about AI as an excuse is you can say to your investors and board “we are shedding cost but still growing and in fact our productivity is up because we are leveraging AI!”
No tech is dead, 2015 i got endless interviews with a barely functional chrome extension. Today your expected to know everything.
Particularly spelling and grammar.
I wish I could hang out in the server closet, going long periods of time without coworker interaction, but you can't get far like that.
Communication skills matter.
Original source instead of Business Insider blogspam - https://www.hiringlab.org/2025/11/20/indeed-2026-us-jobs-hir...
Another thing I’m seeing from the employer side:
As companies tighten their belts, they’re quicker to cut low performers that had been hanging around for too long anyway because:
1) cost reduction
2) companies had been lazy at getting rid of low performers when the market was hot and they didn’t need to cut (and couldn’t find better devs to replace them anyway)
3) with the market this skewed towards employers, you can replace low performers with better talent anyway because everyone’s looking
Maybe they are just calling the jobs by different names? It seems like names of roles are constantly shifting. "Data scientist" is a term that is going out of fashion.
Pretty large claim to insinuate Indeed can't even tell when their own users are simply shifting terms around...
This is the company so large, their jobs data was used in lieu of the Fed's jobs data when the gov was shut down.
Is Indeed seeing much of the tech job market? I never considered looking for a job there over LinkedIn.
Jobs don't have to be exclusive to a single site. Pretty much every job gets posted everywhere (usually done automatically by your HRIS/ATS software). Job boards will even scrape each other for postings. LinkedIn is notorious for this, which is why it has so many outdated listings.
I’ve actually seen an increase in recruiter emails in Toronto. Not sure if it’s just me though.
Those are not "tech jobs" for the most part, they are business support jobs.
Data scientist is an exception based on title, but in my experience there are a large number of people with that title who have never heard of the scientific method, let alone could apply it with any rigor.
I'm sure LLMs are taking some of these jobs, but a lot of the decrease is probably due to general cutbacks on overhead and a realization that they produce limited value.
We were told that "everyone needs to learn how to code", to the thunderous applause of all corporate stooges.
It is hard to tell what is really going on. No company will admit that they are firing, e.g., DEI hires from 2023. I have seen some open source CoC loudmouths being fired, but that is not enough to establish a large trend.
Now it’s “everyone get into the trades!”
I’d recommend talking to people in the trades first. Not saying it can’t be a good move, but it is definitely hard and has its own huge downsides like poor working environments, long hours, and years to actually get into decent paying roles.
Faddish career advice is usually bullshit, or it’s too late and the bus it’s telling you to jump on left the stop years ago.