Then what is causing hiring to be so low, or the layoffs? Just a soft job market in general? The economy is actually tanking, not just "AI" jobs.

Did hiring managers just pump the brakes "just in case this AI thing is real". So we should see some big spike in hiring now that we know AI isn't going to do everything?

Or, the actual real numbers of hiring, is for real an indicator that AI is already taking jobs, or reducing jobs. Teams of 5, can now be teams of 2 or 3.

In my mind it’s simple, at least in tech it was massive over hiring during the pandemic that is being reduced. In many fields though such as science it’s due to the federal government. Anytime there is economic uncertainty there will be less hiring and people holding their jobs without much movement upwards. Fresh grads or those in early or late career are screwed again, similar to 2008.

It's quite region-specific, I think. The big SV tech companies have slowed hiring, and some are doing layoffs. And, obviously, they're global companies so that's had some impact on the rest of the world.

But apart from that, is there really so much of a problem?

In London, there seems to be a bit of a boom going on - in both established tech and the startup scene. The EU is, as ever, a mixed bag but there doesn't seem to any sort of rout even in places like Dublin which are most exposed to the US. India seems to be doing well, as does China. The Gulf states are hurting - perhaps due a downturn in the influencer & crypto markets, but just as likely a result of the US war on Iran.

If the pain is concentrated in the US, then it's most likely a result of local political or economic conditions rather than some sort of global AI apocalypse.

I think to some extent is that the right candidates and employers are not meeting.

Working at a ~1k employee company, we have been trying to hire both junior and senior devs. Out of ~10 interviews I conducted for junior, only 2 was able to program a linked list, and even that was with hints. It was not much better for senior(more system design question instead).

I understand that leetcode questions are (and have been) outdated, but linked list for somebody fresh out of school seems reasonable.

And this overlooks all the people using ai to cheat on the interview.

I would expect in this market we would have better candidates. But for us it was a challenge to hire.

And let’s not even get started with all the ai generated resumes and candidates that don’t actually exist, or have the experience they say they do. Really a waste of my time to interview.

The recruitment process is not made for a world where anybody can just copy paste the job req and generate a resume that fits everything.

There are several things: * economic uncertainty (wars, energy shocks, etc) * policies chaos * end of free money (interest rates)

CEOs say we are in a low fire, low hire economy. They view AI as important but not transformative.

https://www.conference-board.org/topics/CEO-Confidence/

AI could be good enough to dampen hiring without being good enough to cause an apocalypse. for all we know it’s plateauing at its ability to write code to match predefined specs (simplification), which is not sufficient to replace most jobs entirely.

AI has the mind share but I guess it's not hitting the bottom line enough for tech companies to grow.

If anything it feels like AI has sucked the air out of the room as far as investment dollars goes.

It has been said here ad nausea - overhiring during covids, everybody was cargo culting amazon but there was only 1 amazon. Some folks were fired right when that whole charade with massive restrictions ended overnight, some were left around because times were good and money cheap. Thats over now so next waves.

In many corporate places including mine, software dev team's work is maybe 20% coding, and rest is simply getting things delivered to production and maintaning existing stuff. Nothing keeps working for long if left unattended. And there always multiple layers of test envs to manage, syncing with rest of the projects, troubleshooting/bugfixing, deliveries.

Llms won't help a nanometer here unless companies restructuralize their IT from ground up, firing entrenched teams/managers doing half-nothing. So ie if our team would went from 5->2, we would have 40% of the velocity, maaaybe 50%. Realistically, probably even less (since env maintenance is constant drag on productivity regardless on team's size)