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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simonw 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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Avicebron 11 hours ago | parent [-]

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

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simonw 11 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

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37488484 14 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

there's wh0res with more dignity than you simon

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Avicebron 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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simonw 10 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	afpx an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Looking foward to the generated images of a CEO riding a toilet

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underlipton 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>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.