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Comment by mongol | Hacker News Reader

What interests me is if this is a natural dip that will be followed by an upturn, or if something fundamentally has changed, and it will remain lower demand. Perhaps the AI boom will decrease the demand from now on. Waiting for better times may be futile?

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> Perhaps the AI boom will decrease the demand from now on. Waiting for better times may be futile?

I'm not claiming to be very knowledgeable about AI/LLMs or the job market or "the economy" in general, but I'd be absolutely shocked to find that the AI stuff has any impact on the current IT job market.

I know that some people are using AI tools to help generate code and stuff, but it seems like those tools can't even generate correct code a lot of the time- and that's with a professional human programmer asking it to. I can't imagine that these tools are increasing productivity so much that it could actually reduce hiring.

How would it not have any impact? If it allows people to be 10% more productive, you need 10% less people to accomplish the same amount of work.

That's considering production stays constant, which shouldn't be the case since new companies are being created all the time.

What about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox ?

That assumes people are being more productive on net. I suspect generative AI is still a net negative in terms of productivity overall. Lot’s of time spent playing with it and tracking down bugs more than offsetting what little benefit it’s providing people.

I’ve heard people on HN suggest it’s definitely helping them, but I’ve yet to see it in person. So ehh maybe they are just working on very different things.

Most companies "need" to grow, so if you did see 10% more productivity, you aren't going to lay off 10% of your workers--you're just going to enjoy hopefully 10% more profit (grossly simplified).

Not to mention that I'm so skeptical right now that I highly doubt these AI tools are helping IT workers be even 5% more productive.

Historically, every time a new web framework comes out that swears it'll make web devs so much more productive, it doesn't seem like that ever causes a noticeable change in the job market.

Never works this way. Efficiency gains will result in the expectation of doing more.

Maybe that “more” will be in other areas of the business or economy and thus lead to less headcount, but given how profitable tech is.. I’d assume they’d be redeployed to build more product

I have been hanging out in a game dev forum where you've got people asking coding questions as if it's chatgpt, except to real live humans who are able to understand and explain exactly what the person needs to do to implement a feature. And they still can't handle it. No amount of handholding can substitute for knowing what you're doing.

I suspect the answer is a bit of both. On the one hand, the era of zero interest rates is apparently over, so that'll effect things a bit. And the end of the pandemic means that the numbers we saw during that time period probably won't happen again, at least without a major world emergency breaking out.

But things will likely improve eventually. Probably due to a mix of laid off developers finally finding new jobs, a decent percentage of developers/engineers leaving the industry, and new companies being founded in future.

We're unlikely to see another 0% interest era, so that's effectively a fundamental change. The changes to Section 174 are fundamental, but likely to be repealed.

I think things will get better, the effects of the above will lessen with a rate cut and probably a repeal, but the golden era is past.

As Nassim Taleb said: "I've seen gluts not followed by shortages, but I've never seen a shortage not followed by a glut."

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