Tech jobs have dried up

There have been repeated promises by congress to fix it but these efforts have failed so far. The latest attempt, HR7024, received overwhelming support in the house but stalled in the senate over objections by Idaho senator Mike Crapo and was later voted down (mostly by senate Rs, but also notable by a handful of progressive Ds).

> Companies outside the tech industry are also adding AI talent. “Five years ago we did not have a board saying to a CEO where’s our AI strategy? What are we doing for AI?”

Sounds like the AI fad is sucking all the oxygen out of the room. I wish these CEOs had the courage to tell their stupid, uncreative, trend-following boards: "Nothing. Our AI strategy is nothing. We will continue to invest in our core business rather than chasing the latest trend you read about in Harvard Business Review." But they don't. They have no backbone and are about as uncreative and unfocused as their boards.

  > Employment for software engineers has cooled as resources shift toward developing artificial intelligence

as i read recently, "god's plan for me doesn't involve linkedin".

Another is an engineering manager who got another job with a 5% pay cut.

The software engineer employment index is now at 80, relative to 100 in 2018.

They complain about wages that went up by just 0.95%.

This isn’t a bust - it’s just a boom that’s over for now.

Discussion on other url: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41590688

We're living the dream guys. I can't wait for AGI, so it can get even better!

> Moore, who learned how to code by taking online classes, says not having a college degree didn’t stop him from finding work six years ago.

> Myron Lucan, a 31-year-old in Dallas, recently went to coding school

> nontechnical workers in the industry, including marketing, human resources and recruiters, have been laid off multiple times

THIS is the issue. If you have a CS degree (EDIT: And Experience, internship or FT), you will find some job.

If you went to a coding bootcamp, are a self taught programmer, and/or are working in a non-technical role you don't have an edge compared to the multiple recent and mid-career graduates who have the same experience AND a college degree.

I've been frank about this multiple times - if you don't have fundamental skills and knowledge in Algorithms and Systems (an actual Data Structures, Algorithms, and OS class), no offense but you are just a script monkey.

As a hiring manager, I pay the big bucks for demonstrated domain experience AND critical thinking skills. If I need boilerplate code EPAM and TCS (and in 10 years AI-driven code generation platforms) can do that for me.

Usually, when a recession(or hypothetical one) occurs, expensive work forces can’t be paid adequately or adjustments become expensive, so employers try to suppress wage by doing risky layoff[2]. That then becomes a trend for other insignificant players to also follow. After a layoff, expectation for inflation adjustment disappears because one has bills to pay, family to feed, hence desperation leads to wage stagnation.

Then suddenly after 1-2 years hiring boom begins and the wage skips a few cycle of correction but most with decent experience can command good pay despite lower adjustments.

One problem with such play is that, big players can hold out for few years before the dire consequences of the layoff begin to emerge, but before things get serious they start hiring again. The sad part is that, small players are screwed because they are now left with consequences and expense of hiring new workforce.

Also this time it is not only about wage suppression, a massive covert selling of “AI as replacement for those pesky expensive code monkeys” is being peddled(if you look between the lines carefully on layoff/poor productivity/ ai increases productivity play). This will have consequences much dire for the smaller players scrambling to drink the AI coolaid without understanding how it helps, because by the time money had been wasted, the cost will be manyfold to recover the productive workforce and some will fail and become insolvent, but AI will become common place and just another tool like class generator, advanced IDE, no-code tools, uml-to-class generator.

AI(we call these LLMs now) of current generation is expensive and it needs massive investments to become viable(think of main frames of older decades), but we are past the age of when saying something will be useful and getting money because most business saw similar(blockchain/no-code/outsourcing/offshoring) trends before. So the same old play, “productivity gains with this cool tech minus the cost of a human” gets big management excited. Once investment keeps flowing, more development and innovation will take place in AI(LLMs) space and it will get cheaper eventually(mainframe to your smartphone) but until then peddling is needed to fund these gambles.

I see for what the trend it is, I hope others see it too.

[1] I call people learning to code(without formal education on the topic) and then write rote code on what they learned as translator. Code-Monkey is very insulting and should not be a term we use against other human beings.

[2] Like I said, it is short term risky because if things go south too fast they can hire immediately and of course new hires usually have 150% more productivity on their first 6month to a year so any lost productivity of the layoff is adequately compensated quickly.