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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

I continue to suspect that the hiring problems are mainly due to massive over-hiring during Covid, followed by layoffs that flooded the market with skilled developers looking for work.

I'd love to see numbers around the "execs don't think they need engineers because of AI" factor. I've heard a few anecdotal examples of that but it's hard to tell if it's a real trend or just something that catches headlines.

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I think execs don’t see the problems we have with AI because you don’t need to be an expert to be an exec. I run into the edges of AI every day. There are things it is good at and things not so good at, and it varies from model to model and context to context (you can have two conversations with the same model, about the same thing, and get vastly different outputs; eg a test that uses different assertion patterns/libraries that are different from the rest of the project). As an “expert” or “highly skilled” person, I recognize these issues when I see them, but to a layman, it just looks like code.

Definitely. The brilliant moments also get cherry picked for social media.

So let them pay the AI to do it, and see it fail. With some luck, it will fail on their watch!

Massive overhiring or not, it's the fact that many (skilled) engineers can't find a job. Many companies were shut off during the past few years and market became oversaturated over the night. Whether AI will help to correct the market creating more demand we will see but I wouldn't hold my breath. Many domain specific skills became a commodity.

Where's the fact coming from, as in it's higher than before? I seem to be getting more than ever recruiting emails, and have felt out interviewing at a few places which we're very eager to find staff level talent.

Personal experience and also from many people I know around. Previously I would receive a request for an interview every two days or so. Lately, perhaps once a month, if at all. Foundational skills that I have were always scarce on the market so that makes me believe that the demand for them is now much much lower.

Another data point is that there's been ~10 companies that I have been following and all of them have been shut down in the past year or so.

And the general feeling you get from the number of HN posts from people complaining about not being able to find jobs. This certainly hasn't been like that before.

We had a huge boom due to the low interest rates allowing businesses to pay developers with borrowed money, effectively operating at a loss for years on the basis of future growth. Now interest rates have risen the need to actually be profitable has caused a lot of optimization and lower hiring overall.

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