Turns out, they never needed those humans in the first place.
That doesn't answer the other side of the problem though, that it's so hard to find work right now, even for folks who would typically be very easy to employ.
As far as more employable candidates go, I don't think executives realize the vast limitations of LLM. You have to remember they aren't technical people. They're thinking managers with no training are going to replace skilled employees--that there was a secret magic button that the lowly employees all knew about and it's now in their hands.
Sam Altman said there were now going to be one-person, billion-dollar companies. Reading between the lines, since there's not enough money for every person to do that, what does he intend for the remainder to become?
I was laid off as part of the initial panic in early 2020. The job market for IT for the entirety of 2020 was dead. D-E-A-D. There was a _very_ small pickup in the summer when people got more optimistic about the vaccines but it waned very quickly.
I'm in the Midwest so it might have been different in the West but I doubt it was that much different.
There was _some_ pickup in 2021, when companies realized the end of the world isn't happening soon, but it was not very significant. IT job market never really normalized, there was some pickup in 2022 but by then LLM hype started causing layoffs to go up and openings down.