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Comment by 0x3f | Hacker News Reader

I'm not convinced the bad market is due to AI at all. That's just a convenient excuse to do layoffs without the bad PR normally involved in admitting you need to do layoffs.

Also, the Open to Work banner has the stink of desperation. Highly recommend disabling it. It's like dating. Act casual.

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I think it is both a partial contributor but also overstated for the reason you mentioned. The main culprits IMO are over hiring during the zero interest rate period as well as the never ending increases in the supply of CS graduates.

I believe it's not only the supply of CS graduates, it's their training as well. CS education seems to have changed little over the past 50 years. While the skills needed today are drastically different than those needed 10 years ago.

I have little doubt that if I had an opportunity to use Claude to do my CS homework, I would have used it. It seems that the curriculum should assume that college kids are going to use the latest agents and dramatically increase how hard the homework is.

This is like saying that people are going to the gym with power armor, so personal trainers should dramatically increase how heavy the weights are for their clients.

If that helps the clients learn to control the power armour, and if they can later get a job as a power armour operator, then I don't see what the problem with that is?

They won't be fit to work as body builders, sure, but presumably that's not what they were going for when they strapped on the power armour.

Same as CS graduates aren't going to enter a work force that writes code by hand, and shouldn't expect to. The job market requires power armour operators, not muscle heads.

Professional programming without AI assistance is a thing of the past. Much like stablehands or squires or farriers.

You can still do it as a hobby though. You know, for fun. If you want to. It's like knitting!

In a world where trainees are sent directly from the gym to the front lines to fight in power armor against power armor-equipped opponents, they probably should.

If that was the world you lived in, would you go to the gym to learn it?

The question is, what are you trying to learn? There are still going to be problems "power armor" can't solve, like what to move where.

If you want to build strength, the gym is the right place to go. If you want to move large, heavy objects, you get a truck (or power armor, I guess).

Ideally, the people operating the large powerful vehicle are in fact trained in how to use it safely, because trucks (and power armor, and LLMs) can do a lot of damage if used incorrectly

Or that people are doing their driving tests using FSD

The open to work banner is an extremely negative signal. Nobody should use it.

Unless you're desperate to feed and house your family and anything that shortens your search by a day might keep a roof over your head?

I think the point is that the banner is more likely to extend your search by sending a negative signal than it is to speed up your search. Fair or not, potential employers often have a negative bias toward people who are unemployed, so indicating that you’re likely unemployed is unhelpful.

It would be far more effective to spin up a placeholder 1-person contracting firm as your current employment even if it's marginal work for pocket change (build websites for a friend or something).

There's some data from Aline of interviewing.io who says it's a negative signal during a hot market but a neutral signal during a layoff market.

https://interviewing.io/blog/whos-open-to-work-a-tale-of-two...

> Also, the Open to Work banner has the stink of desperation

It may as well say: "need work, bad"

Then the situation could be far worse depending on the percentage of people feel like you.

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