According to FRED/Indeed[1], software job openings have been roughly flat for 2-3 years, and they've actually been slightly increasing again. What data source are you looking at?
There will always be steep corrections when they overhire driven by economic cycles or otherwise (and we're living through an otherwise).
That’s a bit perverse. In democracies, corporations ultimately exist to serve society, not shareholders.
I also think that counter points on the inhumanity of firms, misses that economies are an objective way to structure incentives to achieve subjective ends.
If you want more money to travel to other parts of the pyramid, or you want to disincentivize certain behavior, then economic incentives can be set up to achieve those goals.
Expecting firms to do charity is pointless. Expecting firms to optimize under constraints is not.
I also don't see why everyone would dismiss the statements of large company CEOs about why they are making hiring/firing decisions, regardless of what some statistics say.
Dismissing their words, just brings us back to the issue of what is really going on.
And lest it is forgotten - AI is a huge part of the US economy at this point. It is highly dependent on firms spending tokens.
Saying it’s just CEO market speak means we have an AI bubble that is more worrisome.
You have CEOs claiming that AI is driving layoffs alongside CEOs of Anthropic and OpenAI talking about the end of white collar work. All this is then amplified by tech journalists like Casey Newton and Kevin Roose. The biggest public proponents of AI keep telling people that it will take their jobs.
What comes after the end of jobs? Who knows. Sam Altman occasionlly making vague statements about curing cancer. There are vague hand-waving notions of a Star Trek utopia.
But to be honest it feels more like a Cyberpunk future, where the Altmans and Musks get to live cancer-free and the rest of us eek out an existence without jobs or any prospect for a better life. Or maybe it looks more like Star Trek, but we're all red shirts.
Can you blame people for hating this?
The better question to ask is what happens after the end of OpenAI/Tesla/etc? AI may take your job away, but not because of robots replicating your labor, just good old-fashioned economic collapse.
> There’s a funny interview with Mark Anderseen, where he talks about how he never looks backwards and doesn’t have any sense of introspection and then gets into a rambling and completely wrong history lesson. That’s what these guys do.
Yes, we know they are psychopaths and assholes. The blame is on them.
None of this contradicts OP's claim, because at least anecdotally, juniors/interns are getting disproportionately squeezed by AI. Why hire an intern to write random scripts/tests for you, when claude code does the same thing? Therefore overall job posting could be flat or slightly rising, but that's only because everyone is rushing to hire senior/principals staff to wrangle all the AI agents, offsetting the junior losses.
They tend to catch on quicker these days, making companies more reluctant to hire them. It has little to do with AI.
My guess is that AI can now assist juniors just as it can assist seniors, and they'll become competent in the correct skillset needed for the future, just as everyone before them has.