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Comment by giobox | Hacker News Reader

Anecdotally, it feels like something materially changed in the US software hiring market at the start of this year to me. It feels like more and more businesses are taking a wait and see approach to avoid over-investing in human capital in the next few years.

It also feels like the hiring "signal", which was always weak before, is just completely gone now, when every job you do advertise receives over 500 LLM written applications and cover letters that all look and feel the same.

The pro-athlete comparison in this article is bit silly IMO- there are obvious physical body issues that occur with aging if you rely on your muscles etc to make money. If you compare to other fields of knowledge work, such as say law or medicine, there are loads of examples of very experienced, very sharp operators in their 40s and 50s.

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Anecdotally as well, but I believe that US companies are hiring in big waves in India and other developing markets. I know people who went from zero contacts to daily messages from big tech recruiters in these countries. I've seen people saying that is the result of that specific US section that expired last year, but I'm a layman, so I don't have the knowledge to debate the reasons.

Honestly, AI doesn't feel like it's affecting hiring needs from the trenches. We don't have engineers sitting on their hands because AI wrote up everything the leadership could imagine.

Instead, we get an economy that feels like it's on the cusp of a fall or at the very least a roller coaster. Poor tax incentives to hire. ZIRP is long gone. And the hiring managers are overrun with slop.

But bosses are happy to say it's AI because that makes you sound in control.

Thank you, it's been all but confirmed that lot of "AI layoffs" are due to reaching a workforce equilibrium from Covid era over hiring.

Saying AI for anything, good news or bad news, is a get out of jail free card for execs who want to appease shareholders.

Who did they overhire? Like, Covid didn’t just increase the number of people in the field. Prior to Covid there was a so called talent shortage. The hiring that did occur was mostly net zero in aggregate. Workers got poached, grads got hired, compensation went to far up. And, that’s what they mean by overhired. They over paid. They now see the benefits of hiring cheaper talent on another continent. Cheaper talent that can use the same tools as you are going to use. AI equalized a lot of talent, the US labor doesn’t have the edge it once did. In a sense, this should have been happening at higher rates much earlier than it did but for some reason investors saw value if you paid big salary to smart people in one part of California for a very long time. Now, the thing that should have happened is happening. And they also realize it’s not limited to California, turns out even salaries in Alabama are high compared to other parts of the world.

There is also much more productivity. But I’m not sure it’s really a driving force yet as with the new productivity people are still just trying to do more with it which doesn’t translate to efficiency. Yet. It might once AI loses its wow factor and is just status quo. I feel like this is fast approaching but still may be a few years away.

Yeah so most of my friends who are dealing with spike in outsourced devs in their work environments are cleaning up the AI slop churned out by offshore people who are slinging code and getting the business requirements all wrong. Their jobs are now to clean up the mountains of code coming in from people who don't really get the problems they are being asked to solve.

Outsourcing seems to come in cycles, where it's tried, fails due to communication issues (resulting in quality issues), then things get inhoused again.

I do think there is some opportunity for AI to smooth out the communication aspect, but I think what we will actually see is larger volumes of poorly guided work coming through for each feature. The AI does not fix the lack of deep systems understanding which is why inhousing is always the antidote to bad outsourcing.

I need to make this clear, there are great devs on either side of the various oceans, the issue is usually communication between two parties with nuturally mis-aligned incentives.

I’ve had a lot of success in past with the Apple approach. I design and architect locally but build it overseas. I think AI and the post-WFH office work culture really helped executives get over the hump / learn to make decisions and lead without being in the same physical space daily. Also, feel like the communication gap is largely a solved problem at this point. It is incredibly common to find English speakers in this profession from any country. The trick is learning to project management. At times, you simply just give the person objective instructions of what to build and the exact rendering and color palette. Or the exact packages you they can use as dependencies. But largely the world communicates together much better than the previous wave of outsourcing.

Don't know why this is getting downvoted. AI as air cover for layoffs seems very plausible for at least some companies, especially the ones that were already predisposed to doing layoffs pre-ai.

> We don't have engineers sitting on their hands because AI wrote up everything the leadership could imagine.

The idea of leadership knowing what they want is laughable, always has been. If anything AI will expose them as the bottleneck they’ve always been.

> Anecdotally, it feels like something materially changed in the US software hiring market at the start of this year to me. It feels like more and more businesses are taking a wait and see approach to avoid over-investing in human capital in the next few years.

My guess is companies overhired in COVID and between that experience and an uncertain market they don't want to make the same mistake twice.

where did the excess labor force suddenly materialize in covid.

the "learn to code" campaign began ramping up in 2013. If you started undergrad in 2016 you would've graduated right into the covid market.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learn_to_Code#Policy_impact

I think the hype peaked around 2016 where Democrats were portrayed as out of touch for saying laid off coal miners could just "learn to code". By 2019 it was a cliché used to mock laid off journalists on Twitter.

This is a great question that rarely gets answered. It’s partially that a ton of student students went to school for computer science because they saw how much money could be made, another fraction is people that switched into software from related fields, maybe with a boot camp or something.

It didn't. The elites never want to admit that they have failed to efficiently use capital for the last 40 years. It's always the fault of workers that should never be trusted. Just continue trusting the elites as they ruined US manufacturing jobs, surely the same institutions won't fail the workers again!

2008 had ~30k CS graduates.

2015 had ~50k CS graduates.

2021 had ~100k CS graduates.

You can extrapolate the rest.

thats only a fraction of all the layoffs

Someone may graduate with that degree only once in their lifetime--or not at all--and be laid off multiple times. :p

We might be able to make a flow-comparison for "entering the field" versus "exiting the field forever", but layoffs don't really measure the latter.

Anecdotally, our firm's Covid hires were just okay. The recent hires are better. So my hunch is the weaker CS candidates were able to get jobs back during Covid, while today, they are left out.

> So my hunch is the weaker CS candidates were able to get jobs back during Covid, while today, they are left out.

Does this mean that your assertion is that "people currently unable to get a job are weak CS people"?

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