andsoitisThe tech jobs bust is real. Don't blame AI (yet)
https://economist.com/finance-and-economics/2026/04/13/the-tech-jobs-bust-is-real-dont-blame-ai-yet
Feels early to blame AI for most of this. A lot of it still looks like a reset from 2021-era hiring assumptions rather than actual labor replacement
Over hiring is one thing.. but that wouldnt be a problem if there was an endless stream of projects to take that are value creating.
So the issue is not necessarily the over-hiring.. more that the large tech firms are running out of projects to take that are value-creating. Which is not surprising - the labour market in its currently state is absolutely not perfect in allocating labour.
It should be noted that fixing tech debt is not necessary value-creating from a financial standpoint. What engineers think is value creating has nothing to do with what a CFO determines to be a value creating project - whose job is to maximize firm value.
The "value" creation is tied to the interest rate.
When interest rates are low, even low value creation projects are viable.
When rates are high, those exact same projects are no longer viable.
Therefore, i would argue that the labour market is not perfectly allocating labour, but it is close enough for practical purposes.
Value creation is more of a function of cash flow potential on a project than the risk-free rate, cost of equity or cost of debt.
"labour market is not perfectly allocating labour, but it is close enough for practical purposes."
No its not lmao. Do you even know what characteristics a 'perfect labour market' is even comprised of? Go on, surprise me.
I don't think it's that simple. The 2021 over-hiring was a weird time where hiring as many people as possible became a goal in itself.
There were companies growing organizations faster than they could be made productive. They acquired a lot of bureaucracy, excess structure, and inefficiency. The current backlash is trying to reverse the excess structure and middle management buildout so they can get back to more functional teams.
Glad I was over working three full time jobs (remote w2) during that period. I stacked A LOT of cash during that those years that has appreciated nicely.
> Over hiring is one thing.. but that wouldnt be a problem if there was an endless stream of projects to take that are value creating.
I very much agree.
A lot of tech job growth during the late 2010 and pandemic period were frankly BS for a ROI perspective. Late 2010s was really the first time in tech that I started to feel like most of the stuff that needed to be built was built, and increasingly I was working on BS projects offering less and less value every year.
Consider:
- In the 80s developers were needed to write fundamental business software for word processing and spreadsheets
- In the 90s computers became mainstream and there was a huge demand for consumer software
- In the 00s the internet took off and we needed people build the web
- In the 10s the smart phone revolutionised computing and we needed people to build apps and rebuild websites to be mobile-first
But towards the late 10s entrepreneurs and investors seemingly ran out of no-brainer tech investments so increasingly started trying mental stuff still promising tech-like returns – block-chain, metaverse, Web 3.0, [insert traditional industry here] but a tech company.
I'm not saying there's nothing to build or maintain anymore, but I also no longer see where people think the exponential need for new software and software developers could come from, and I suspect this would have become obvious earlier if it wasn't for ZIRP.
But it's not a lack of productive things to build. We also have other trends hurting demand for new SWEs today. Consider how today completely non-technical people can start and scale an ecommerce company without any developers. Things that would have taken armies of developers just 10-15 years ago, can now be largely done in an afternoon on platforms like Shopify. It's actual hard to believe that just 15 years ago selling things online used to be very hard if you weren't technical.
Similarly starting in the early 2010s even being a developer got significantly easier because increasingly there was packages for everything. Things I might have spent weeks building before could now be built in days or less. And another thing that changed was sites like stackoverflow and blogs which help you solve problems and learn new skills. I remember trying to learn how to do things before 2010s was hard, and before the 00s it very hard.
And of course now we also have AI coding tools which don't just hurt the overall demand for developers, but effectively expands the supply of developers to anyone with an internet connection and computer.
So to summerise:
- There's much fewer good investments to be made in new software today.
- Where there are investments to be made you need far less developers.
- When you need developers there's far more people who can do the job.
Even if tech companies are doing well and the number of tech jobs is increasingly, the above means the average person trying to find a job in tech today will find it much, much harder than they have in the past. People working in tech today genuinely should consider a career change if they're primarily in tech for the money.
Market saturation for tech products + new competition from vibe coded startups moving into mature enterprise spaces.
The rate of non-tech business growth has slowed, who is going to continue to buy all these cloud software services? Tricking consumers into subscribing to AI tools or extra storage only goes so far.
Don't conflate businesses that have tech organizations in them, with actual technology companies. They are not the same thing. Technology companies exist as investment vehicles for R&D. There are endless streams of projects when your whole existence is structured around finding endless streams of projects.
Yeah it feels like a lot of this could still be shakeout from FAANG and FAANG wannabes hiring 10x more engineers than needed. I realize Square is a more complicated business than OnlyFans. But OnlyFans isn't a trivial app and it runs on 42 employees. Block had more than 10k employees pre-layoff.
I don’t think that sufficiently explains it either. We all want a nice little bow on a simple, easy target. But there isn’t one.
Block, for example, said that they had experienced record profits… in spite of their, “hiring spree.”
This is just capitalism working as usual, only more of it, faster.
AI has a part in it. So does austerity policies and the rise of a certain political climate.
Without an archive link I think 90% of these comments will be in response to the title only.
I'd happily provide one but I've had enough of being repeatedly trashed and denigrated here for posting too many archive links.
You could look at your denigrators and decide: "fuck you". Internet points are strangely attractive but not vital. You can always post with another account with a bit of effort too.
I understand that you are pissed off (as am I too) but debating with an army of bots, LLMs, wankers and Russians is unfortunately the status quo, quotidien.
On the bright side there are lots of lovely folk hereabouts with a large thing between their ears.
> You could look at your denigrators and decide: "fuck you"
That escalated quickly and I enjoyed this comment a lot
It is interesting that sites like HN have existed for decades and still don't have any real solution for this sort of problem. Is providing a way for us to all bypass paying for this content that cost money to produce actually the most desirable outcome?
Like imagine if there was some 90 minute tech documentary on Netflix that was worth discussing here. Could I just rip it and link to a copy on my Google Drive? How long would that link stay up? I can't imagine long. I guess the conclusion based off how these sites operate is that piracy doesn't count when it's just words.
> It is interesting that sites like HN have existed for decades and still don't have any real solution for this sort of problem.
Heck, I find it odd we don't even model the problem, let alone solve it.
There's no tickbox for "this submission requires additional access", no way to sort for/against them, not even an informal convention like putting [paywall] in the title.
That first link is not relevant to the point of my comment. I was not complaining about paywalls. The comment also doesn't address whether paywall bypasses would be acceptable for non-text links.
Regarding the second link, I'll happily engage with something specific dang said on this topic if you want to link to it, but a link to every time he said the word "paywalls" is not a productive contribution to this conversation.
Given that it's paywall, there's a good reason for that. (gift link below no longer works)
Posts with links to paywalled articles should be identified somehow. (Flashing red title??)
I would prefer to just skip them, but they are not easy to spot.
Two big tech FAANG jobs, org is 95% h1b engineers from china/india. Tons of resumes from american grads somehow never hit my desk, continue to interview random candidates from india with some low quality USA masters from missisipi state. Candidate has spent the last year locked in a room memorizing algorithm interview questions
Why are we letting tech companies in the USA do this?
honestly i have no idea, in some cases, they are working weekends/are hyper focused on extremely boring, somewhat manual work. some of the systems are complicated and break constantly, so they are almost just oncall fodder for manually fixing a constantly breaking high scale service
It’s arguably consistent with the past: https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/essays/histo...
History Times: A Nation of Immigrants | Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
History Times: A Nation of Immigrants | Coming to the Land of Opportunity | Coming to the Land of Opportunity Throughout American history, millions of people around the world have left their homelands for a chance to start a new life in this country—and they continue to come here to this day. People who come to live in a new country are called immigrants. Over the past 400 years, immigrants have had different reasons to come to America. Some came to escape war, others for the freedom to practice the religion of their choice. Still others came for the opportunity to own land or simply for a chance to work and escape poverty. For example, the threat of starvation brought a large portion of Ireland’s population to the United States in the 1840s and 1850s. Potatoes, Ireland’s main source of food at the time, stopped growing because of a fungus in the soil. The Irish Potato Famine led nearly 20 percent of Ireland’s population to immigrate to the United States. Immigrants also came from China at a time when parts of China were experiencing severe drought and starvation. Many of the Chinese immigrants built the railroads running across the sprawling American continent. The Industrial Revolution of the late 1800s attracted more immigrants as businesses in the United States grew quickly. New technology and new ideas helped develop large factories where many new products were made. These businesses needed more workers to keep growing. Immigrants and migrants filled the labor demands of the new industrial order, transforming the nation. Between 1882 and 1914 approximately twenty million immigrants came to the United States. Mass immigration from eastern and southern Europe dramatically altered the population’s ethnic and religious composition. Unlike earlier immigrants, who had come primarily from northern Europe—Britain, Germany, Ireland, and Scandinavia—the "new immigrants" came increasingly from Hungary, Italy, Poland, and Russia. The newcomers were often Catholic or Jewish, and two-thirds of them settled in cities. A Changing Nation By 1900, New York City had as many Irish residents as Dublin. It had more Italians than any city outside Rome and more Poles than any city except Warsaw. It had more Jews than any other city in the world, as well as sizeable numbers of Slavs, Lithuanians, Chinese, and Scandinavians. The government began to pay closer attention to these new immigrants. From 1882 until 1943 most Chinese immigrants were barred from entering the United States. The Chinese Exclusion Act was the nation’s first law to ban immigration by race or nationality. In 1892, Ellis Island was opened in New York as a place to check immigrants before allowing them to enter the United States. On the West Coast, a similar immigrant station opened near San Francisco called Angel Island. Government agents at Ellis Island and at Angel Island recorded the names of the twenty million immigrants who passed through their gates and determined whether they should be allowed to settle here. People on the Move During World War I, as immigration from Europe temporarily waned, thousands of African Americans left farms in the South for better opportunities in northern cities. Between 1916 and 1918 alone, nearly 400,000 African Americans, or about 500 people each day, made the journey north. Although most had been farmers, they were attracted by industrial jobs in places like Chicago, Detroit, New York, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles. Sometimes called the Great Migration, this movement inside the country continued until 1930. Despite many difficulties, both immigrants and migrants forged new communities in their adopted homes. Assimilation of immigrants preoccupied reformers and immigrant leaders. Others believed immigrants threatened the nation and called for immigration restriction. Today, immigrants must have permission to enter the country and Americans don’t all agree on who should be allowed to enter. But there is little argument about the importance of immigrants in our country’s history. Immigration brought people to this land from all over the world. This blend of cultures and traditions makes the United States unique. The hard work of immigrants, their talents, and their ideas have made the United States a great country. This essay is reprinted from the Gilder Lehrman Institute’s American History: An Introduction, part of the History in a Box series.
Because if we didn't we wouldn't have a tech industry?
The main problem with immigrant talent in computer field is that legislators don't understand the difference between IT and Tech product development jobs. IT jobs don't need immigrant talent, so companies like Accenture, Infosys etc. should not be given H-1B visas. But tech companies like Google, Meta, Apple, OpenAI etc. absolutely need immigrant talent, or they will lose to Chinese competitors.
We had a tech industry prior to H1Bs before the 90s. What we didn't have was Silicon Valley corporatism that doesn't value American labor nor American education. It's why SV is so gun-ho on charter schools and devaluing American labor.
Let's not act like we need to import 80k "high tech" workers that amount to writing react components and spring endpoints.
Hardly anything hard that we couldn't force companies to train workers to do, but they don't want to ever help people they just want to suck up all the money in the room while decimating entire populations.zzzzzzz
Also, as an American I don't really benefit if US corporations are doing "better." How does that help the person that can't pay for healthcare or afford to go to school, but they sure can get their serving of Zuckerberg slop? I'm supposed to care about these companies success? Really? I hope they go down in flames.
The problem is that the rich and elite have captured and dictated American tech policy for far too long.
Do you share the same thoughts for blue collar immigrants?
Not sure how you came to draw this conclusion, as there's lots of data out there showing droves of Computer Science graduates here in the states unable to land jobs.
Doesn't sound accurate. Please list some sources here that are credible that explain your point. Just sounds like dismissive bias.
We would absolutely have a tech industry. The richest people on the planet, however, would make slightly less money. It is not an exaggeration to say this is what the entirety of American society is based on right now.
It generates economic activity and taxes in the US and suppresses wages.
Most of the H1 candidates are in shitty roles that are well defined low/moderate skill jobs for giant companies. Hire people whom you can’t actively exploit and those are the kind of jobs where unions can organize.
The alternative is offshoring the work, not hiring Americans.
The smart thing would be to just let people immigrate. Instead we have a weird tiered system with a small number of highly skilled specialists and an army of serfs facing deportation if they piss off the bosses.
Offshoring isn't a given. It's simply permitted.
FYI, these jobs pay the highest in the world. If these jobs are exploitative, then so are other non tech jobs that employ citizens and pay lower wages.
Software devs lost their pricing power due to LLMs but not exactly how most people think.
What's missed in understanding is 'how exactly does this functionality work for this specific case?' or 'can we implement this tiny one off feature in some legacy code base'. Both things are why you keep the guy that wrote it around. And you couldn't really replace him. Because digging into what he wrote was hard.
Now, LLMs can do that stuff better than the guy that wrote it.
Software devs were non-fungible. Now they're commodities. When things become commodities, they lose their value.
I'm not sure why I haven't heard people talk about this aspect. It's the biggest effect on jobs.
While this is true to an extent, oftentimes the important context is not in the code but in the head of the writer. The code is just the fence in the Chesterton’s Fence analogy. And that is still non-fungible and will (presumably) forever be.
> There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”
You're correct that it doesn't answer the why.
But it answers the what, how, and allows one-off features.
So the guy that wrote might (or might not) still have the edge with the why. But that's not the moat it used to be.
In big companies, the why is 80% of the work. I could swear actual dev work is less than 20% of a “developer’s” job at a standard large (non-SV/FAANG/tech-first) company. The rest is holding a lot of really weird organization-specific context in your head to make the right decision.
With my own tiny company, I used to answer questions about my code to support. Supporting the support. I remember doing that when working at big companies too.
Now, my support asks claude about the codebase to answer those sorts of questions. He's better than my memory.
Maybe we've had different experiences.
I am yet to see this pan out in the enterprise. Enterprises are full of mini kingdoms built by VP+ leaders with the tools they prefer or were sold on. And many of these tools are inherently and sometimes by design are cumbersome, expansive and not onboarding friendly. LLMs haven't breached this domain and this domain empirically is 80% of enterprise software. I am yet to see direct examples of llm agents replacing say 4 engineers out of an existing 8 person team.
I work for a fairly big tech company, For the last 2 years, basically stopped hiring people in the US. Only hiring engineers in the India office.