How does one explain the drop starting January 2023 (esp for things like Customer Service Rep, which is an NLP-heavy task) when most corporations didnt even start LLM/NLP pilots until mid/late 2023? I skimmed thru the 100+ page paper but didnt see an explanation for this strange leading effect.
SWE figures dropped mid-2022 (almost magically in line with interest rate hikes) and LLM-copilots werent introduced for another year. The paper notes they did an adjustment for the end of ZIRP. I dont know enough econometrics to understand whether this adjustment was sufficient, but the chart doesnt make sense since the labor efforts seem to be leading the actual technology by over a year or more. From informal surveys, LLM-copilot usage didnt become widespread until late 2023 to mid 2024, certainly not widespread enough to cause macro labor effects in mid-2022.
The 2022 drop for SWE is easy for me to explain, and it's not on these analysts' list of factors (though I'm not an economic quant, I don't know how you could really control for it): In 2017, a tax bill was passed that cut a particular tax incentive in 2022 in an effort to be counted as "revenue neutral" despite being otherwise a massive tax cut overall. The incentive in question was a writeoff for "Research and development". This means that in 2022, it got effectively much more expensive to hire anyone who falls under that category, including developers not directly necessary for the day-to-day function of a business (hell, one might argue they would have counted anyway) and scientists of most kinds. That this hit big firms, which have a higher relative amount of R&D efforts going at a given time, first makes a lot of sense.
For customer service, my explanation is that companies literally do not care about customer service. Automated phone trees, outsourced call centers whose reps have no real power to help a customer, and poorly-made websites have been frustrating people for decades, but businesses never seem to try to compete on doing better at it. It's a cheap win with investors who want to hear about AI initiatives to lay off yet even more of this department, because it doesn't matter if the quality of service declines, there are no market or regulatory forces that are punishing this well enough to ever expect firms to stop breaking it, let alone fix it
Love this note. For those interested, this is the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017 Section 179.
For a software engineering business, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017 significantly impacted how software costs can be expensed under Section 179. While Section 179 previously allowed for the immediate expensing of many software purchases, TCJA reforms restricted this deduction primarily to "off-the-shelf" software. Custom-developed software and internal development costs are no longer eligible for Section 179 expensing and must now be capitalized and amortized.
Under the TCJA, Section 179 cannot be used for software that a company develops for itself. This includes the direct costs for the engineers, programmers, and other personnel involved in the development process.
The report not addressing this elephant in the room is a disappointing.
I think it may have been a one-two punch of §174 and the end of ZIRP.
Of note, the OBBB reinstated the ability to deduct R&D, so businesses are no longer required to capitalize and amortize R&D expenses (including software development).
https://warrenaverett.com/insights/one-big-beautiful-bill-se...
I was talking about zirp in another thread and got downvoted. But yes, companies were taking out low/zero interest loans and hiring people in hopes of making 1-2% on it, which worked for awhile. It doesn't work at 4-5%, though. We can't pin our hopes to zirp anyways. But a lot of sketchy activities around investing were accomplished because of zirp.
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Section 174 was the big one that affected how SE salaries could be deducted, that many blamed for the start of layoffs.
However, that's back for tax year 2025, so why aren't we seeing the jobs come back? Maybe it really was 174 then, but AI now?
Anecdotally I saw a post on reddit about a senior SWE in the USA who was laid off and couldn't get any interviews, with their old job outsourced to eastern Europe. And then this month the people he hadn't even got a response back from started requesting he apply for their jobs. Only one data point but the market might be coming back.
Anecdotally in the past month or so, I've started seeing a large uptick in recruiter reach-outs. I had none for the past year (aside from directly reaching out), but there have been 4 cold contacts in the last couple of weeks alone now.
I did a bunch of interviews, I was actually busy with them, earlier this summer. I just can pass the damn system design interview lol ugh
I think if your willing to go to the sf bay and work in an office there are lots of opportunities. Remote and high pay doesn't have alot of options.
Remote is career suicide anyways.
As a 20 year remote employee across multiple companies...in my experience, this is true depending on one's definition of career. If you want to advance high in the company, remote is going to stifle you unless the entire company is remote. And even then something as small as skipping an offsite or keeping your cam off will stifle you. Humans like connection, apparently.
My own career progress was much slower and topped out lower than (in my enlightened opinion) much less qualified folks in office.
That said, it's a tradeoff. I -still- wouldn't move to work in office knowing this. I value my family, time, and lifestyle I'm able to afford in a place I want to be more than making tons of money.
In another 10 or 20 years I'm half sure I'll run the numbers and regret that, but so far so good.
I have been promoted while working remote, so I disagree.
I don’t have 2 different 1 hour commute blocks on my calendar. While you’re fighting traffic, I’m working. While you’re rushing through your morning routine, I’m sitting at my computer catching up on slack. While you’re finding the meeting room, I’m reading the meeting prep material. While you’re getting distracted by Sales in your open office, I’m locked in, midway through a 2 hour coding session.
Did you actually get a promotion with pay increase?
Or did they give you a title and say, great job — now we have higher expectations of you!
It was a $50k salary bump.
What you’re talking about seems like an attempt to placate rather than reward.
Wow, congratulations! Thought that only happened in fairy tales!
Not remotely true.
How so?
No other options though.
I did the sf thing and don't want to go back. Don't want to live in NYC or Seattle or commute over an hour from NYC suburbs.
20 miles to SF, 25 yoe (backend, data, basic frontend), been there done that and all I have got is this automated rejection email
Also overhiring in the pandemic.
>why aren't we seeing the jobs come back?
It was only just reinstated, so it's probably too early to see the effects.
I also expect that despite the restoration of Section 174, companies realized that they not only overhired during ZIRP, but also that they don't actually need that headcount, given the outcome of Musk's Twitter layoffs. There were so many prognostications that Twitter would imminently implode after downsizing from ~8k to ~1.5k employees, and when these claims never came to pass, it was a wake-up call to the rest of the industry [0].
[0] https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/elon-musk-fired-80-p...
I also think it’s fashionable to have a smaller headcount these days. Historically, the dynamics of businesses encouraged rising headcounts, as ICs weren’t as valued as managers (salary caps basically, as impact for ICs is hard to measure unless you are in sales), and managers generally view headcount as a metric to career and salary growth.
So there was just this general pressure from the middle up to grow instead of paying more to existing staff or finding some other way to spend the money. After all, investors generally want you to spend the money you have access to, otherwise they’ll put it to use elsewhere.
It seems that there is external pressure right now from investors, and on to executives, to push headcounts down as there is a general feeling that good companies should be able to leverage AI to become much more efficient, and higher headcounts just burn money and bog things down. Whether or not that’s true is another question, but the perception exists.
I’m not sure if this is a fundamental change in the dynamic, or just a temporary push against it that will eventually lose steam.
> good companies should be able to leverage AI to become much more efficient
I feel like this should be a “both and” situation. AI is not a panacea. If your company has 10 good engineers and a ChatGPT subscription, and my company has 100 good engineers and a ChatGPT subscription, we are going to move considerably faster.
Until someone gets an exclusive contract with AGI, it doesn’t change things.
This isn't how it practically works though. You hit a saturation point where there's no more work to be done. There's only so much software to write, only so many ad campaigns to push, sometimes you just need to maintain, stabilize, and not iterate. If you have a problem that requires 10 engineers, 100 isn't going to speed it up. 9 women can't make a baby in 1 month and all that.
I don't think many people really doubted that Twitter could keep itself up and running.
But that "everything app"? It hasn't happened. The money transfer app ("Twitter Payment Platform")? Still MIA.
>I don't think many people really doubted that Twitter could keep itself up and running.
Oh, they sure did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34617964
Even in that thread, a lot of people were saying "it's only been three months, give it a bit more time."
I don't understand this thread - twitter is pretty much entirely dead, like stackoverflow - in some zombie state before getting the plug inevitably pulled in a decade or so. Its revenue halved since 2020.
Net income/profit is what matters, revenue is largely irrelevant. Your own date is a perfect example of this since Twitter somehow managed to lose a ton of money in 2020 when they did indeed see record revenue, probably owing to over-stuffed election coffers. X's user counts and EBITDA are at record levels. In 2024 it was $1.25 billion on $2.7 billion revenue, contrasted against 'old Twitter's' $0.68 billion on $5 billion revenue in 2021. [1]
[1] - https://archive.is/evLAL (WSJ archive)
Doesn't this forum periodically discuss an article[*] about profit not really mattering in the grand scheme of things? (As in, profitable and growing companies are capable of showing profit whenever they want, and conversely to show no profit if they so wish.)
[*] This one I believe - https://commoncog.com/cash-flow-games/
The numbers I referenced were EBITDA, which is mostly the point of that article.
But a software company shouldn't really need to show even EBITDA. Amazon didn't between 2000 and 2012.
I'm not sure this is true. Amazon was investing heavily in things that would be reasonably expected to yield future gains, like fulfillment centers and just broadly expanding their logistic capacity. But for Twitter? So far as I know, most of their expenses were just ongoing operational costs and which seem to have been greatly bloated owing to mismanagement.
That's due to Elon's gross mishandling of Twitter governance (e.g. demanding that the recommendation algorithm be tweaked so that literal Nazis dominate people's feeds), not due to any technical failings of the platform as a result of downsizing the engineering staff.
- [deleted]
Twitter really is a hellscape. I was drawn in for a few days recently and started getting affected by the barrage of relentless right-wing garbage. And for those on twitter it seems like the most important information in the world when it’s just a dopamine pump of rage and fear. Easier just to switch it off and live your life in peace.
- [deleted]
I doubt it. There are no Nazis in my feed.
For some people, everyone else is nazi.
This is a thought terminating cliche, ironically about a thought terminating cliche. X does have a problem with actual, literal, antisemitic, genocidal Nazis. No funny business or stretched definitions. Nazis. Dismissing it just because of a few people going by the Nazi bar analogy risks normalizing the actual fucking Nazis we're dealing with. "Oh everyone's a Nazi to you people" is a crazy thing to say when the individual under discussion is screaming about globalist cabals of bankers ushering in white erasure. And that is who is getting algorithmically elevated on X.
Also plenty of racists and homophobes, more than I see just about anywhere else on the internet. And more wild, rabid hate surrounding trans people than I see anywhere outside of narrow, festering cesspools in wastelands like 4chan.
And they were right, I think. Twitter's UI has degraded. I can't see this tweet linked from the thread: https://x.com/Grady_Booch/status/1620720537805922306 - it gives me an error. It might have been deleted, but Twitter just says "something went wrong". And I don't think it's even possible to view threads anymore without logging in?
But more importantly, X has not released any substantially new features within the last 3 years. And I bet that it won't release anything new for a while, and anything they _do_ try to release will be laughably broken.
Existing features are also suffering and going unfixed. If you browse any tweet with more than a few dozen replies, loading replies takes a notable amount of time, and X very conspicuously does not load all of them. Sometimes changing reply sorting algorithms loads entirely different batches of tweets.
Besides that most basic functionality, many times notifications are not sent when the notification settings would suggest they should be. And of course, moderation has fallen by the wayside, although that's more of a policy shift than a technical failure.
Incidentally, those defects would be good for censorship with deniability.
(Occam says deficit of institutional capability is the most likely cause. But that could also turn into a feature.)
> But more importantly, X has not released any substantially new features within the last 3 years.
Just on top of my head, there's the ability to write longer texts, the AI integration (that seems fairly popular in there). There was also some revenue sharing scheme where accounts can get paid for engagement. And from the point of view of management, making it impossible to view threads without login would also be a feature (as in "something we have to deliberately implement").
It's not a lot, but I don't think the pre-Musk Twitter changed even that much in the 3 year period before the acquisition.
Recruiters have been blowing my inbox up since the day Trump signed the OBBB
although I think entry level is still in shambles, for now
What was the reasoning behind this change? Isn’t R&D something we’d encourage to be a tax write off since it reduces the cost of well.. R&D? Or is R&D not as important as I’m thinking?
It was done to try and make the bill somewhat pencil out and make the national debt increase less egregious. Everyone just assumed it would be delayed forever or reversed before it could take effect, but those negotiations failed, triggering massive waves of layoffs.
The story that I’ve heard (probably on here) is that the administration did it to make the tax bill look more balanced over the long term by phasing out that tax write-off, while giving them (or the next administration) time to reverse it before it really impacted anything. But, nobody reversed it, until this year.
That administration really didn't like tech
Why do you think they brought it back this year?
It was also in part a budgetary time bomb that was set to go off in the next term. If Trump won, they would have rolled it back. As it was, there were several attempts to roll it back between 2021 and 2024 that were blocked by republicans ( https://www.claconnect.com/en/resources/blogs/manufacturing/... https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/4737635-senate-republica... ) so that the economy would continue to suffer under Biden.
Once Trump won and was in place for 2025, they defused it so that (they hoped) the economy would pick up.
>> Why do you think they brought it back this year?
Huge amounts of coordinated lobbying by the tech industry concentrated on three topics (crypto, section 179, ai deregulation)
Presumably because they see the tech industry as having been brought sufficiently to heel.
Those changes got permanently reversed in the recent passage of the Big Beautiful Bill by a one-in-a-year reconciliation process that was able to pass with only 51 votes in the Senate with zero votes from the opposition.
Note that the reversal only applies to American software jobs, not offshore ones. So maybe tech hiring is going to pick up again soon. Those changes should've been reversed before they took effect in 2022 by the govt at the time.
This 1000x.
I was working in Europe for a big American company, which will remain nameless, and they started shutting down most, if not all, of their European operations.
A change in the US tax code made software development amortize over 5 years in the US and over 15 years overseas. It was later changed instant deduction in the US but still 15 years for overseas. It no longer makes sense to outsource software development in many cases.
And something to note - this cut has been reinstated as part of the Big Beautiful Bill. Which has passed. I think the drop in jobs between now and a year from now atleast be separated as AI vs just interest rates. There are less confounding variables.
> It's a cheap win with investors who want to hear about AI initiatives to lay off yet even more of this department, because it doesn't matter if the quality of service declines, there are no market or regulatory forces that are punishing this well enough to ever expect firms to stop breaking it, let alone fix it
There's also some argument that, if people cannot get customer service to "help" they stop asking for help - driving that cost down.
And not having to remedy issues in the product = no repair/replace cost
And people are then left with only a few options, one of which... buy a replacement... which in a restricted market is a WIN because more money coming in...
How does US tax bill explain global slowdown?
You absolutely misunderstand Section 174 and you are spreading misinformation.
The only companies this affected are those right at the margins of becoming profitable. It doesn't affect new startups and it doesn't affect established businesses. And if you are at the margins of becoming profitable you have likely accumulated more than enough tax credits for all your losses.
The changes to Section 174 is not the explanation of why software engineering jobs were lost in 2022. They were lost because every company overhired from 2020-2022 and they have to absorb it given the drop in activity once the Pandemic was over.
Not entirely accurate. An unprofitable company that is acquired for its tech or team might have a huge amount of tax credits that they can’t use, but the acquiring company can. This can make an acquisition more attractive, even if the target company never made any money.
You are right that it creates residual value which might be purchased for value (probably at a discount.) However, it doesn't help the startup actually pay the bills while it operates.
Historically, the R&D payroll just wiped out same year revenue and you essentially did cash accounting. After Section 174, you had to finance the R&D by borrowing or just hiring less.
This only makes sense if you have taxable income :))) and if you dont in the near term, the present value of those tax credits are lower.
You won’t lose the tax credits they only get time shifted.
I was responding to “The only companies this affected are those right at the margins of becoming profitable.”
It also affects wildly unprofitable companies that have burned lots of cash and never made any money.
And you do “lose” the tax credits upon acquisition - they’re not only time-shifted, they are company-shifted.
>> You won’t lose the tax credits they only get time shifted.
Yes, from a value perspective you do not lose the tax credits. But from a "cash" perspective, how do I pay my tax bill in years 1, 2, 3, 4?
I've heard this complaint/observation many times and I just don't buy it. For one thing, particularly for large companies, the deduction smooths out. Yes, you can only deduct 20% of the costs this year but you're also deducting 20% from the previous year, 20% from the eyar before that and so on.
Also, the 2017 tax cuts and the recent bill have provided substantial tax cuts to these corporations too.
Usually this subject comes up where people (at least on HN) are telling people to mail their Congresspeople and Senators to get a bill passed to "fix" this and my question is always this:
"What tax cuts are you going to give back to pay for this?"
If we want to end this ridiculous IP transfer to Ireland and royalty payments to offshore profits to avoid taxes at the same time, I'm 100% on board with fixing the deductability of engineering salaries.
> Also, the 2017 tax cuts and the recent bill have provided substantial tax cuts to these corporations too.
That's just not how big companies look at their budgets, it isn't all one big pool of funds coming in and going out everything has a cost center and is accounted for individually end to end. This tax change made certain jobs suddenly 20% more expensive on paper. People in corporate finance look at these numbers and make recommendations that get implemented.
> the 2017 tax cuts and the recent bill have provided substantial tax cuts to these corporations too.
Sure, but that doesn't necessarily change the marginal cost of hiring another dev if the tax incentives have worsened.
The time value of money over 5 years is significant, especially in a fast moving industry like tech. The correlation between this change passing and tech hiring dropping is strong so I'm inclined to think there's some signal there.
> I'm 100% on board with fixing the deductability of engineering salaries.
It's already been fixed for US workers.
I do consulting, I'm constantly scouting clients. Right around November 2022 something very stark happened. I went from fighting off prospects with a stick, to crickets, almost over night. I deal mostly with startups and mid-size companies, nobody with insider knowledge or cutting edge interests. I can tell you that GPT was not heavily on anyone I dealt with's radar as an opportunity to reduce costs.
Some sort of cultural zeitgeist occurred, but in terms of symptoms I saw with my own eyes, I think ZIRP ending (projects getting axed) and layoffs starting (projects getting filled within ~24 hours) were huge drivers. I have no proof.
> Right around November 2022 something very stark happened.
The Twitter layoffs perhaps?
The interest rate rise also. It happened earlier but thats when the effects started to filter down.
The Twitter layoffs were done in anticipation of AI. Musk knew he wanted to make X and Twitter was one entry point. The loss in twitter productivity would be made up by AI gains and the first realization of that AI was named Grok.
So there's a bit of circular causality here. AI is a cause of the Twitter layoffs, and others are arguing that the Twitter layoffs may be a cause of other labor force shrinkage. If so then the Twitter layoffs are a costly signal that AI will impact the labor force and the shrinkage downstream of them is AI related.
No, they weren't.
The Twitter layoffs were because the company was hemorrhaging money and Musk is an egomaniac.
Is your claim that Musk, who cofounded OpenAI and started buying GPUs by the tens of thousands almost immediately after buying Twitter, and whose stated purposes in buying Twitter included AI, and who has been trying to build X since the 1990s, and who uses AI in SpaceX and Tesla, did not foresee that he would use AI on Twitter when he conducted the layoffs?
Can you walk me through your thought process here?
- [deleted]
I think part of that is a bit of a collapose of traditional consulting. There's been a huge transition into the boutique firms now.
Where do you think the market is going in regards to boutique firms? I've heard it mentioned but I'm not sure what counts as boutique and what that signifies for the next few years.
Interest rate was hiked rapidly from 1% (in May 2022) to 4% (in Dec 3 2022).
Oct 2022 recorded the lowest for S&P 500 since COVID (till now).
COVID assistance was over. Vaccination reached a critical majority. On Sep 2022, Biden declared "COVID-19 pandemic was over" [1].
Businesses got a reality check.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_the_Unite...
Yep, interesting. Thank you.
I had the same thoughts, there are clearly indicators that the weakness in the labor market started happening before LLMs and AI took over popular discourse.
All the more reason to believe that while correlated, LLMs are certainly not the largest contributor, or even the cause of the job market weakness for young people. The more likely and simple explanation is that there are cracks forming in the economy not just in the US but globally; youth employment is struggling virtually everywhere. Can only speculate on the reasons, but delayed effects from questionable monetary and fiscal policy choices, increasing wealth gaps, tariffs, geopolitics, etc. have certainly not helped.
>youth employment is struggling virtually everywhere.
Interesting point. With Baby Boomers retiring everywhere and fertility falling everywhere, one would expect fierce competition for young workers.
The Boomers are largely gone now from tech. One former manager of mine was 65 when I left, she retired a year later at 66, gone. Unfortunately, most of the roles those people held were not back-filled. The roles vanished, too.
Anecdata: I spent quite a bit of time driving around office parks in Eagan, MN. Most of them are dead--really, really dead. Vacant offices everywhere, the hotel that used to cater to business travelers is shuttered and the parking lot looks like a jungle. I can't peg exactly when all this took place because I haven't worked in that area in several years, but probably the effects of 2020, the remote work culture, and now the layoff hangover. I see a lot of people in their 50s and 60s working retail jobs right now. They often look like folks who would have been working in an office someplace.
>The paper notes they did an adjustment for the end of ZIRP. I dont know enough econometrics to understand whether this adjustment was sufficient
Looking at the paper [0], they attempted to do it by regressing the number of jobs y_{c,q,t} at company c, time t, and "AI exposure quintile" q, with separate parameters jointly controlling for company/quintile (a), company/time (b) and quintile/time (g). This is in Equation 4.1, page 15, which I have simplified here:
log(y_{c,q,t}) ~ a_{c,q} + b_{c,t} + g_{q,t}
Any time-dependent effects (e.g. end of ZIRP/Section 174) that would equally affect all jobs at the company irrespective of how much AI exposure they have should be absorbed into b.
They normalized g with respect to October 2022 and quintile 1 (least AI exposure), and plotted the results for each age group and quintile (Figure 9, page 20). There is a pronounced decline that only starts in mid-2024 for quintiles 3, 4, and 5 in the youngest age group. The plots shown in the article are misleading, and are likely primarily a reflection of ZIRP, as you say. The real meat of the paper is Figure 9.
A potential flaw of this method is that ZIRP/Section 174 may have disproportionately affected junior positions with high AI exposure, e.g. software engineers. This would not be accounted for in b and would thus be reflected in g. It would be interesting to repeat this analysis excluding software engineers and other employees subject to Section 174.
[0] https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/...
Yeah my company started stepping up outsourcing in 2023. We also started some AI projects. The AI projects haven't made much progress but the outsourcing is at an extremely advanced stage.
I personally sat in meetings in 2022 where we adjusted staffing projections in anticipation of AI efficiency. Sure some of it was "overhiring," but the reality was that those staffing goals were pre-ai. Once they were updated, that's when the layoffs started because management didn't want anyone who didn't have an AI or big data background.
Gen-AI was still extremely niche in 2022; ChatGPT didn't come out until the end of the year, on 30 November, and it was pretty much just a toy curiosity until mid-2023 when GPT-4 came out. I am very surprised that leadership at your company was seriously discussing the business impact of AI that early on.
Chat gpt wasn't considered a toy... Not sure where you got that. We were interested in what openai was going from very early given the founders' history.
It absolutely was considered a toy by most people when it debuted in late 2022. This was the era when memes abounded about how ChatGPT would dutifully answer the query "what's the world record for crossing the English Channel on foot?" [0] or "what weighs more, a pound of feathers or a kilogram of bricks?" [1]
Most people didn't start taking ChatGPT/gen-AI seriously until mid-2023, when GPT-4 became widely used.
[0] https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/format:webp/1*yJs...
[1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fpl09fAakAE1cFW?format=jpg&name=...
You can see for your self how seriously HN users took ChatGPT in late 2022 https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1672444800&dateRange=custom&...
Some of the highlights include:
* Building a Virtual Machine Inside ChatGPT https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33847479 (Dec 3, 2022; 2029 points; 919 comments)
* Disputing a Parking Fine with ChatGPT https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33937753 (Dec 10, 2022; 606 points; 348 comments)
* ChatGPT passes the 2022 AP Computer Science A free response section https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33858844 (420 points; Dec 4, 2022; 455 comments)
* ChatGPT is a ‘code red’ for Google’s search business https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34086462 (396 points; Dec 23, 2022; 636 comments)
* Build your front end in React, then let ChatGPT be your Redux reducer https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34166193 (395 points; Dec 28, 2022; 142 comments)
Hacker News is not most people. Even today most non-tech people I speak to have barely touched AI. Perhaps a bit of gimmicky “ooh that’s cool” image generation or chatGPT, but nothing serious.
Warren Buffet is also not most people, yet people like him have far more to do with what actually happens on the stock market than the tens millions of retail investors.
...so? It seems that you forgot what this thread is about.
I mean very good job staying on-top of new tech but you're not actually trying to imply your not the anomaly in that regard right?
Not for people paying attention to the entire AI space. GPT wasn't the only thing going on at the time. AlphaGo was a big deal for anyone paying attention.
He was certainly on top of new technology movement but signs were there the whole time.
I wasn’t aware of ChatGPT in 2022 but I was aware that we could not keep data scientists hired long term because several faangs like meta were just dropping 100% increases in salary as the opener to our people for some mega project related to machine learning based on the skill set of the people being hired
Correct. We didn't know chatgpt would be huge but we knew big data and ai were the next big thing and we're investing heavily in that space. The funding for this came from sre teams, pms, etc.
Huge difference between people with forward thinking and without, right.
GitHub Copilot was out there in 2021. The "chat about anything" era hadn't really begun, but "your computer can write code for you" era was well underway. And given that said business wanted to retain the people it had with AI/big data backgrounds, strongly suggesting it isn't like a restaurant where it would be unlikely that any staff would have that kind of experience, we can reasonably assume that they are in that particular niche.
in addition to this detail I might add I can't remember the last time I had a customer service call that took place with someone stateside. It's easy to point to AI when offshoring for favorable interest rates is really the reason.
I'm surprised more folks aren't live to this -- AI is just the scapegoat. The jobs are moving to where labor is cheaper.
I remember the outsourcing meme was huge in the early 2000s. "Don't study CS, you'll get outsourced." Why is it only happening now? It's far from a new idea.
> Why is it only happening now?
because 2020-2022 COVID happened and forced everything remote. world didn't end.
the offshoring boom was the 90s and 2000s, and generally ended not amazing, but now a new generation of leadership saw it could be done, and done better -- video calls to the other side of the globe work far better than in 2004, speaking from experience.
The exaggerated state of the national security narrative.
Two data points from last month:
American Express
And a large bank headquartered in Virginia
I think USAA but that was two years ago
I just had one on saturday actually, was a pleasant surprise!
I called bank of america’s credit card line and asked for a support agent. A friendly lady answered, she had a southern accent. :)
I remember years of a no-backfill policy at Devon on a promises of automation. Since 2017 at least. The “desirable job market” for young people has been challenging well before LLM became popular. Want a dead end entry level job in food service earning $20/hour? No problem.
> SWE figures dropped mid-2022 (almost magically in line with interest rate hikes) and LLM-copilots werent introduced for another year
It was pretty clear by late 2022 that AI assisted coding was going to transform how software development was done. I remember having conversations with colleagues at that time about how SWE might transform into an architecture and systems design role, with transformer models filling in implementations.
If it was clear to workers like us, it was pretty clear to the c-suite. Not that it was the only reason for mass layoffs, but it was a strong contributor to the rationale.
Many large companies were placing a bet that there were turbulent times ahead, and were lightening their load preemptively.
My company had multiple call center modernizing projects going on starting around 2021, including many NLP based routing and task upgrades.
H1B visas are clearly a massive factor. Well before AI.
AI is barely a blip on why the job market is dead for entry level, and dying all the way up the ladder.
Every one of my engineer friends says the same thing. "My team is 80% indians" and more than half are not qualified for the job they have.
The whole thing is a fucking scam for them, every company, top to bottom. Recruiters, hiring managers, referrals, CEO's. All one thing in common.
I'll take my downvotes, I don't care, everyone here knows I'm right. And those with their head up their ass can enjoy getting replaced and spending years looking for another role.
If people don't wake up to this fact, things are going to get very ugly very quickly. They already are in the retail sector.
Upvoting!
This is 100% the reason, saying its A.I. is gas lighting
Appointing indian leadership is the single biggest sign of moving to an extraction phase for a company.
The idea is they think the current value of the institution and IP is higher than their ability to innovate, so the try to outsource and reduce labour cost as much as possible intending to do the bare minimum maintenance for as long as possible.
This gets compounded by every layer trying to get the most out of the company as fast as possible, hiring in a way that has no long term outlook.
It is possible that multiple trends are coalescing
1. layoffs after web3 hiring spree
2. End of Zirp
However I think now, in 2025 is it impossible to reasonably claim AI isn't making an impact in hiring. Those who disagree on here seem to be insistent on some notion that AI has no benefits whatsoever, thus could never cause job loss.
M2 Money supply: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL
I sense some conflation of causation/correlation at hand.
Completely agree with you. You can't be an economist and criticize current monetary policy. You will be labeled a crackpot, ostracized and have difficulty with grants. Grants from who? The same institution you'll be critizing in the first place.
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Exactly this - I've said it before and will say it again - new technologies emerge in response to trends, often to accelerate existing trends and does not create them.
I see a few explanations for what you're saying, and those might be true, but I strongly believe part of it is investment (particularly VC, less so PE) has hit diminishing returns in tech and which means less subsidized "disruption", which means less money to hire people. AI becoming hugely popular right when this was happening is not a coincidence. And it's not just startups, less investment in startups also mean less clients for AWS and Azure. A16Z / Sand Hill switching to AI is not them just chasing the latest trend, it's a bid to reduce cost on people, which is the most expensive part of a tech company, as the only way to extend their unicorn-focused investment strategy.
Like the drug dealers.
They just supply what people want and follow the trends.
SWE, i know some worfloe digitalisation projects that had been in the planning for a very long time, budgetted as multiple person tear efforts, that due to pandemic nescessity were exected by a team of 3 over a long weekend in 2020. This did not go unnoticed, neither by customers nor swe providers.
I think it's lipstick on a pig. We've seen tech companies collude before, and I'm guessing they're doing it again, trying to drive down the price of talent and make their employees less demanding.
The economy is destroying the jobs and AI is just the raven on the shoulder of a stumbling bull . . .
>The economy is destroying the jobs
the economy actually creates all the jobs ever since hunt and gather. the buggy whip jobs did eventually dry up, but the economy continues to create other jobs, paid for by ever increasing surpluses.
> the economy actually creates all the jobs ever since hunt and gather.
The economy neither creates nor destroys jobs. The economy is the aggregate of the jobs.
yes, this is it
Chat gpt 3 was 2020, even if the technology wasn't mature the hype was there informing investment and hiring decisions.
There was also other factors, there were covid booms, covid busts, overcorrections, Elon shoes you can cut by 90% and still keep a product running (kind of) and with X taking the flack other people followed suit without being as loud. There is a fairly major war in Europe ....
You are confusing GPT models and ChatGPT.
Oh yep.
Still, even fine tuned gpt2 was an eye opener.
And 2022 (chatgpt) fits time wise- the hype came before mature solutions.
My understanding is that before Nov 2022, GPT models are obsecure, technical NLP stuff that most people don't understand or care about. ChatGPT is the first real product that is accessible and useful to everybody.
GPT3 drove the AI Dungeon explosion iirc
Coordination, plain and simple.
Could you please explain more. Very interested in anything that explains the massive hole in the timeline.
Openai also invented time travel to coordinate with companies.
Nothing to do with thr mass exodus and offshoring of US jobs.
The BPO industry is GROWING the opposite of standard AI understanding ideas.
Also call center is a good one I was doing research myself and call center jobs overseas have GROWN pretty rapidly over time these jobs are moving not vanishing.
Yep. For some reason everyone assumes that jobs in the US live in a closed system. In reality, things that can be moved abroad to save 20% of costs will be moved this way or the other.
I don’t know why everyone remembers how the manufacturing went to China, and at the same time forgets about it when we are talking about office jobs.
This is a second hand anecdote but someone commented here or on X, that basically he was on a cruise and overheard two heads of HR of 2 big Co's talking to each other about shenanigans.
Would not be the craziest considering that AI has to make a ROI. Even if it's not up there yet to do so organically. If you annihilate the entry labor market, then after some time, you have no choice but to use AI because there is no one remaining with the skills. AI is lower than entry level -> No one is hiring new grads -> There is no new talent being developed -> use AI for everything!
> This is a second hand anecdote but someone commented here or on X, that basically he was on a cruise and overheard two heads of HR of 2 big Co's talking to each other about shenanigans.
I have no idea what this means.
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It's describing the setting for a conspiracy theory. Multiple (in this case 2) people (in this case powerful ones) getting together and deciding that a certain outcome would be mutually beneficial.
And the second paragraph details the conspiracy is to work together to remove a certain type of employee in large numbers, so that AI tools have to be used in order to make up for that loss.
Pretty much, though I would not say they go together. 2nd paragraph is just a separate conjecture.
Personally, don't need that much evidence; are we old enough to remember the hiring gentleman's agreement in big tech?
Let's also not forget one of the main functions of HR, as an industry, these days: friction. You think salaries (and inflation) wouldn't go up if hiring managers had more freedom?
You say this as if humans do not collude all the time. The pejorative idea of a "Conspiracy theory" is such a great modern tool for those who want to collude to hide their collusion in plain view.
Somehow it has become a heuristic that if caste in, the collusion is instantly dismissed as fiction. Even better that the person who thinks collusion is happening must have a lower IQ than those who don't. How convenient for those who are colluding.
An of the horizon for AI explosive growth was 10 years down the road, then what those execs report to the board/C*Os after their department failed to perform without half the employees?
Makes zero sense.
You completely misunderstand corporate incentives.
I do see that angle, and my impression is this push comes from the top top. The execs and middle are just following, milking it as long as it lasts.
cf. Matt Levine's thoughts on how Blackrock optimizes whole industries beyond the company level.
It still makes no sense. Why would a CEO or the Board gamble the company on an outcome they have no input on?
> Why would a CEO or the Board gamble the company on an outcome they have no input on?
have you seen the behavior of CEOs?
the market is doing it, and there is no way for a CEO, CIO, CTO, CISO, et al, to not do AI in 2025. the gains to stock price from the hype alone could be worthwhile, and even if not "everyone else was doing it"
Broad pressure because everybody else MIGHT be using AI and this (example) company stock MIGHT go down.
Until you run out of people using AI in the first place lol
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Coordination of…?
Think Trust as in anti-trust
What?
Coordination as in a trust or cartel
Why can't it be both?
This reminds me of the part of The Book of Why by Judea Pearl discussing how do calculus and the causal revolution came about with the simple insight that effects come before causes and so do calculus was invented to keep track of that in the math, rather than obscuring that with statistical relations that worked in either direction.
2 things can be true. I was applying for jobs in 2022 and we all knew that the market was crap then because of overhiring during pandemic.
Tech companies pumped massive money into coding boot camps, overproduced coders, market crashes, salaries go down (or at least stagnate).
My understanding is the same thing recently happened to pharmacists.
seeing the same in IT security / cyber.
so, so many jr hires with no-name online degrees.
The drop started from mid-2022 and 2023 and there is a single cause: Russian assets freeze. This led to governments around the world moving their assets from West/AngloSaxon countries. This lack of liquidity put the West in a “hang in there” situation. Economically, it showed up as raising interest rates and politically where things move slower, the emergence of a new coalition.
It’s really as simple as that. But people would like to believe that West GDP is higher than global south GDP by xxx amounts and so all of this couldn’t be possible.
If you want an insight inside their heads, there is a Biden speech after the assets freeze where he declares that the Russian economy/country will collapse in a few weeks under the measures. None of this materialized and their bet have failed which is why Trump is trying to pull the US out of the mess.
Of course all of this is my personal opinion. So take it from the grain in my bag of salt.
