The gruesome new data on tech jobs

Slightly tongue in cheek, but maybe there's just a divide in the market? I've been seeing more jobs advertised as "for people excited about using AI at work" or something to that effect.

Maybe the market is bifurcating along the lines of people who hate AI chat bots and people who love them?

If it were 2018, I personally would have made 3 SWE hires in the last 12 months. The reason I didn't need to is because of LLMs. Not budget, not anything else. I don't think AI is so much to blame for layoffs, but I do think it is a huge component of the slow hiring. There's just less demand for coders.

No. ZIRP hangover all the way.

AI is just a plausible scapegoat that sounds hip.

AI is increasing the capacity of existing employees and I think we're all still discovering, everyday, better ways to leverage it even more. So when the question comes of hiring a new teammate, the value they'd bring to the table needs to be convincingly more than what I can expect to achieve alone with AI.

I think the glut is ZIRP, but the lack of recovery (or very slow pickup) is AI.

Personally I think it’s “None of the Above”. Frankly I own several projects that I really wish AI would do better at maintaining or enhancing (please don’t reply with “you’re holding it wrong messages”).

At least with my org and a lot of my friends companies, they’ve just kind of stopped building (non-AI) features? Not completely, but like a 70% reduction. And that’s apparently fine with the market, since AI promises infinite productivity in the future. As an example Amazon had a massive outage recently, like a world-scale, front page news outage. Then they followed it up with a massive layoff. In 2018 logic the markets probably would have been like “this company is fucked people are going to start moving out of AWS if they can’t promise reliability”. In 2025 logic, it barely even registers. I guess the assumption is that even with less employees they’ll be AWS can be even more stable in the future because of better AI. Even companies who _should_ be more concerned with reliability aren’t because _they’re too concerned about their next big AI move_.

I guess in the end I still think it’s about AI but more about how companies are reacting to AI rather than replacing too many jobs.

It’s mostly ZIRP hangover. The over hiring in those years was ludicrous.

AI is having some effect at the margins but it’s mostly an excuse.

Companies always prefer to avoid saying they are just laying people off. It can be a negative market signal to investors, which is paradoxical, since it might indicate lower growth expectations. It also creates possible exposure to lawsuits depending on the circumstances and state.

The nice thing about AI as an excuse is you can say to your investors and board “we are shedding cost but still growing and in fact our productivity is up because we are leveraging AI!”

No tech is dead, 2015 i got endless interviews with a barely functional chrome extension. Today your expected to know everything.

Pretty large claim to insinuate Indeed can't even tell when their own users are simply shifting terms around...

This is the company so large, their jobs data was used in lieu of the Fed's jobs data when the gov was shut down.

Jobs don't have to be exclusive to a single site. Pretty much every job gets posted everywhere (usually done automatically by your HRIS/ATS software). Job boards will even scrape each other for postings. LinkedIn is notorious for this, which is why it has so many outdated listings.

Now it’s “everyone get into the trades!”

I’d recommend talking to people in the trades first. Not saying it can’t be a good move, but it is definitely hard and has its own huge downsides like poor working environments, long hours, and years to actually get into decent paying roles.

Faddish career advice is usually bullshit, or it’s too late and the bus it’s telling you to jump on left the stop years ago.