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AI didn't cause the tech jobs bust, but it explains why there's no recoveryvithushansylvester.com
They are on the rise but that rise is slower than and has not yet made up for the jobs lost despite growth in revenues returning to the industry
give it a little more time and don't put the lost before the gain, we had an overage and then walked that back, it's a different perspective, we don't have to get back to peak soon, the peak was way out of bounds
Your link says the postings are on the rise. The article also says postings are on the rise.
Evidence for that is Apple. The one company that didn't go on a hiring binge during the Covid years is also the only company not doing mass layoffs. What a curious coincidence.
AI is providing a cover story for incompetent executive management decisions at firms worth trillions of dollars. I'm not saying anything about how useful or not useful AI will actually be, but it's clear that these geniuses funded a bunch of dead-end projects chasing fool's gold, and then they needed to free up capital to get in on what could be an actual gold rush.
I've heard it's on the upswing again, but then became depressed when I actually looked into job listing.
More detailed data by company. Ai is most likely the cause. Saying that that layoffs started before does not prove that it is not continuing because of Ai.
But aren't these data points based on statements made by companies, a contentious premise because of the competing claim that AI isn't really driving layoffs (rather economic conditions for capital), but rather AI is a convenient excuse as how companies can achieve similar results, with a smaller headcount?
Yes it is the declaration by companies. Capital or whatever that is Ai related is Ai. Are they going to have more capital to hire people again?
Right. The statements are not at all trustworthy.
No one is going to say "we over hired because we had cheap capital and got careless and over-ambitious" or "we were overstaffed because we were inefficient".
"Most likely" based on what?
Look at the data that I referenced.. They have references cited for each layoff from the news.
Strange that this page has weird distracting "gnats" flying around in the background. A key rule as a communicator is: never compete for attention with yourself! If you want people to read your words, why add distracting gnats?
Are bees okay? https://beeswax.getflourish.org/
Your username is slop and was created 19 days ago. LOL
The “tech sector” is not one thing. “Developer” is not a single kind of job. Groupings like this are not very useful.
Perhaps it’s easier to define companies that are not in the tech sector better than ones that are.
Either way, I think the category still has a non-zero amount of meaning.
If your primary product is computer hardware or software and you serve more than one market, you’re probably in the tech sector.
E.g., Epic Systems is not a tech company, even though all they do is make software, since they only serve the healthcare industry.
We can’t say the same thing about Apple even though they make healthcare products and services.
Even companies like Epic Systems or other customer-specific tech industries like FinTech can get lumped in the tech industry umbrella in the right context, and I generally think that makes sense.
Developer is where I disagree with you more strongly. It is much more straightforward as “a single kind of job” in the sense that almost all of them are affected in the same ways by AI. It doesn’t really matter what company you work for: if you’re a Java developer and AI is increasing output/decreasing hours, that affects your employment status regardless of your industry.
I guess I don’t see the value in a category that includes a web/ui person at a mid sized bank, a backend Java programmer at Amazon and a kernel engineer at intel.
─ 2 more ─
I would say that 90% of the category is doing roughly the same job from a structural standpoint and only a small 10% like those kernel engineers are actually doing something “exotic” so to speak.
Even if you have outliers the category still has value.
Essentially think if we start thinking about “backend versus frontend” or getting down to distinctions between individual programming languages we are almost too dismissive of the ways in which these jobs are essentially exactly the same
For C suites, they are all the same, developer guys that do things with computers, and are handled the very same way on their HR Excel sheets.
The tech sector is one of booms and busts. Humans tend to extrapolate the present into the future but often these extrapolations are wrong due to unforeseen factors. I was around in the dotcom bust and many people thought the profession was done and "that time was different".
The boom bust thing is a policy choice. The issue are not unforeseen factors, but the legal/tax/financial system with predictable bubble bust consequences.
We looked at 73K Upwork jobs posted in September. 27.6% mentioned AI, but only ~3.5% were actually AI-focused projects.
Seems like there's still plenty of demand for regular dev work. AI is often just a buzzword in job descriptions.
Curious, did you look at freelance/contract work too, or just full-time jobs?
Given the interest rates a valid explanation is that we are not done with the employment contraction still.
But it looks to me that the layoffs are due to AI but not because the positions are replaced, because capital is flowing to hardware instead of new hires. The growth engine of the tech industry used to be people, now it is clearly gpus. If you have 10 billion in the bank you are not going to aggressively expand your workforce, you are going to build datacenters.
It's an interesting take, thank you for that.
But for the love of Linus please remove that background animation or give me the possibility to disable it, it's distracting.
The writing style is very AIy, as a feedback.
Point taken. thanks for the feedback
I've seen multiple other sources that report software jobs are on the rise again. One example: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/11/ai-software-developer-jobs.h...
A different story being told is that the industry over hired during COVID and lockdowns, then over corrected with Ai, and now we are returning to normal levels.