[bayarearefugee]

> It's not surprising these companies are returning to reality and not hiring back to the same levels.

The common claim from the "dont worry about AI stealing jobs" crowd is that there is nearly limitless demand for new software to be written.

Even if over hiring is the reason for a lot of current job losses, the fact that over hiring is possible makes it obvious their Jevron's paradox claims are either lies or an attempt at self-soothing.

[el_benhameen]

The process of figuring out what to build has always been harder and more drawn out than the process of building it. I’m not arguing one way or the other for the Jevon’s paradox claims, but the steelman argument that you’ve missed is that job losses can happen very quickly (“last week’s version of Claude code is good enough that we can fire Joe and have Sarah do twice the work”), but the recovery can take a long time as the tech slowly diffuses throughout the economy and slowly spurs new ideas.

[dangus]

I think a more common claim is that the current downturn is way more obviously explained by Covid-era overhiring.

Basically all the charts on that subject are incredibly eye-opening.

To me it shows that the tech industry has actually been extremely resilient. Despite clearly going on an insane hiring spree that was not justifiable in the end, there hasn’t really been the kind of collapse we should expect. Tech companies have still maintained revenues and we haven’t seen any real sign of collapse. Companies that have gone trough major layoffs generally still have more employees than they did before 2020.

What we are seeing are some tech employees who were used to nearly a decade of easy work act like spending 3-6 months looking for a job is industry apocalypse.

I think you actually need to support the idea that there isn’t a nearly endless demand for software to be written.

Software is just business logic.

What businesses don’t involve software?

What businesses are you seeing that are saying “our software is done, there are no more ways to optimize our business, and there’s no need to evolve business processes to compete, we don’t need to update it anymore!”?

I can’t think of any business vertical that isn’t expecting constant improvement with their software.

[lelandbatey]

I think the timelines are too short for trends to be completely apparent yet. You can typically hire people faster than you can scale your income sources, even in the face of tremendous demand. Right this moment there's factors pushing folks to fire, but I also do see some companies delivering more (not a lot, but noticably more) and seeing increasing sales as a result. Those are in conflict, and we'll see which way the trends push through time.

[visarga]

AI work creates surplus, we eat that away by specializing and becoming more dependent. Work doesn't stop, it becomes higher stakes, we depend on each other and AI now.