[boshalfoshal]

Its AI. Both AI actually being good now, and CEOs believing AI is good. Even at most big tech companies, L3 engineers were basically the "claudes" of their team (or at least, 80% of their job was basically to be a "claude"). You give them some well scoped, largely coding task (that you either delegate as part of a larger project, or just something you don't want to do), and then they execute it. Once they build trust and learn the system, then they get larger projects, and then promotions.

Places are still hiring juniors, but now the bar for them is just much much higher, because a large portion of the junior level work (i.e, execution on implementation details), is pretty much 80-90% done by some senior + AI at this point, whether people believe it or not. This was certainly the case at the FAANG I was at.

I don't know why this "COVID overhiring" rhetoric is still a talking point. Covid was over 5 years ago at this point, those "overhires" have already left or have been flushed out from all these layoffs. Are you telling me the "COVID" overhiring resulted in such a huge surplus that, 5-6 years later, they are still on the market?

[arexxbifs]

Meta fired 8,000 employees not two weeks ago: "[Meta] revealed to employees in April that it would conduct a major round of layoffs the following month while nixing plans to fill 6,000 open positions. The company told workers in a memo at the time that the job cuts were intended to help offset investments into other areas like AI." [1]

That sounds exactly like funneling money away from hiring and into AI investments to me.

As for COVID overhiring, Amazon doubled their workforce during the pandemic. I'm sure plenty of those hires are still employed. During their latest layoff, they also spoke about "shifting resources to invest more in artificial intelligence".[2]

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/20/meta-layoffs-zuckerberg-says... [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/21/amazon-cut-thousands-of-engi...