[mbgerring]

The AI job crisis is large tech employers firing workers to free up cash for AI capex, and those workers competing with everyone else in a competitive job market.

I’ve been unemployed and actively looking for a job for about 6 months, the longest stretch of active job searching I’ve ever done in my career. Several close friends who work in tech or tech-adjacent fields are in the same boat. Anecdata on Hacker News or LinkedIn tells the same story.

A chart showing “total number of jobs” is not meaningful. I took a temp job in a metal shop to make ends meet while I wait for the endless rounds of interviews I’ve now gone through with 4 companies. It pays less than half of what I was making before, and I am barely making ends meet. It’s not sustainable, even though the pay is more than fair for the work.

There are also a lot of job openings for home health care workers, or seasonal resort workers, that used to be filled by immigrants. Those jobs are not going to be taken by any of the engineers who just got laid off by Meta.

I have the strong impression that people who write articles like this are very disconnected from the reality of the economy right now, and that their curiosity ends at the line on the chart they cooked up to make a contrarian point.

[bwestergard]

I am very sympathetic to your situation, and fear something similar happening to me. But the article is addressed to investors, who are interested in aggregate labor demand declines.

"A chart showing “total number of jobs” is not meaningful."

It is meaningful in answering the question being asked, which is whether the hype around labor displacement, which has been growing for nearly five years now, is actually occurring in a way that would justify some of the higher valuations for AI firms.

The "AI jobs crisis" is generally understood to mean a sustained downturn in demand for all labor due to AI substituting for labor across a huge range of tasks.

[iceflinger]

Same boat, used to do backend infrastructure but have now been doing basic IT support at a non-tech industry; on paper I'm still employed, but between making not enough to make ends meet anymore and not even being fully engaged with the work, I feel effectively unemployed.

[heldrida]

That's true! In 12 months, I got two contracts: a 3-month fixed-term contract and a previous 10-day contract role. Let's say that the landlord decides to sell the place I'm renting, I won't be able to rent another place due to unemployment.