[ChicagoDave]

There are a number of reasons I’d site for the current job market tightness:

- political: there’s an enormous amount of uncertainty here. All businesses make plans and uncertainty puts them all on pause.

- economic: related to political, but we’re teetering on a very bad recession. Watch where national oil reserves go.

- AI: I throw this in with every new technology that comes out. There is always a period of chaos before normalization. We’re still in the chaos phase.

- Business Pain: Right now I don’t see any sector that’s in pain. Inflation has hurt consumers, but we’re still spending. When consumers lock it down, that pain comes back and job market shifts with it.

I have no solution other than figuring out a way to do your own thing. There’s no better time to be a founder.

[Exoristos]

* cite

> There is always a period of chaos before normalization.

In this case, it's the normalization period that has people terrified.

[ChicagoDave]

Understandable. Look at the possible directions:

- GenAI becomes a foundational requirement for tech and non tech sectors. If you’ve refused to engage, you’ve self-selected out of any of those sectors.

- GenAI usage shifts down to just the tech sector, but in an integrated fashion where current engineering practices are still desired. Everyone survives, but pay scales are adjusted down by a not-insignificant amount.

- GenAI bubbles badly, OpenAI and Anthropic merge with Google/Microsoft/Oracle/IBM/???. Tokens become extremely expensive and no one is leaning into agentic integration. Everyone thrives.

[XorNot]

The problem with scenario one is it's still cope: "if you didn't develop the skills to use GenAI then you'll be left behind".

But that's not the promise of GenAI models. The skill floor is constantly lowering and your advanced workflow is rendered obsolete monthly.

[ChicagoDave]

I've not seen anything from the base models that replaces my engineering harness (workflow). There's a significant gap between what a generic LLM does and the domain I work in (software construction for complex applications).