[_override]

When it comes to the AI crash honestly my biggest concern is what is going to happen to the job market during and the years following the crash. Not sure how things are in the rest of the world, but as someone in their early 30s working in the IT industry in Sweden I’ve never seen the market this competitive before, even for mid level and senior roles, and it worries me what the future of employment is going to look like.

Maybe those older than me have been through this kind of thing before in 2008-2009 and in the early 2000s but the state of the IT job market in the last year or two has been really concerning to me. Anecdotally I’ve also heard it’s very tough for new graduates these days.

[dspillett]

> what the future of employment is going to look like

As an already slightly outdated senior dev in the UK rapidly approaching 50 and not wanting to touch generative AI / agentic dev… … I'm increasingly looking forward to waiting tables, being a hospital porter, or anything else away from tech!

I'm thinking that if I get out soon, I might beat most of the rush and be safely employed before many of the rest of you are forced down the same path.

[more than a little defeatist, yes, but I've be been unhappy in dev for years so for me the AI driven displacement is just the final nail rather than the main big new problem]

[mikegioia]

Over 40 myself and switched to high school teaching this year. I feel like tech in general has been degrading for a while but 2025 AI really just wiped it out imo.

[ray_v]

It's interesting that you're looking to exit the industry as a SR dev - from my casual observations it seems like mostly it's the JR devs and younger folks that have been mostly rejecting agentic dev.

Just out of curiosity, do you have a specific objections to using the technology? I totally understand the burnout however (I'm rapidly approaching 50 myself).

[lstodd]

get into telecom is my advice. despite it being the birthplace of monstrosities like 3gpp, there is a suprising amount of sane people. and no amount of ai crash and burn will decrease the need for communications.

[giancarlostoro]

I think there's a few things going on and I also believe that in many (if not most, and dare I say ALL) cases AI as an excuse for lay offs is simply a scapegoat. If AI is so great, why aren't you re-training those who are ineffective at using it, and then cutting those who still don't make the cut? If it's this amazing thing for your company, wouldn't it drive revenue up drastically?

I wish the SEC would start auditing claims about AI for job cuts, not sure if its within their ball park but there's people claiming this, when they have no receipts, and then stock goes up, if that's not market manipulation, I'm not sure what is.

[Schlagbohrer]

This is a good example. If AI increases productivity so much, then having more employees would be beneficial, because each can produce even more output. So the firm would only be limited by the imagination of their product managers and marketing team finding new things to produce with this vast capability.

And yet...

[giancarlostoro]

Even IF somehow you can do with less employees, in the case that you over hired after the "Great Resignation" following COVID (I think this is partial to blame for many lay offs still happening now that people aren't resigning from jobs willy nilly), where are these magical numbers that your current workforce is producing with AI? Are you just shipping more code with less testing? So many questions, only very little remarks. We need receipts.

[agnosticmantis]

Devil's advocate: if demand is constrained/finite in a given market, there's an upper bound on revenue, no matter how hard you try. In that case it'd make sense to work on efficiency to maximize profits given fixed revenue.

(Not saying AI helps with that yet.)

[mosura]

One of the strong arguments in favor of AI accelerationism is net pain reduction by making the transition period as short as possible. Ideas like “pacing” or a crash and reboot will prolong the inevitable.

[jbreckmckye]

That is an absurd position to take. Nobody benefits by having less time to adapt to changes in their employability

I am not calling you out personally here, but this comment bears many hallmarks of the "accelerationist disease": thinking in abstract models rather than in concrete terms; optimising for the fangs of capital rather than human beings, imaginary infinite bets that lead participants to nonsensical conclusions

[user43928]

Concretely:

If AI replaces all labor in two years, unemployment insurance and savings can comfortably carry me over the transitional period to universal income or obsolescence of money.

Should AI stagnate at the point where 70% of software engineering jobs are gone, I am going to have a problem.

Concretely, I imagine that I would need to learn other knowledge work. If AI can also perform it, I would have to go into blue collar work.

[Marha01]

> Nobody benefits by having less time to adapt

Not exactly true. If AI goes from 0 to 100 quickly (human level AGI in a few years), we will all lose our jobs together and will have to confront this fact. There is no ignoring such massive societal elephant in the room.

If instead AI improves slowly, lots of people will lose their jobs, but majority will not. Those still with jobs may not be persuaded by the sizable jobless minority to support any societal changes, since they are still OK. This means the jobless will be screwed.

[jbreckmckye]

Firstly, this generation of AI is not going to take away all jobs

Secondly, we already know what happens when sectors face mass unemployment from the 1980s, when steel and coal workers were laid off en-masse: nobody came to help

Accelerationists want to see their jobs go up in smoke because they think that if enough white collar workers are impoverished, everyone who was formerly poorer than them, will chip in to rescue us

Just like they didn't in 1985...

In a context where the state already has less tax revenue due to mass unemployment! It's completely bananas thinking that only survives on internet brainrot forums

[Marha01]

> Firstly, AI is not going to take away all jobs

Human-level AGI is by definition able to take away all human jobs.

> Secondly, we already know what happens when sectors face mass unemployment from the 1980s, when steel and coal workers were laid off en-masse: nobody came to help

There is a massive difference between 20-30% of people in a country being unemployed (historical sector-wide collapses), and 80-100% of people in a country being unemployed (human-level AGI unemployment). The second situation is completely historically unprecedented and will *not* lead to the same results.

> In a context where the state already has less tax revenue due to mass unemployment!

If human-level AGI is an actual reality, taxation (and money itself) is no longer relevant. Only energy and resources may still matter.

[mosura]

Once AI is achieved it will not be a question of “adaptation” but “acceptance”.

You are in denial. If you don’t like this the answer was what the Unabomber proposed the whole time.

[jbreckmckye]

> the answer was what the Unabomber proposed the whole time.

The Unabomber (Theodore Kaczynski) killed 3 people and injured 23 others across 16 bombings between 1978 and 1995

It's absolutely incredible to see this talked about as a "reasonable" position on AI taking jobs.

edit: updated as it is not clear if Mosura is being serious or exaggerating for rhetoric

[mosura]

I am not advocating that, since I am an accelerationist, but basic reading comprehension is obviously a problem for you both here and in your other trolling efforts. (He has since edited his comment to remove the direct claim I was personally advocating terrorism).

You cannot stop the advancement of technology towards AI without the threat of violence towards those that pursue technology. The Unabomber was at least honest about that.

> edit: updated as it is not clear if Mosura is being serious or exaggerating for rhetoric

You are the HN manifestation of that woman’s face when interviewing Sydney Sweeney.

[contagiousflow]

What is inevitable?

[N_Lens]

The pacing and the prolonging, obviously!

[mosura]

Artificial intelligence.

If humans are machines executing on some medium eventually it will be possible to emulate them on some other medium. Believing otherwise requires some essentially religious convictions on the existence of the soul or similar.

[jbreckmckye]

We already have human intelligence. Creating new humans is easy (and fun)

The only reason to emulate human intelligence is to capture it, exploit it, and reduce the negotiating power of those who have it naturally. Anyone who wants this is not a friend of human beings

[Marha01]

> Creating new humans is easy (and fun)

This could not be further from the truth.

Creating a new educated, competent human takes ~25 years, and significant costs and resources.

AGI can be just copy-pasted at essentially no cost. Even a robot that is mass-produced for tens of thousands of dollars is still much less expensive and takes much less time to make than a competent human.

[la64710]

But it is more than just fun , it gives purpose to our existence … pardon me but it is idiotic to look at bringing up a child so objectively.

[anonymous_sorry]

I do mostly agree with you, but...

> Creating new humans is easy

If you did a survey I suspect agreement with this statement would be rather bimodal.

[jbreckmckye]

That's fair. It starts easy, then gets difficult.

[contagiousflow]

Sure, but that only stands if you believe the only purpose of human intelligence is for economic benefit.

[Marha01]

That does not follow. The argument about the possibility of artificial intelligence makes absolutely no claims about the purpose of human or artificial intelligence. One is a claim about "is", another is a claim about "ought".

[jplusequalt]

>Believing otherwise requires some essentially religious convictions on the existence of the soul or similar.

My doubt has nothing to do with religion.

I believe we'll never be able to harness the amount of technology required to replicate human intelligence.

[SpicyLemonZest]

Technological changes to economic conditions in general are not possible to opt out of forever. I'm not an AI accelerationist myself, because I think there are severe risks beyond the merely economic, but the auto industry is a good example of where many countries are engaging in what one might call "EV accelerationism". In principle you don't have to, it's possible to let them roll out only to the extent that the market naturally demands, but if you know internal combustion engines will become a niche hobbyist thing by 2050 there's a lot of value in making that transition faster and intentional.

[phoronixrly]

That all persons doing intellectual work die of hunger as they cannot find a job. At least that's how I understand what the parent commenter is implying. They say that all people doing intellectual work better die quickly so they don't suffer a long 'transition period' to inevitably being dead of hunger.

[jbreckmckye]

Wonderful. And these people call themselves utilitarians too. God / Buddha / Allah / Batman, save me from their kindness!

[Yopolo]

Yeah I can't imagine this suddenly stops.

We already have disruptions in Software engineering, image generation, video generation, etc.

Humans might not like AI, Companies do and with Claude we are no longer sitting on the right side, if a Product manager tells a Boss that the PM now can do also code, the boss will listen.

But we will see other effects in the next 5-15 years: population pyramid is crashing which will increase demand for people. We already have high demand for other jobs.

so i can see a transition for a lot of white collar workers to blue collar workers which will continue the disruption for everyone.

Then the robots come along and AI integration is done and we will have a real issue on our hand. When will this come? No clue i don't think its unrealistic to expeirernece this in my lifetime.

[otabdeveloper4]

> what is going to happen to the job market during and the years following the crash

Junior programmers will be in demand again. Someone will have to fix the mountains of vibe coded technical debt.

[AnimalMuppet]

I'm not sure that you're going to fix that with juniors...

[rf15]

well, somebody has to learn it anew, after all the seniors are out. It's fine.

[Schlagbohrer]

What if they're cheap, though? Perhaps the pay scale for programmers starts to resemble that for finance bros: very low pay for the first few years because so many go into the field, and those who accumulate skill (and connections, etc) can then hit the hockey stick part of the graph and get a huge pay boost when they become middle and senior. So, it would be a deskilling of programmers at the start of their careers but still worthwhile to hire them if they are cheap and can dig through the tech debt with sheer numbers/manpower. I'm just spitballing here.

[SpicyLemonZest]

I've already seen an instance of a junior developer being completely unable to fix vibe coded technical debt, even with guidance, because AI analysis is fundamental to how they understand code and they're unable to comprehend what's happening when the AI analysis is not right.