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.
Do you have a link? There's no obvious place to look for this. All I can find is "Median usual weekly earnings of full-time wage and salary workers by sex, quarterly averages, seasonally adjusted". Which is not trivial to extrapolate into a real annual wage. And it's not clear how "quarterly averages" and "median usual weekly earnings" compose....
"But then people who work in actual tech companies come in and explicitly say they are not hiring any juniors anymore specifically because AI is good enough to do most of what juniors do, and that senior engineers can now write 3x as much code, etc."
If you want an anecdote: the media company I work for just started hiring interns and juniors in software career tracks again after a lengthy hiatus.
I have a suspicion that Twitter laying off so much of the software staff was very influential for people with hiring abilities. The company didn't crash, and they (relatively slowly) began shipping new features again. I think that coincided with the pandemic-era overhiring, and we've been working against that combo ever since.
Every now and then, I actively try to make an LLM replace my tasks, and fully do greenfield projects I would accept- I don't see it. It's very good, no doubt. But I have or have been given the project parameters, and just like with a junior, failures in communication inevitably lead to breakdowns in execution.
It does your job, but not completely autonomously so you don't see it?
It requires a lot of guidance, luckily, I mean thank god otherwise we would be goners. The job itself hasn't become easier, but it did change. If you come across failures you update the spec, the guard rails, whatever you use to guide it. It's not a "it produced bad code and now it's forever useless" type of situation.
I hate to be "that guy" but you're crazy if you don't see AI being able to do greenfield projects you'd accept.
I mean, in your defense, last year I think you would have been right, but right now? Codex rocks, as does Claude. I am literally making money shipping a greenfield project to a customer right now. I'm basically a cheap consultant that is incrementally adding features to make something exactly what they want for way cheaper than it would be to do it the old way.
There are hiccups, outages, things to fix etc. but the customer is happy with the output, and the reduced price means they get bespoke solutions rather than some BS one size fits all SaaS app. Then my job is maintenance and effectively "ITSM." Which kind of sucks in some ways, I miss writing real code for real projects, but this is the future going forward. If you want something for your business, you'll generate it rather than pay for it and for now at least, getting beyond localhost requires someone who knows a bit about computers or is willing to learn. Most small businesses aren't willing to learn.
Now, to your point. Is the code all that clean? Nope (and in your defense sometimes I read through the codebase and shudder)... but who cares? Like, for awhile I would go through and frantically edit it, but why? It worked. Not only that, but there's going to be a new model in 3 months or whatever that can clean it up and make it less shitty. I've literally done that a couple times since I started doing this in January.
The customer ain't reading the code. They don't care as long as the the functionality works - that's what counts. The gazillion tests I have keep it stable as I push code, and the CI/CD pipeline removes a ton of the ass pain I'd have without it.
The biggest thing I'm worried about when it comes to clean code and good design is trying to make sure I keep the token count down on these projects so I can actually do meaningful work without burning through a week's worth of tokens in a single day. That, and I like to try to keep a sort of architectural bird's eye view on what's happening...
Like, I'm not sure what niche of the industry you're in, but for the stuff I'm using it for, stuff is working really well with LLMs.
I assume they are working on low stakes software. Does it really matter if you use an LLM to code a scheduling app for a hair salon or veterinary clinic?
Think about all the geneticists that complain about excel re-writing DNA sequences.
It doesn't matter if its high stakes or low stakes. People use the software that generates the results they like. Not the software that is "correct to use".
So to try and understand your position - you are hired by a small? Company in which sector? And you built an app that does what? And I think most importantly - how did you find the gig? Were they explicitly hiring a AI capable person to do X?
I run my own thing since the start of the year. I’m building little tools for an industry I’m highly familiar that needs very specific scheduling software, data tools, tracking tools etc. My old job was a boring as a government bureaucrat.
I started this by doing some work for an old employer that asked me to start by modernizing an excel spreadsheet into an app I made for them like 10 years ago? They kept asking for more though since, and they’re my biggest customer right now. Which is good because I only have the bandwidth for like one more place right now.
I’ve had a few sort of one off things with other places? But I’m working on getting another company in the same industry right now and I’ll be able to adapt most of the code I’ve built here for another company if they end up deciding to use me.
But my biggest value to companies is “I already know this industry extremely well.”
There's no rule that a phenomenon needs 1 cause - the decline could've been junior cuts to start after '22 since they have less seniority and impact, followed by a substitution effect after broad LLM adoption. I don't doubt that remote had an additive effect on productivity via mentoring etc as well.
It's not just that. It's anyone who wants to live longer and look younger. Pretty much anyone with the income to afford it. As society becomes wealthier , it means more $ spend on elective procedures and healthcare overall. Wellness clinics are a huge deal now.
Yeah I'm starting to think the BLS needs to do "Boomer aging adjustments" to jobs numbers, in a similar manner to how they do "seasonal farming adjustments". Until we get through the Boomer population bulge, healthcare is going to keep adding jobs for quite a while regardless of how the rest of the economy does, but that doesn't necessarily mean the overall labor market is healthy.
If you leave out healthcare, 2025 had massive job losses overall, with Boomer bedpan cleaning bringing the net number up to just above zero.
If there is an increased demand in healthcare jobs that will increase wages in healthcare which will pull people out of other jobs and into healthcare in a healthy labor market. I’m not saying whether or not the labor market is healthy, but this adjustment wouldn’t help you figure that out.
Also Gen X isn’t that much smaller than the boomers, and millennials are the largest generation ever. Plus all generations aster the baby boomers have fewer children per couple to take care of them, so demand for healthcare jobs isn’t going to drop anytime soon.
> the BLS needs to do "Boomer aging adjustments" to jobs numbers, in a similar manner to how they do "seasonal farming adjustments"
You’re comparing a low-frequency trend with a high-frequency cycle. The latter has lots of data to characterize it. The former may be secular or may be a slow cycle; nobody should be adjusting for it in the base data.
I'm trying to envision the attacks and countermeasures for this approach. I suppose what I would do to fake this is write a program that takes text and the desired output histogram of edit timings and randomly introduces jitter into the typing. Then, I'd imagine you'd develop more sophisticated statistical tests, and so on. My intuition is that eventually there would be no statistical test that reliably discriminates real human typing.
Exactly! I was considering writing it myself in order to discourage an arms race. I do not think the battle can be won, but it is certainly worth fighting. At least increase the friction.
On the other hand "Failed a Turing test" would be a good bumper sticker.
In 2024, the Silent Generation and baby boomers represented 25% of the population, but held 65% of all wealth in the US.
The healthcare industry will profit a great deal, but there is no way they will capture 65% of all wealth in the country. And supposing they did: ultimately, all this wealth ends up on some household's balance sheet unless it goes abroad.
Yet we have ample evidence that extremely little of the massive increases in wealth, value, and productivity of the past 50 or so years has ended up in the hands of normal people.
Why would this be any different?
You can make all sorts of hay about "Oh that money will be invested so it will still benefit normal people" but no, the vast majority of the wealth the boomers gathered will be controlled by the new aristocracy. They will do with it as they please and thus you should expect it to almost entirely benefit them first and foremost.
Private equity prepared for this windfall. Even if they scoop up only ten percent of it or so, that's an enormous transfer of wealth from average families to the hyperwealthy. That's another entire chunk of the pie that is just removed from the continually shrinking normal person economy.
A giant fraction of that wealth is in real estate: Homes. Those homes should be passed down to the next generation, alleviating our insane house prices somewhat, but instead they will come under ownership of the same companies who currently monopolize specific rental markets to ensure the price goes up as much as they want, and they will absolutely rent out those new properties, in such a way that they do not reduce prices.
That housing stock is completely and totally captured by these private equity firms that own the end of life care companies.
To the greatest degree of our understanding, the mid-career slump happens to some people because priorities can shift mid-career. Kids/family starts to grab more attention, seeing life as more than a job and wanting to live it to the fullest becomes more prevalent as one becomes more aware of the clock ticking, for professionals they've likely started to build a bit of a nest egg so money doesn't seem as important before, etc. They slump because they just don't care about work like they used to.
How does your union keep people focused on the job? Or is it simply that the union self-selects those who are already focused on job-related matters and wouldn't end up in the slump anyway?
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