It’s so disingenuous and absurd to claim this is a AI problem. It’s an over saturation of qualified individuals in a field, problem. These companies and executives are just using AI as a cover story to hide the fact that the industry is not growing fast enough to employ the number of skilled professionals in the field. This was the point of the whole “learn to code” talking points. Executives and shareholders wanted an over-saturation in the field so as to push down wages and reduce the bargaining power of employees.
This situation kind of hammers home the importance of a robust social safety net, strong unions, minimum wages that keep up with inflation, and maintaining an affordable cost of living. There being a saturation in one job market should not doom people to poverty conditions. Even a job at chipotle should pay well enough to live comfortably on, and workers there should have enough bargaining power to ensure decent treatment.
Like, we need to act collectively to ensure stability and prosperity. There is no path that someone can take individually to ensure these things, no escape hatch to prosperity for “hard workers”. “Learning to code” and “Get a CS degree” seemed like a straight forward answer, but here we are.
AI was an excuse to fire people, in reality it doesnt generate profit for the company. by the time my older bro was laid off, he was in the 300k range of salary 165k is generously low and i would think it would be the max income if they would rehire,and i already suspected before the pandemic something will cause the companies to lay off the staff, and its usually the top earners and they would rather do it quickly. laid of in '23 and living off a severance package and not finding a job.
The other side is that the mass layoffs of the last year mean that there are plenty of experienced people to hire over new grads. I can’t imagine any company right now taking on the cost and risk of training up entry level folks when they can hire a 10+ yr senior in that role who’s been job hunting for 5 months, for the same or a little more than the entry level salary.
5? I know some in the industry who have been out for 30 months. Talented and experienced, as well.
That sucks, that’s way beyond what anyone I’ve met has been out for. They’re either very specialized, in an area that requires in-person work (and they’re not nearby to anyone), or there’s something that’s red-flagging them.
they will just go to h1b visas, and hire lower quality people, to barely maintain things.
From what I’m seeing and hearing in the tech space, I think the opposite is true. I think the current admin’s war on non-white people is making companies really wary of hiring H1B holders (even European ones) and even green card holders.
A lot of companies are just halting hiring altogether for a bit, and the ones who are hiring are looking for local, laid-off tech workers at lower salaries, who have to take it because there’s such a glut of them to compete with. Somewhat counterintuitively, this doesn’t mean an easier time for Americans to get hired, it means fewer overall Americans getting hired period (which the recent jobs reports prove to be the case).
Companies tend to hire visa’d workers when they are doing rapid business expansion, because that’s when saving the 20-30% per-head adds up (e.g. if you’re saving 20% per-head when hiring 100, you’re saving yourself 20 salaries-worth, but if you’re hiring 5, you’re better off getting the most experienced ones who give you the best bang-for-your-buck). And no one is doing rapid business expansions in this economy.
Exactly right. Most of us older coders have been warning of this for years. It was not benevolence that Microsoft, Google, Amazon so gleefully pushed for more coders and coding boot camps. They wanted a flood of labor to bring down salaries. They knew this was going to happen, and I’ve been calling it out for years. This is exactly what they wanted.
i had a “preminition” right before the pandemic that were going to start massive layoffs of tech workers soon, simply because they are earning hundreds of thousands a year, and the c-suites/ceos arnt going to let that slide.
Arguably, the market is flooded with tech grads, and they were never going to be enough jobs.
Well, yes. Capitalism and friends don’t care about a healthy society. They care about the owners having all the riches. This is inevitable without intervention.
“Waaah, our vibe coding broke!”
-Companies that go all in on AI and think they don’t need people
Vibe coding anything more complicated than the most trivial example toy app creates a mountain of security vulnerabilities. Every company that fires human software developers and actually deploys applications entirely written by AI will have their systems hacked immediately. They will either close up shop, hire more software security experts than the number of developers they fired just to keep up with the garbage AI-generated code, or try to hire all of the software developers back.
It staggers me that “vibe coding” is even a term. I wonder if the people behind that sort of thing would take the same attitude to, say, bridge design. “Oh yeah, move that support over there. It’ll be fine, haha. Here, have a beer while you’re at it!”
If a company fired and tried to rehire me, it’d be the perfect opportunity to negotiate. Imagine asking for a 20% raise and all of the unvested stock they robbed you of in addition to a stock bonus.
And yeah, I’d ask for that.
You should ask for 30% at least, fuck these clowns.
should be 200% plus benefits, or more. they already put in a traumatic firing situations, whats to stop them from firing immediately after you fixed thier problem.
20% would definitely be justified for having to take care of bad quality spaghetti code that is the result of vibe coding.
These are the kind of articles that occurred last time there was a boom bust cycle. Instead of outsourcing taking our jobs, its now ai. Except with outsourcing you can at least fire the individual. Ai is a subscription plan that produces template code.
Give it a couple of years and it will go from being the new shiny thing to just a microwave again.
