A big nerd debate with bigger implications for the future of work, technology, and the economy
In a moment with many important economic questions and fears, I continue to find this among the more interesting mysteries about the US economy in the long run: Is artificial intelligence already taking jobs from young people?
If you’ve been casually following the debate over AI and its effect on young graduates’ employment, you could be excused for thinking that the answer to that question is “possibly,” or “definitely yes,” or “almost certainly no.” Confusing! Let’s review:
Possibly! In April, I published an essay in The Atlantic that raised the possibility that weak hiring among young college graduates might indicate an AI disruption. My observation started with an objective fact: The New York Federal Reserve found that work opportunities for recent college graduates had “deteriorated noticeably” in the previous few months. Among several explanations, including tight monetary policy and general Trumpy chaos, I considered the explanation that companies might be using ChatGPT to do the work they’d historically relied on from young college grads. As David Deming, an economist and the dean of undergraduate studies at Harvard University, told me: “When you think from first principles about what generative AI can do, and what jobs it can replace, it’s the kind of things that young college grads have done” in white-collar firms.
Definitely yes! Soon after my essay went up, several other major news organizations and AI luminaries endorsed even stronger versions of my hedged claim. The New York Times said that for some recent graduates “the A.I. job apocalypse may already be here.” Axios reported that “AI is keeping recent college grads out of work.” In a much-discussed interview predicting a labor “bloodbath,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei made the audacious forecast that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within the next five years. By June, the narrative that AI was on the verge of obliterating the college-grad workforce was in full bloom. Until …
Almost certainly no!: As AI panic reached its fever pitch, several whip-smart analysts called the whole premise into question. A report from the Economic Innovation Group took several cuts of government data and found “little evidence of AI’s impact on unemployment,” and even less evidence that “AI-exposed workers [were] retreating to occupations with less exposure.” In fact, they pointed out that “the vast majority of firms report that AI had no net impact on their employment.” John Burn-Murdoch at the Financial Times pointed out that “the much-discussed contraction in entry-level tech hiring appears to have reversed in recent months.” The economic commentator Noah Smith synthesized even more research on this question to reach the conclusion that “the preponderance of evidence seems to be very strongly against the notion that AI is killing jobs for new college graduates, or for tech workers, or for…well, anyone, really.”
To be honest with you, I considered this debate well and truly settled. No, I’d come to think, AI is probably not wrecking employment for young people. But now, I’m thinking about changing my mind again.
Last week, I got an email from Stanford University alerting me to yet another crack at this question. In a new paper, several Stanford economists studied payroll data from the private company ADP, which covers millions of workers, through mid-2025. They found that young workers aged 22–25 in “highly AI-exposed” jobs, such as software developers and customer service agents, experienced a 13 percent decline in employment since the advent of ChatGPT. Notably, the economists found that older workers and less-exposed jobs, such as home health aides, saw steady or rising employment. “There’s a clear, evident change when you specifically look at young workers who are highly exposed to AI,” Stanford economist Erik Brynjolfsson, who wrote the paper with Bharat Chandar and Ruyu Chen, told the Wall Street Journal.
In five months, the question of “Is AI reducing work for young Americans?” has its fourth answer: from possibly, to definitely, to almost certainly no, to plausibly yes. You might find this back-and-forth annoying. I think it’s fantastic. This is a model for what I want from public commentary on social and economic trends: Smart, quantitatively rich, and good-faith debate of issues of seismic consequence to American society.
To more deeply understand the new Stanford paper, I reached out and scheduled an interview with two co-authors, Erik Brynjolfsson and Bharat Chandar. A condensed and edited version of our interview is below, along with careful analysis of the most important graphs.
Thompson: What’s the most important thing this paper is trying to do, and what’s the most important thing it finds?
Erik Brynjolfsson: There has been a lot of debate out there about AI and jobs for young people. I was hearing companies telling me one thing while studies were telling me another. I honestly didn't know the answer. We went at this with no agenda.
When we were able to slice the data, lo and behold, subcategories of high-exposed jobs like software developers and customer service agents for people aged 22 to 25 saw a very striking decline in employment in the last few years.
Then we asked, what else could this be? We brainstormed alternative hypotheses—COVID and remote work, tech over-hiring and pullback, interest rates—and we put in efforts to address and control for all of those, and the results still showed through clearly.
This is not a causal test, to be clear. We didn’t assign the technology to some firms and not others. But it’s a comprehensive observational analysis that controls for all the obvious alternatives we could think of. We’re happy to add more if people suggest them. Right now, there’s a clear correlation between the most-exposed categories and falling employment for young people.
Thompson: People like to look at graphs, and this will be published as a Q&A on Substack, so why don’t you tell me the key graphs from your paper that make the strongest case for your finding?
Bharat Chandar: I think Figure 1 has drawn a lot of interest, which considers the employment effects among young software engineers/software developers and customer service. We clearly saw hiring decline for young workers specifically, in these occupations.
Then I think people have been pretty interested in Figure 2 on the effects for home health aides as well, because here you see the opposite pattern. This is an occupation you wouldn’t think is very exposed to AI, because a lot of the work is in person and physical. And, indeed, you see the opposite pattern. For entry-level worker, there is faster employment growth. So that suggests this isn’t an economy-wide trend. The decline in employment really seems to be more concentrated in jobs that are more AI-exposed.
Thompson: Other research failed to find any effect of AI on employment for young people. Why is your paper different?
Chandar: The main advantage we have is this data from ADP, which tracks millions of workers every single month. That allows us to dig into what’s happening with much more precision.
I actually wrote a paper a couple of months ago using data from the Current Population Survey [CPS], which is a kind of workforce survey for real-time economic outcomes that researchers rely on a lot. My conclusion was similar to pieces by John Burn-Murdoch and others: Across the entire economy, we weren’t seeing major disruptions in the jobs most exposed to AI. But the tricky thing [with CPS] is that when you narrow your analysis to, say, software engineers aged 22 to 25, the sample sizes get very small. You don’t have the precision to say much that’s definitive.
That’s where the ADP data comes in. With millions of observations every month, we can cut the data by age and occupation and get reliable estimates even for small groups like 22–25 year-old software engineers.
Thompson: One piece of the paper that I love is that you specify the effect of AI in occupations where AI is more likely to automate vs. augment human work. So, "translate this essay into Spanish" or "format this technical document" is a task that can be automated by existing AI. But drafting a marketing strategy for a company is something where a human worker is necessary and might collaborate with AI. How did this distinction between automation versus augmentation play out in the paper?
Chandar: We have different measures of AI exposure. One we use is from Claude, via the Anthropic Economic Index. They analyze conversations that come into Claude and associate them with tasks and occupations. For each occupation, they give a sense of whether usage is more automative or augmentative. Automative means my conversation with AI is completely replacing some work I’d have to do. Augmentative is more like I’m learning by using Claude, asking questions, gaining knowledge, getting validation and feedback. We got an interesting result. For occupations where usage is more automative, we see substantial declines in employment for young people, whereas for augmentative occupations, that’s not true. You can see this in Figures 6 and 7 in the paper. It’s compelling because it shows not all LLM usage results in the same trend. The effect shows up more in the automative uses than the augmentative uses.
Thompson: What kind of jobs are most automative versus augmentative?
Chandar: For automative occupations, a lot of it is software engineering, auditing, and accounting, where there are well-defined workflows and LLMs are good at doing one-off tasks without a lot of feedback. For augmentative cases, you’re looking at more complex or managerial roles. It’s not, “I’m just offloading my task and I’m set.” There’s more back-and-forth, more strategic thinking on top of using the LLM. For those applications, we don’t see the same patterns.
Thompson: Would it be fair to say that within the same company, access to generative AI tools could reduce employment among young workers in one department—say, the legal department, where young hires just read, and look up stuff, and synthesize what they find, and write up reports—but also increase employment in another department, where the technology is more augmentative? So “AI is killing jobs at Company X” is less accurate than “AI is reducing headcount in Department A and increasing it in Department B.” Is that the story?
Chandar: Exactly. We actually have an analysis that confirms almost exactly that. It’s a little technical, but it’s basically what you just said. In one part of the analysis, we control for the firm and find that even within the same company, the more-exposed jobs are declining relative to the less-exposed jobs. In particular, for the most-exposed jobs, there’s a 13% relative decline in employment compared to the least-exposed jobs. That’s compelling because these aren’t trends driven by firm-level, aggregate economic shocks, like interest-rate changes. You’d expect those to apply at the firm level, but even within the firm you see differences between the more-exposed jobs and the less-exposed jobs.
Thompson: What does this suggest about what AI is good at versus what workers are good at?
Brynjolfsson: This is a little speculative, but important. LLMs learn from what’s written down and codified, like books, articles, Reddit, the internet. There’s overlap between what young workers learn in classrooms, like at Stanford, and what LLMs can replicate. Senior workers rely more on tacit knowledge, which is the tips and tricks of the trade that aren’t written down. It appears what younger workers know overlaps more with what LLMs can replace.
Chandar: One thing I’d add is short-time-horizon tasks vs. long-time-horizon tasks. The strategic thinking that goes into longer-horizon tasks may be something LLMs aren’t as good at, which aligns with why entry-level workers are more affected than experienced workers. Another factor is observable outcomes. Tasks where it’s easy to see whether you did a good job may be more substitutable. tThe nature of the training process means AI should, in general, be better at those.
Thompson: Does this paper have any bearing on the question of how colleges should respond to AI or what should students should study?
Brynjolfsson: One obvious category is: learn how to use AI. Paradoxically, I’ve found that senior coders are more familiar with AI than juniors. Universities haven’t updated their curricula. Maybe universities need to explicitly teach not just the principles of coding but also how to use these tools the way people do on the job. Also, there are many things LLMs aren’t very good at. Many jobs have a physical component that may be increasingly important.
So, what did we learn today? I think Noah Smith’s basic approach here is correct. Understanding real-time changes to the economy is hard work, and overconfidence in any direction is unadvisable. But I’m updating in the direction of trusting my initial gut instinct. I think we’re looking at the single most compelling evidence that AI is already affecting the labor force for young people.
This fits into a broader theme that I’m trying to bang on about in my work on AI. All this talk about AI as the technology of the future—will it cure cancer in 2030? or, destroy the world in 2027? or accomplish both, maybe within the same month?—can evade the question of what AI is doing to the economy right now. AI infrastructure spending growth is already keeping annual GDP growth above water. AI is already creating a cheating crisis in high schools and colleges. AI is having interactions with young and anxious people that are already having real-world effects. And, just maybe, AI is already warping the labor market for young people.
Someone once asked me recently if I had any advice on how to predict the future when I wrote about social and technological trends. Sure, I said. My advice is that predicting the future is impossible, so the best thing you can do is try to describe the present accurately. Since most people live in the past, hanging onto stale narratives and outdated models, people who pay attention to what’s happening as it happens will appear to others like they’re predicting the future when all they’re doing is describing the present. When it comes to the AI-employment debate, I expect we’ll see many more turns of this wheel. I cannot promise you that I’ll be able to predict the future of artificial intellignece. But I can promise you that I’ll do my best to describe the wheel as it turns.
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Comments
How does one explain the drop starting January 2023 (esp for things like Customer Service Rep, which is an NLP-heavy task) when most corporations didnt even start LLM/NLP pilots until mid/late 2023? I skimmed thru the 100+ page paper but didnt see an explanation for this strange leading effect.
SWE figures dropped mid-2022 (almost magically in line with interest rate hikes) and LLM-copilots werent introduced for another year. The paper notes they did an adjustment for the end of ZIRP. I dont know enough econometrics to understand whether this adjustment was sufficient, but the chart doesnt make sense since the labor efforts seem to be leading the actual technology by over a year or more. From informal surveys, LLM-copilot usage didnt become widespread until late 2023 to mid 2024, certainly not widespread enough to cause macro labor effects in mid-2022.
The 2022 drop for SWE is easy for me to explain, and it's not on these analysts' list of factors (though I'm not an economic quant, I don't know how you could really control for it): In 2017, a tax bill was passed that cut a particular tax incentive in 2022 in an effort to be counted as "revenue neutral" despite being otherwise a massive tax cut overall. The incentive in question was a writeoff for "Research and development". This means that in 2022, it got effectively much more expensive to hire anyone who falls under that category, including developers not directly necessary for the day-to-day function of a business (hell, one might argue they would have counted anyway) and scientists of most kinds. That this hit big firms, which have a higher relative amount of R&D efforts going at a given time, first makes a lot of sense.
For customer service, my explanation is that companies literally do not care about customer service. Automated phone trees, outsourced call centers whose reps have no real power to help a customer, and poorly-made websites have been frustrating people for decades, but businesses never seem to try to compete on doing better at it. It's a cheap win with investors who want to hear about AI initiatives to lay off yet even more of this department, because it doesn't matter if the quality of service declines, there are no market or regulatory forces that are punishing this well enough to ever expect firms to stop breaking it, let alone fix it
Love this note. For those interested, this is the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017 Section 179.
For a software engineering business, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017 significantly impacted how software costs can be expensed under Section 179. While Section 179 previously allowed for the immediate expensing of many software purchases, TCJA reforms restricted this deduction primarily to "off-the-shelf" software. Custom-developed software and internal development costs are no longer eligible for Section 179 expensing and must now be capitalized and amortized.
Under the TCJA, Section 179 cannot be used for software that a company develops for itself. This includes the direct costs for the engineers, programmers, and other personnel involved in the development process.
The report not addressing this elephant in the room is a disappointing.
I think it may have been a one-two punch of §174 and the end of ZIRP.
Of note, the OBBB reinstated the ability to deduct R&D, so businesses are no longer required to capitalize and amortize R&D expenses (including software development).
https://warrenaverett.com/insights/one-big-beautiful-bill-se...
By lisbbb 2025-09-044:25 I was talking about zirp in another thread and got downvoted. But yes, companies were taking out low/zero interest loans and hiring people in hopes of making 1-2% on it, which worked for awhile. It doesn't work at 4-5%, though. We can't pin our hopes to zirp anyways. But a lot of sketchy activities around investing were accomplished because of zirp.
Section 174 was the big one that affected how SE salaries could be deducted, that many blamed for the start of layoffs.
However, that's back for tax year 2025, so why aren't we seeing the jobs come back? Maybe it really was 174 then, but AI now?
Anecdotally I saw a post on reddit about a senior SWE in the USA who was laid off and couldn't get any interviews, with their old job outsourced to eastern Europe. And then this month the people he hadn't even got a response back from started requesting he apply for their jobs. Only one data point but the market might be coming back.
By akrotkov 2025-09-043:48 Anecdotally in the past month or so, I've started seeing a large uptick in recruiter reach-outs. I had none for the past year (aside from directly reaching out), but there have been 4 cold contacts in the last couple of weeks alone now.
I did a bunch of interviews, I was actually busy with them, earlier this summer. I just can pass the damn system design interview lol ugh
I think if your willing to go to the sf bay and work in an office there are lots of opportunities. Remote and high pay doesn't have alot of options.
By 62951413 2025-09-0416:03 20 miles to SF, 25 yoe (backend, data, basic frontend), been there done that and all I have got is this automated rejection email
By silisili 2025-09-046:22 As a 20 year remote employee across multiple companies...in my experience, this is true depending on one's definition of career. If you want to advance high in the company, remote is going to stifle you unless the entire company is remote. And even then something as small as skipping an offsite or keeping your cam off will stifle you. Humans like connection, apparently.
My own career progress was much slower and topped out lower than (in my enlightened opinion) much less qualified folks in office.
That said, it's a tradeoff. I -still- wouldn't move to work in office knowing this. I value my family, time, and lifestyle I'm able to afford in a place I want to be more than making tons of money.
In another 10 or 20 years I'm half sure I'll run the numbers and regret that, but so far so good.
I have been promoted while working remote, so I disagree.
I don’t have 2 different 1 hour commute blocks on my calendar. While you’re fighting traffic, I’m working. While you’re rushing through your morning routine, I’m sitting at my computer catching up on slack. While you’re finding the meeting room, I’m reading the meeting prep material. While you’re getting distracted by Sales in your open office, I’m locked in, midway through a 2 hour coding session.
By BobbyTables2 2025-09-051:591 reply Did you actually get a promotion with pay increase?
Or did they give you a title and say, great job — now we have higher expectations of you!
It was a $50k salary bump.
What you’re talking about seems like an attempt to placate rather than reward.
By BobbyTables2 2025-09-053:42 Wow, congratulations! Thought that only happened in fairy tales!
By tayo42 2025-09-045:24 No other options though.
I did the sf thing and don't want to go back. Don't want to live in NYC or Seattle or commute over an hour from NYC suburbs.
By esseph 2025-09-046:19 Not remotely true.
By boredtofears 2025-09-044:36 How so?
By tomrod 2025-09-043:14 Also overhiring in the pandemic.
By MontyCarloHall 2025-09-040:292 reply >why aren't we seeing the jobs come back?
It was only just reinstated, so it's probably too early to see the effects.
I also expect that despite the restoration of Section 174, companies realized that they not only overhired during ZIRP, but also that they don't actually need that headcount, given the outcome of Musk's Twitter layoffs. There were so many prognostications that Twitter would imminently implode after downsizing from ~8k to ~1.5k employees, and when these claims never came to pass, it was a wake-up call to the rest of the industry [0].
[0] https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/elon-musk-fired-80-p...
I also think it’s fashionable to have a smaller headcount these days. Historically, the dynamics of businesses encouraged rising headcounts, as ICs weren’t as valued as managers (salary caps basically, as impact for ICs is hard to measure unless you are in sales), and managers generally view headcount as a metric to career and salary growth.
So there was just this general pressure from the middle up to grow instead of paying more to existing staff or finding some other way to spend the money. After all, investors generally want you to spend the money you have access to, otherwise they’ll put it to use elsewhere.
It seems that there is external pressure right now from investors, and on to executives, to push headcounts down as there is a general feeling that good companies should be able to leverage AI to become much more efficient, and higher headcounts just burn money and bog things down. Whether or not that’s true is another question, but the perception exists.
I’m not sure if this is a fundamental change in the dynamic, or just a temporary push against it that will eventually lose steam.
> good companies should be able to leverage AI to become much more efficient
I feel like this should be a “both and” situation. AI is not a panacea. If your company has 10 good engineers and a ChatGPT subscription, and my company has 100 good engineers and a ChatGPT subscription, we are going to move considerably faster.
Until someone gets an exclusive contract with AGI, it doesn’t change things.
By jdiff 2025-09-0513:49 This isn't how it practically works though. You hit a saturation point where there's no more work to be done. There's only so much software to write, only so many ad campaigns to push, sometimes you just need to maintain, stabilize, and not iterate. If you have a problem that requires 10 engineers, 100 isn't going to speed it up. 9 women can't make a baby in 1 month and all that.
I don't think many people really doubted that Twitter could keep itself up and running.
But that "everything app"? It hasn't happened. The money transfer app ("Twitter Payment Platform")? Still MIA.
By MontyCarloHall 2025-09-040:532 reply >I don't think many people really doubted that Twitter could keep itself up and running.
Oh, they sure did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34617964
Even in that thread, a lot of people were saying "it's only been three months, give it a bit more time."
And they were right, I think. Twitter's UI has degraded. I can't see this tweet linked from the thread: https://x.com/Grady_Booch/status/1620720537805922306 - it gives me an error. It might have been deleted, but Twitter just says "something went wrong". And I don't think it's even possible to view threads anymore without logging in?
But more importantly, X has not released any substantially new features within the last 3 years. And I bet that it won't release anything new for a while, and anything they _do_ try to release will be laughably broken.
Existing features are also suffering and going unfixed. If you browse any tweet with more than a few dozen replies, loading replies takes a notable amount of time, and X very conspicuously does not load all of them. Sometimes changing reply sorting algorithms loads entirely different batches of tweets.
Besides that most basic functionality, many times notifications are not sent when the notification settings would suggest they should be. And of course, moderation has fallen by the wayside, although that's more of a policy shift than a technical failure.
By neilv 2025-09-042:50 Incidentally, those defects would be good for censorship with deniability.
(Occam says deficit of institutional capability is the most likely cause. But that could also turn into a feature.)
By username332211 2025-09-045:09 > But more importantly, X has not released any substantially new features within the last 3 years.
Just on top of my head, there's the ability to write longer texts, the AI integration (that seems fairly popular in there). There was also some revenue sharing scheme where accounts can get paid for engagement. And from the point of view of management, making it impossible to view threads without login would also be a feature (as in "something we have to deliberately implement").
It's not a lot, but I don't think the pre-Musk Twitter changed even that much in the 3 year period before the acquisition.
I don't understand this thread - twitter is pretty much entirely dead, like stackoverflow - in some zombie state before getting the plug inevitably pulled in a decade or so. Its revenue halved since 2020.
By somenameforme 2025-09-044:301 reply Net income/profit is what matters, revenue is largely irrelevant. Your own date is a perfect example of this since Twitter somehow managed to lose a ton of money in 2020 when they did indeed see record revenue, probably owing to over-stuffed election coffers. X's user counts and EBITDA are at record levels. In 2024 it was $1.25 billion on $2.7 billion revenue, contrasted against 'old Twitter's' $0.68 billion on $5 billion revenue in 2021. [1]
[1] - https://archive.is/evLAL (WSJ archive)
By username332211 2025-09-044:561 reply Doesn't this forum periodically discuss an article[*] about profit not really mattering in the grand scheme of things? (As in, profitable and growing companies are capable of showing profit whenever they want, and conversely to show no profit if they so wish.)
[*] This one I believe - https://commoncog.com/cash-flow-games/
By somenameforme 2025-09-045:251 reply The numbers I referenced were EBITDA, which is mostly the point of that article.
By username332211 2025-09-045:421 reply But a software company shouldn't really need to show even EBITDA. Amazon didn't between 2000 and 2012.
By somenameforme 2025-09-046:28 I'm not sure this is true. Amazon was investing heavily in things that would be reasonably expected to yield future gains, like fulfillment centers and just broadly expanding their logistic capacity. But for Twitter? So far as I know, most of their expenses were just ongoing operational costs and which seem to have been greatly bloated owing to mismanagement.
By MontyCarloHall 2025-09-041:533 reply That's due to Elon's gross mishandling of Twitter governance (e.g. demanding that the recommendation algorithm be tweaked so that literal Nazis dominate people's feeds), not due to any technical failings of the platform as a result of downsizing the engineering staff.
Twitter really is a hellscape. I was drawn in for a few days recently and started getting affected by the barrage of relentless right-wing garbage. And for those on twitter it seems like the most important information in the world when it’s just a dopamine pump of rage and fear. Easier just to switch it off and live your life in peace.
This is a thought terminating cliche, ironically about a thought terminating cliche. X does have a problem with actual, literal, antisemitic, genocidal Nazis. No funny business or stretched definitions. Nazis. Dismissing it just because of a few people going by the Nazi bar analogy risks normalizing the actual fucking Nazis we're dealing with. "Oh everyone's a Nazi to you people" is a crazy thing to say when the individual under discussion is screaming about globalist cabals of bankers ushering in white erasure. And that is who is getting algorithmically elevated on X.
Also plenty of racists and homophobes, more than I see just about anywhere else on the internet. And more wild, rabid hate surrounding trans people than I see anywhere outside of narrow, festering cesspools in wastelands like 4chan.
I believe you that there are literal Nazis on X, just as there are on every social media platform (and society in general). I despise Nazis but again I literally never see them on my feed so I find it hard to believe that this is a major problem or that the platform is boosting that content. If you're seeing a lot of Nazi content then you're probably following the wrong type of accounts.
By jdiff 2025-09-0521:52 No, in fact I block every such account I see. I go on Twitter for inspiration of various kinds, not for doomscrolling, although I recognize that that's in vogue. But the owner of the platform has been demonstrated to artificially push posts and accounts into people's timelines and notifications, particularly his own, and he has retweeted, replied to, and otherwise boosted blatantly antisemitic conspiracy theories. It's pretty well documented as something that does actually happen, and not just as some sort of algorithmic quirk.
By yieldcrv 2025-09-040:54 Recruiters have been blowing my inbox up since the day Trump signed the OBBB
although I think entry level is still in shambles, for now
By ivewonyoung 2025-09-040:21 Those changes got permanently reversed in the recent passage of the Big Beautiful Bill by a one-in-a-year reconciliation process that was able to pass with only 51 votes in the Senate with zero votes from the opposition.
Note that the reversal only applies to American software jobs, not offshore ones. So maybe tech hiring is going to pick up again soon. Those changes should've been reversed before they took effect in 2022 by the govt at the time.
By tru3_power 2025-09-040:353 reply What was the reasoning behind this change? Isn’t R&D something we’d encourage to be a tax write off since it reduces the cost of well.. R&D? Or is R&D not as important as I’m thinking?
By tart-lemonade 2025-09-040:50 It was done to try and make the bill somewhat pencil out and make the national debt increase less egregious. Everyone just assumed it would be delayed forever or reversed before it could take effect, but those negotiations failed, triggering massive waves of layoffs.
By arscan 2025-09-040:43 The story that I’ve heard (probably on here) is that the administration did it to make the tax bill look more balanced over the long term by phasing out that tax write-off, while giving them (or the next administration) time to reverse it before it really impacted anything. But, nobody reversed it, until this year.
By WillPostForFood 2025-09-041:143 reply Why do you think they brought it back this year?
By shagie 2025-09-041:56 It was also in part a budgetary time bomb that was set to go off in the next term. If Trump won, they would have rolled it back. As it was, there were several attempts to roll it back between 2021 and 2024 that were blocked by republicans ( https://www.claconnect.com/en/resources/blogs/manufacturing/... https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/4737635-senate-republica... ) so that the economy would continue to suffer under Biden.
Once Trump won and was in place for 2025, they defused it so that (they hoped) the economy would pick up.
By TuringNYC 2025-09-042:15 >> Why do you think they brought it back this year?
Huge amounts of coordinated lobbying by the tech industry concentrated on three topics (crypto, section 179, ai deregulation)
By neutronicus 2025-09-041:50 Presumably because they see the tech industry as having been brought sufficiently to heel.
By green7ea 2025-09-046:33 This 1000x.
I was working in Europe for a big American company, which will remain nameless, and they started shutting down most, if not all, of their European operations.
A change in the US tax code made software development amortize over 5 years in the US and over 15 years overseas. It was later changed instant deduction in the US but still 15 years for overseas. It no longer makes sense to outsource software development in many cases.
By awesome_dude 2025-09-040:36 > It's a cheap win with investors who want to hear about AI initiatives to lay off yet even more of this department, because it doesn't matter if the quality of service declines, there are no market or regulatory forces that are punishing this well enough to ever expect firms to stop breaking it, let alone fix it
There's also some argument that, if people cannot get customer service to "help" they stop asking for help - driving that cost down.
And not having to remedy issues in the product = no repair/replace cost
And people are then left with only a few options, one of which... buy a replacement... which in a restricted market is a WIN because more money coming in...
By another_twist 2025-09-045:35 And something to note - this cut has been reinstated as part of the Big Beautiful Bill. Which has passed. I think the drop in jobs between now and a year from now atleast be separated as AI vs just interest rates. There are less confounding variables.
I've heard this complaint/observation many times and I just don't buy it. For one thing, particularly for large companies, the deduction smooths out. Yes, you can only deduct 20% of the costs this year but you're also deducting 20% from the previous year, 20% from the eyar before that and so on.
Also, the 2017 tax cuts and the recent bill have provided substantial tax cuts to these corporations too.
Usually this subject comes up where people (at least on HN) are telling people to mail their Congresspeople and Senators to get a bill passed to "fix" this and my question is always this:
"What tax cuts are you going to give back to pay for this?"
If we want to end this ridiculous IP transfer to Ireland and royalty payments to offshore profits to avoid taxes at the same time, I'm 100% on board with fixing the deductability of engineering salaries.
By ch4s3 2025-09-041:51 > Also, the 2017 tax cuts and the recent bill have provided substantial tax cuts to these corporations too.
That's just not how big companies look at their budgets, it isn't all one big pool of funds coming in and going out everything has a cost center and is accounted for individually end to end. This tax change made certain jobs suddenly 20% more expensive on paper. People in corporate finance look at these numbers and make recommendations that get implemented.
By rurp 2025-09-042:55 > the 2017 tax cuts and the recent bill have provided substantial tax cuts to these corporations too.
Sure, but that doesn't necessarily change the marginal cost of hiring another dev if the tax incentives have worsened.
The time value of money over 5 years is significant, especially in a fast moving industry like tech. The correlation between this change passing and tech hiring dropping is strong so I'm inclined to think there's some signal there.
By saelthavron 2025-09-042:12 > I'm 100% on board with fixing the deductability of engineering salaries.
It's already been fixed for US workers.
By ponector 2025-09-0418:20 How does US tax bill explain global slowdown?
By blindriver 2025-09-040:271 reply You absolutely misunderstand Section 174 and you are spreading misinformation.
The only companies this affected are those right at the margins of becoming profitable. It doesn't affect new startups and it doesn't affect established businesses. And if you are at the margins of becoming profitable you have likely accumulated more than enough tax credits for all your losses.
The changes to Section 174 is not the explanation of why software engineering jobs were lost in 2022. They were lost because every company overhired from 2020-2022 and they have to absorb it given the drop in activity once the Pandemic was over.
Not entirely accurate. An unprofitable company that is acquired for its tech or team might have a huge amount of tax credits that they can’t use, but the acquiring company can. This can make an acquisition more attractive, even if the target company never made any money.
By TuringNYC 2025-09-043:10 You are right that it creates residual value which might be purchased for value (probably at a discount.) However, it doesn't help the startup actually pay the bills while it operates.
Historically, the R&D payroll just wiped out same year revenue and you essentially did cash accounting. After Section 174, you had to finance the R&D by borrowing or just hiring less.
By utyop22 2025-09-0413:30 This only makes sense if you have taxable income :))) and if you dont in the near term, the present value of those tax credits are lower.
By blindriver 2025-09-046:382 reply You won’t lose the tax credits they only get time shifted.
By cobbzilla 2025-09-0410:51 I was responding to “The only companies this affected are those right at the margins of becoming profitable.”
It also affects wildly unprofitable companies that have burned lots of cash and never made any money.
And you do “lose” the tax credits upon acquisition - they’re not only time-shifted, they are company-shifted.
By TuringNYC 2025-09-0411:56 >> You won’t lose the tax credits they only get time shifted.
Yes, from a value perspective you do not lose the tax credits. But from a "cash" perspective, how do I pay my tax bill in years 1, 2, 3, 4?
I do consulting, I'm constantly scouting clients. Right around November 2022 something very stark happened. I went from fighting off prospects with a stick, to crickets, almost over night. I deal mostly with startups and mid-size companies, nobody with insider knowledge or cutting edge interests. I can tell you that GPT was not heavily on anyone I dealt with's radar as an opportunity to reduce costs.
Some sort of cultural zeitgeist occurred, but in terms of symptoms I saw with my own eyes, I think ZIRP ending (projects getting axed) and layoffs starting (projects getting filled within ~24 hours) were huge drivers. I have no proof.
> Right around November 2022 something very stark happened.
The Twitter layoffs perhaps?
By pydry 2025-09-047:15 The interest rate rise also. It happened earlier but thats when the effects started to filter down.
By ants_everywhere 2025-09-0411:461 reply The Twitter layoffs were done in anticipation of AI. Musk knew he wanted to make X and Twitter was one entry point. The loss in twitter productivity would be made up by AI gains and the first realization of that AI was named Grok.
So there's a bit of circular causality here. AI is a cause of the Twitter layoffs, and others are arguing that the Twitter layoffs may be a cause of other labor force shrinkage. If so then the Twitter layoffs are a costly signal that AI will impact the labor force and the shrinkage downstream of them is AI related.
By estimator7292 2025-09-0413:032 reply No, they weren't.
The Twitter layoffs were because the company was hemorrhaging money and Musk is an egomaniac.
By ants_everywhere 2025-09-0415:331 reply Is your claim that Musk, who cofounded OpenAI and started buying GPUs by the tens of thousands almost immediately after buying Twitter, and whose stated purposes in buying Twitter included AI, and who has been trying to build X since the 1990s, and who uses AI in SpaceX and Tesla, did not foresee that he would use AI on Twitter when he conducted the layoffs?
Can you walk me through your thought process here?
By habinero 2025-09-0520:17 You're too in love with your own conclusion here. The reality is Elon's kind of an idiot who just impulsively does stuff and mostly gets away with it because money.
Elon talked shit online and then fought hard to wriggle out of buying Twitter after promising to pay the funny weed sex number for it.
And he fired employees because he's cheap and only keeps people who yes man him. You can read the complaint yourself:
https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/twitter-employee-laws...
I think part of that is a bit of a collapose of traditional consulting. There's been a huge transition into the boutique firms now.
By speakspokespok 2025-09-046:091 reply Where do you think the market is going in regards to boutique firms? I've heard it mentioned but I'm not sure what counts as boutique and what that signifies for the next few years.
By k_roy 2025-09-065:49 So if we are talking about "traditional consulting", that usually means MBB/Big Three
The value they add is their corpus of previous work to lean on and sell. And anybody at the firm can reference that. But it's always almost the junior level consultants doing the work, and a bunch of c-suites trying to manage it and sell it.
So when you work with a firm like this, you are going to get a team who has managed a similar project as yours, but it usually ends up being generic and trying to repeat past successes.
I really think that's where some of the boutique firms are being different.
Instead of just saying "here is our Lean Six Sigma team", they can say "we've got these four people who are perfect for technical implementation, and here is a project manager who has done almost exactly this before, and here is a RevOps person who has worked in your actual industry".
Maybe someone is an expert on some super obscure domain. They might not qualify for a full time consultant position at a big 3 firm, can suddenly be pulled in on projects that are their specialty.
Mostly these boutique firms can put together a more highly specialized and focused team than the prebuilt teams at a place like Bain or McKinsey.
Interest rate was hiked rapidly from 1% (in May 2022) to 4% (in Dec 3 2022).
Oct 2022 recorded the lowest for S&P 500 since COVID (till now).
COVID assistance was over. Vaccination reached a critical majority. On Sep 2022, Biden declared "COVID-19 pandemic was over" [1].
Businesses got a reality check.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_the_Unite...
By thr0w 2025-09-0514:19 Yep, interesting. Thank you.
I had the same thoughts, there are clearly indicators that the weakness in the labor market started happening before LLMs and AI took over popular discourse.
All the more reason to believe that while correlated, LLMs are certainly not the largest contributor, or even the cause of the job market weakness for young people. The more likely and simple explanation is that there are cracks forming in the economy not just in the US but globally; youth employment is struggling virtually everywhere. Can only speculate on the reasons, but delayed effects from questionable monetary and fiscal policy choices, increasing wealth gaps, tariffs, geopolitics, etc. have certainly not helped.
By 0xDEAFBEAD 2025-09-044:171 reply >youth employment is struggling virtually everywhere.
Interesting point. With Baby Boomers retiring everywhere and fertility falling everywhere, one would expect fierce competition for young workers.
By lisbbb 2025-09-0420:04 The Boomers are largely gone now from tech. One former manager of mine was 65 when I left, she retired a year later at 66, gone. Unfortunately, most of the roles those people held were not back-filled. The roles vanished, too.
Anecdata: I spent quite a bit of time driving around office parks in Eagan, MN. Most of them are dead--really, really dead. Vacant offices everywhere, the hotel that used to cater to business travelers is shuttered and the parking lot looks like a jungle. I can't peg exactly when all this took place because I haven't worked in that area in several years, but probably the effects of 2020, the remote work culture, and now the layoff hangover. I see a lot of people in their 50s and 60s working retail jobs right now. They often look like folks who would have been working in an office someplace.
By MontyCarloHall 2025-09-040:42 >The paper notes they did an adjustment for the end of ZIRP. I dont know enough econometrics to understand whether this adjustment was sufficient
Looking at the paper [0], they attempted to do it by regressing the number of jobs y_{c,q,t} at company c, time t, and "AI exposure quintile" q, with separate parameters jointly controlling for company/quintile (a), company/time (b) and quintile/time (g). This is in Equation 4.1, page 15, which I have simplified here:
log(y_{c,q,t}) ~ a_{c,q} + b_{c,t} + g_{q,t}
Any time-dependent effects (e.g. end of ZIRP/Section 174) that would equally affect all jobs at the company irrespective of how much AI exposure they have should be absorbed into b.
They normalized g with respect to October 2022 and quintile 1 (least AI exposure), and plotted the results for each age group and quintile (Figure 9, page 20). There is a pronounced decline that only starts in mid-2024 for quintiles 3, 4, and 5 in the youngest age group. The plots shown in the article are misleading, and are likely primarily a reflection of ZIRP, as you say. The real meat of the paper is Figure 9.
A potential flaw of this method is that ZIRP/Section 174 may have disproportionately affected junior positions with high AI exposure, e.g. software engineers. This would not be accounted for in b and would thus be reflected in g. It would be interesting to repeat this analysis excluding software engineers and other employees subject to Section 174.
[0] https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/...
By jordanb 2025-09-040:22 Yeah my company started stepping up outsourcing in 2023. We also started some AI projects. The AI projects haven't made much progress but the outsourcing is at an extremely advanced stage.
I personally sat in meetings in 2022 where we adjusted staffing projections in anticipation of AI efficiency. Sure some of it was "overhiring," but the reality was that those staffing goals were pre-ai. Once they were updated, that's when the layoffs started because management didn't want anyone who didn't have an AI or big data background.
By MontyCarloHall 2025-09-0323:573 reply Gen-AI was still extremely niche in 2022; ChatGPT didn't come out until the end of the year, on 30 November, and it was pretty much just a toy curiosity until mid-2023 when GPT-4 came out. I am very surprised that leadership at your company was seriously discussing the business impact of AI that early on.
Chat gpt wasn't considered a toy... Not sure where you got that. We were interested in what openai was going from very early given the founders' history.
By MontyCarloHall 2025-09-040:091 reply It absolutely was considered a toy by most people when it debuted in late 2022. This was the era when memes abounded about how ChatGPT would dutifully answer the query "what's the world record for crossing the English Channel on foot?" [0] or "what weighs more, a pound of feathers or a kilogram of bricks?" [1]
Most people didn't start taking ChatGPT/gen-AI seriously until mid-2023, when GPT-4 became widely used.
[0] https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/format:webp/1*yJs...
[1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fpl09fAakAE1cFW?format=jpg&name=...
You can see for your self how seriously HN users took ChatGPT in late 2022 https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1672444800&dateRange=custom&...
Some of the highlights include:
* Building a Virtual Machine Inside ChatGPT https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33847479 (Dec 3, 2022; 2029 points; 919 comments)
* Disputing a Parking Fine with ChatGPT https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33937753 (Dec 10, 2022; 606 points; 348 comments)
* ChatGPT passes the 2022 AP Computer Science A free response section https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33858844 (420 points; Dec 4, 2022; 455 comments)
* ChatGPT is a ‘code red’ for Google’s search business https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34086462 (396 points; Dec 23, 2022; 636 comments)
* Build your front end in React, then let ChatGPT be your Redux reducer https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34166193 (395 points; Dec 28, 2022; 142 comments)
Hacker News is not most people. Even today most non-tech people I speak to have barely touched AI. Perhaps a bit of gimmicky “ooh that’s cool” image generation or chatGPT, but nothing serious.
By tick_tock_tick 2025-09-040:082 reply I mean very good job staying on-top of new tech but you're not actually trying to imply your not the anomaly in that regard right?
He was certainly on top of new technology movement but signs were there the whole time.
I wasn’t aware of ChatGPT in 2022 but I was aware that we could not keep data scientists hired long term because several faangs like meta were just dropping 100% increases in salary as the opener to our people for some mega project related to machine learning based on the skill set of the people being hired
By deelowe 2025-09-056:23 Correct. We didn't know chatgpt would be huge but we knew big data and ai were the next big thing and we're investing heavily in that space. The funding for this came from sre teams, pms, etc.
By bongodongobob 2025-09-041:37 Not for people paying attention to the entire AI space. GPT wasn't the only thing going on at the time. AlphaGo was a big deal for anyone paying attention.
By raincole 2025-09-040:17 Huge difference between people with forward thinking and without, right.
By 9rx 2025-09-043:07 GitHub Copilot was out there in 2021. The "chat about anything" era hadn't really begun, but "your computer can write code for you" era was well underway. And given that said business wanted to retain the people it had with AI/big data backgrounds, strongly suggesting it isn't like a restaurant where it would be unlikely that any staff would have that kind of experience, we can reasonably assume that they are in that particular niche.
in addition to this detail I might add I can't remember the last time I had a customer service call that took place with someone stateside. It's easy to point to AI when offshoring for favorable interest rates is really the reason.
I'm surprised more folks aren't live to this -- AI is just the scapegoat. The jobs are moving to where labor is cheaper.
By 0xDEAFBEAD 2025-09-044:252 reply I remember the outsourcing meme was huge in the early 2000s. "Don't study CS, you'll get outsourced." Why is it only happening now? It's far from a new idea.
By red-iron-pine 2025-09-0412:53 > Why is it only happening now?
because 2020-2022 COVID happened and forced everything remote. world didn't end.
the offshoring boom was the 90s and 2000s, and generally ended not amazing, but now a new generation of leadership saw it could be done, and done better -- video calls to the other side of the globe work far better than in 2004, speaking from experience.
By iszomer 2025-09-0411:58 The exaggerated state of the national security narrative.
By greenavocado 2025-09-042:03 Two data points from last month:
American Express
And a large bank headquartered in Virginia
I think USAA but that was two years ago
By lurking_swe 2025-09-046:38 I just had one on saturday actually, was a pleasant surprise!
I called bank of america’s credit card line and asked for a support agent. A friendly lady answered, she had a southern accent. :)
By cyanydeez 2025-09-040:20 I think it's lipstick on a pig. We've seen tech companies collude before, and I'm guessing they're doing it again, trying to drive down the price of talent and make their employees less demanding.
By Den_VR 2025-09-041:34 I remember years of a no-backfill policy at Devon on a promises of automation. Since 2017 at least. The “desirable job market” for young people has been challenging well before LLM became popular. Want a dead end entry level job in food service earning $20/hour? No problem.
By fuzzfactor 2025-09-0323:482 reply The economy is destroying the jobs and AI is just the raven on the shoulder of a stumbling bull . . .
>The economy is destroying the jobs
the economy actually creates all the jobs ever since hunt and gather. the buggy whip jobs did eventually dry up, but the economy continues to create other jobs, paid for by ever increasing surpluses.
By dragonwriter 2025-09-041:20 > the economy actually creates all the jobs ever since hunt and gather.
The economy neither creates nor destroys jobs. The economy is the aggregate of the jobs.
By safety-space 2025-09-040:06 yes, this is it
By danans 2025-09-040:11 > SWE figures dropped mid-2022 (almost magically in line with interest rate hikes) and LLM-copilots werent introduced for another year
It was pretty clear by late 2022 that AI assisted coding was going to transform how software development was done. I remember having conversations with colleagues at that time about how SWE might transform into an architecture and systems design role, with transformer models filling in implementations.
If it was clear to workers like us, it was pretty clear to the c-suite. Not that it was the only reason for mass layoffs, but it was a strong contributor to the rationale.
Many large companies were placing a bet that there were turbulent times ahead, and were lightening their load preemptively.
By giantg2 2025-09-040:11 My company had multiple call center modernizing projects going on starting around 2021, including many NLP based routing and task upgrades.
By valianteffort 2025-09-044:373 reply AI is barely a blip on why the job market is dead for entry level, and dying all the way up the ladder.
Every one of my engineer friends says the same thing. "My team is 80% indians" and more than half are not qualified for the job they have.
The whole thing is a fucking scam for them, every company, top to bottom. Recruiters, hiring managers, referrals, CEO's. All one thing in common.
I'll take my downvotes, I don't care, everyone here knows I'm right. And those with their head up their ass can enjoy getting replaced and spending years looking for another role.
By shoobiedoo 2025-09-044:59 If people don't wake up to this fact, things are going to get very ugly very quickly. They already are in the retail sector.
By the_real_cher 2025-09-0411:28 Upvoting!
This is 100% the reason, saying its A.I. is gas lighting
By typewithrhythm 2025-09-045:31 Appointing indian leadership is the single biggest sign of moving to an extraction phase for a company.
The idea is they think the current value of the institution and IP is higher than their ability to innovate, so the try to outsource and reduce labour cost as much as possible intending to do the bare minimum maintenance for as long as possible.
This gets compounded by every layer trying to get the most out of the company as fast as possible, hiring in a way that has no long term outlook.
By atleastoptimal 2025-09-040:22 It is possible that multiple trends are coalescing
1. layoffs after web3 hiring spree
2. End of Zirp
However I think now, in 2025 is it impossible to reasonably claim AI isn't making an impact in hiring. Those who disagree on here seem to be insistent on some notion that AI has no benefits whatsoever, thus could never cause job loss.
M2 Money supply: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL
I sense some conflation of causation/correlation at hand.
By camilomatajira 2025-09-048:05 Completely agree with you. You can't be an economist and criticize current monetary policy. You will be labeled a crackpot, ostracized and have difficulty with grants. Grants from who? The same institution you'll be critizing in the first place.
Exactly this - I've said it before and will say it again - new technologies emerge in response to trends, often to accelerate existing trends and does not create them.
I see a few explanations for what you're saying, and those might be true, but I strongly believe part of it is investment (particularly VC, less so PE) has hit diminishing returns in tech and which means less subsidized "disruption", which means less money to hire people. AI becoming hugely popular right when this was happening is not a coincidence. And it's not just startups, less investment in startups also mean less clients for AWS and Azure. A16Z / Sand Hill switching to AI is not them just chasing the latest trend, it's a bid to reduce cost on people, which is the most expensive part of a tech company, as the only way to extend their unicorn-focused investment strategy.
By fithisux 2025-09-045:39 Like the drug dealers.
They just supply what people want and follow the trends.
By Natsu 2025-09-047:05 This reminds me of the part of The Book of Why by Judea Pearl discussing how do calculus and the causal revolution came about with the simple insight that effects come before causes and so do calculus was invented to keep track of that in the math, rather than obscuring that with statistical relations that worked in either direction.
By PeterStuer 2025-09-046:06 SWE, i know some worfloe digitalisation projects that had been in the planning for a very long time, budgetted as multiple person tear efforts, that due to pandemic nescessity were exected by a team of 3 over a long weekend in 2020. This did not go unnoticed, neither by customers nor swe providers.
2 things can be true. I was applying for jobs in 2022 and we all knew that the market was crap then because of overhiring during pandemic.
Tech companies pumped massive money into coding boot camps, overproduced coders, market crashes, salaries go down (or at least stagnate).
My understanding is the same thing recently happened to pharmacists.
By red-iron-pine 2025-09-0412:57 seeing the same in IT security / cyber.
so, so many jr hires with no-name online degrees.
Chat gpt 3 was 2020, even if the technology wasn't mature the hype was there informing investment and hiring decisions.
There was also other factors, there were covid booms, covid busts, overcorrections, Elon shoes you can cut by 90% and still keep a product running (kind of) and with X taking the flack other people followed suit without being as loud. There is a fairly major war in Europe ....
Oh yep.
Still, even fine tuned gpt2 was an eye opener.
And 2022 (chatgpt) fits time wise- the hype came before mature solutions.
By rs186 2025-09-0512:17 My understanding is that before Nov 2022, GPT models are obsecure, technical NLP stuff that most people don't understand or care about. ChatGPT is the first real product that is accessible and useful to everybody.
By datameta 2025-09-042:05 GPT3 drove the AI Dungeon explosion iirc
By thrawa8387336 2025-09-0323:442 reply Coordination, plain and simple.
Could you please explain more. Very interested in anything that explains the massive hole in the timeline.
By johnsmith1840 2025-09-0323:551 reply Openai also invented time travel to coordinate with companies.
Nothing to do with thr mass exodus and offshoring of US jobs.
The BPO industry is GROWING the opposite of standard AI understanding ideas.
Also call center is a good one I was doing research myself and call center jobs overseas have GROWN pretty rapidly over time these jobs are moving not vanishing.
By reliabilityguy 2025-09-042:15 Yep. For some reason everyone assumes that jobs in the US live in a closed system. In reality, things that can be moved abroad to save 20% of costs will be moved this way or the other.
I don’t know why everyone remembers how the manufacturing went to China, and at the same time forgets about it when we are talking about office jobs.
By thrawa8387336 2025-09-0323:543 reply This is a second hand anecdote but someone commented here or on X, that basically he was on a cruise and overheard two heads of HR of 2 big Co's talking to each other about shenanigans.
Would not be the craziest considering that AI has to make a ROI. Even if it's not up there yet to do so organically. If you annihilate the entry labor market, then after some time, you have no choice but to use AI because there is no one remaining with the skills. AI is lower than entry level -> No one is hiring new grads -> There is no new talent being developed -> use AI for everything!
By cactusplant7374 2025-09-040:282 reply > This is a second hand anecdote but someone commented here or on X, that basically he was on a cruise and overheard two heads of HR of 2 big Co's talking to each other about shenanigans.
I have no idea what this means.
It's describing the setting for a conspiracy theory. Multiple (in this case 2) people (in this case powerful ones) getting together and deciding that a certain outcome would be mutually beneficial.
And the second paragraph details the conspiracy is to work together to remove a certain type of employee in large numbers, so that AI tools have to be used in order to make up for that loss.
By thrawa8387336 2025-09-041:32 Pretty much, though I would not say they go together. 2nd paragraph is just a separate conjecture.
Personally, don't need that much evidence; are we old enough to remember the hiring gentleman's agreement in big tech?
Let's also not forget one of the main functions of HR, as an industry, these days: friction. You think salaries (and inflation) wouldn't go up if hiring managers had more freedom?
By xenobeb 2025-09-0411:59 You say this as if humans do not collude all the time. The pejorative idea of a "Conspiracy theory" is such a great modern tool for those who want to collude to hide their collusion in plain view.
Somehow it has become a heuristic that if caste in, the collusion is instantly dismissed as fiction. Even better that the person who thinks collusion is happening must have a lower IQ than those who don't. How convenient for those who are colluding.
By reliabilityguy 2025-09-042:141 reply An of the horizon for AI explosive growth was 10 years down the road, then what those execs report to the board/C*Os after their department failed to perform without half the employees?
Makes zero sense.
You completely misunderstand corporate incentives.
By thrawa8387336 2025-09-042:251 reply I do see that angle, and my impression is this push comes from the top top. The execs and middle are just following, milking it as long as it lasts.
cf. Matt Levine's thoughts on how Blackrock optimizes whole industries beyond the company level.
By reliabilityguy 2025-09-043:132 reply It still makes no sense. Why would a CEO or the Board gamble the company on an outcome they have no input on?
By red-iron-pine 2025-09-0413:31 > Why would a CEO or the Board gamble the company on an outcome they have no input on?
have you seen the behavior of CEOs?
the market is doing it, and there is no way for a CEO, CIO, CTO, CISO, et al, to not do AI in 2025. the gains to stock price from the hype alone could be worthwhile, and even if not "everyone else was doing it"
By esseph 2025-09-044:54 Broad pressure because everybody else MIGHT be using AI and this (example) company stock MIGHT go down.
By delfinom 2025-09-041:20 Until you run out of people using AI in the first place lol
By gmunny 2025-09-040:05 [dead]
By reliabilityguy 2025-09-0323:541 reply Coordination of…?
By thrawa8387336 2025-09-041:261 reply Think Trust as in anti-trust
By reliabilityguy 2025-09-042:141 reply What?
By thrawa8387336 2025-09-042:26 Coordination as in a trust or cartel
By blindriver 2025-09-040:22 Why can't it be both?
By csomar 2025-09-0412:47 The drop started from mid-2022 and 2023 and there is a single cause: Russian assets freeze. This led to governments around the world moving their assets from West/AngloSaxon countries. This lack of liquidity put the West in a “hang in there” situation. Economically, it showed up as raising interest rates and politically where things move slower, the emergence of a new coalition.
It’s really as simple as that. But people would like to believe that West GDP is higher than global south GDP by xxx amounts and so all of this couldn’t be possible.
If you want an insight inside their heads, there is a Biden speech after the assets freeze where he declares that the Russian economy/country will collapse in a few weeks under the measures. None of this materialized and their bet have failed which is why Trump is trying to pull the US out of the mess.
Of course all of this is my personal opinion. So take it from the grain in my bag of salt.
I made a stupid simple model where hiring in all age brackets rose slowly until 2021 and then fell slowly. That produces very similar looking graphs, because the many engineers that were hired at the peak move up the demographic curve over time. Normalizing the graph to 2022 levels, as the paper seems to do, hides the fact that the actual hiring ratios didn't change at all.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1z0l0rNebCTVWLk77_7HA...
By juxtaposicion 2025-09-044:191 reply I'm not sure I understand. Your model shows that different group buckets (eg 20-24yo vs 25-29yo) peak at different years (in your figure, 2022 vs 2024) despite being driven by the same dynamics. Is that expected? I (naively?) expected the same groups to rise, fall and have peaks at the same times.
One of the dynamics is that people get older so they move into different buckets.
We can make the model way simpler to make it clearer. Say in 2020 we hired 1000 20-24yo, 1000 25-29yo etc and then we didn't hire anyone since then. That was five years ago, so now we have 0 20-24yo, 1000 25-29yo, 1000 30-34yo etc and 1000 retirees who don't show up in the graph.
Each individual year we hired the exact same number of people in each age bracket, and yet we still end up with fewer young people total whenever hiring goes down, because all the people that got hired during the big hiring spike are now older.
By juxtaposicion 2025-09-0415:40 Got it, thanks! Yeah, so it makes sense that any age-bucketing like this would have a similar effect
By tangotaylor 2025-09-0413:25 Wow, that's hilarious. So essentially hiring could be identical across all age groups, but due to a glitch in the analysis (young people don't stay young, who knew?), it appears that younger people are losing jobs more than the rest.
I think not hiring juniors is a tragedy of the commons situation. It started before the AI boom, during COVID. It's not tax-related as people claim here, since this phenomenon is not US-only.
The ZIRP era made companies hire people as if there was no tomorrow, and companies started "poaching" engineers from others, including juniors. I saw some interns with 2 years of experience getting offers as seniors. I had friends being paid to attend boot camp.
Then everyone realized they were training junior engineers who would quickly get offers from other companies as “Senior" and leave. So companies stopped hiring them.
By causal 2025-09-040:55 Also AI hype is sucking all capital out of traditional hiring
