Where is the AI jobs crisis?

https://blog.glassdoor.com/site-us/wp-content/uploads/sites/...

https://www.glassdoor.com/blog/worklife-trends-2026/

But, CEOs figured out that if they blame layoffs on AI, stock go up a lot. Reporters know that anxiety about AI drives the clicks that write the checks.

I do think that AI anxiety is making HR around the world anxious about hiring. That's my best guess for why everyone is finding they need to apply to 500 jobs to get anywhere. So, AI is making it hard for you to find a job not because it took your job, but because HR is reading ragebait and turning it into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Data : https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf

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.

There seems to be a desire for a narrative that AI really just can't replace productive work, and that it's all a mirage. However it seems just like common sense that if an AI can do junior-engineer-level coding work, that a company has less reason to hire a junior engineer.

I know plenty of people looking for job for months at this point. I am looking for 3+ months and have a few leads finally but nowhere close to offer. Remember, people have to live in these high cost GEOs (SF, Seattle, NYC and others). Since COVID, the US economy is effy at best with housing prices doubled, rents and household expenses doubled. Just for something simple it costs $200 subscription like mowing the lawn. Pulling stats out of some dashboard that a rando made is not how people live day to day life. Remember, people lie with statistics all the time.

So yes, there is a significant job crisis. Because Ycombinator invested in AI companies this narrative is suppressed here and moderator DANG (one of the worst) heavily moderates anything critical of AI and YC.

https://corvi.careers/blog/global_software-engineering_jobs_...

The jobs openings / unemployed close but a bit larger than 1 is the expected value when nothing is turning the economy completely upside down right now. It means there is no new shock that is too fast for people to adapt.

What is surprising, yes, because I could easily name half a dozen shocks that I would expect to see there. But it seems US people are adapting quickly right now, or things are canceling out.

But to keep this out of a low-value vent, my experience has been that the _threat_ of it is there, but in my small corner of the world/industry, lots of layoffs that would have happened anywhere may just be categorized as "AI" layoffs, but the wild manpower reducing benefits aren't really there. The larger an org gets, the more of your job is dedicated to human stuff, and you can just get some of the code part done a little more quickly.

Would be interesting if we could measure how much effort is put into agentic coding harnesses, frameworks, and theory, vs labor saved using them.

>> The May jobs report reinforced this with nonfarm payrolls jumping by 172,000, confirming that there are no signs of workers being replaced by ChatGPT.

On the other hand, I'm just finishing an agent-heavy piece. After getting it set up, it's been some of the most mindless and soul-destroying work I've had the displeasure of in a while. This stuff will be near minimum wage in a few years, totally unskilled babysitting.

AI really hasn't been all that bad for work, by volume at least. I know where I want to focus my efforts though.

A lot of people and companies working left and right building things which are obvious that they are coming.

We do not know yet how that impacts even more people.

And AI already removed certain jobs.

As though the decades of work I've put into my career means I should want a job as the hamburger man or working as a ditch digger. No shade to burger flippers or ditch diggers, but these are not jobs that I'm trained for, nor are they jobs that I remotely want to do. So for me, aviation expert, programmer, ML engineer, weird IT generalist, guy with a math degree who speaks a couple languages, and isn't exactly fully capable anymore, the idea that jobs in some other field (like an RN or an Oncologist or Electrician) are just something I can pivot into is just hilarious. It's such a shallow and ignorant take. Even the premise that all jobs are equally distributed and there aren't jobs that are more or less in demand at any time is a real funny take too.

I'm so glad I started working for myself, because honestly, seeing this dogshit analyses from supposed experts means I'll be able to keep making money for a long time just be actually trying when I need to think about something.

If you had to hire a concierge for a hotel, would you rather take a guest-oriented, quick-witted junior or an AI? If you could either take a Waymo or an 80-year old driver, what would you take?

I don’t believe hiring managers think that one-dimensionally. Roles are unique and in some roles experience is more important than in others. Plus, juniors already balance their lack of experience with lower salary expectations.

The much easier explanation for the anecdotes: companies are more cautious at the moment and if you only have a few positions to hand out, you rather take the proven hand than risking it on someone who hasn’t shown yet that they can do it

Even if AI is an absolutely bubble, and SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI all cease to exist in a year... there's simply no way that AI has not fundamentally changed work. Even if I was forever pinned to the local models I'm running and the agent harnesses they use, I would never write code for work the same way.

But I lived through the rise of the web. I remember serving dynamic websites through cgi (which meant a new instance of an interpreter was spawned per user session). I vividly remember great JavaScript books saying things like "never use JavaScript for core functionality". I recall Java engineers saying Ruby on Rails was a toy and would never take off, that Python offered nothing over Perl and that "rich web applications" where never going to replace app native interfaces. I remember when the MVC pattern from the early Smalltalk days being dusted off and repurposed for web applications, completely changing how we designed software for the web.

And all of that is just software. It wasn't until the pandemic that ebooks replaced print books in share of academic library circulation (reversing a decades long trend of reduced circulation).

In my daily use of agents for coding and other forms of problem solving, while it is a wild accelerant, it's also clear we have not even started scratching the surface of how to think about building things with these tools.

I suspect we'll adapt to AI faster, but having lived through one major tech revolution, transforming work still takes some time. I'm not surprised we don't see an immediate jobs crisis.

Not to mention the completely separate topic that huge classes of employees were not and are not all that productive, so boosts in productivity don't imply lost jobs. That would require a boost in productivity combined with pressure to create concrete value with less, looking at the SpaceX IPO we're still a ways away from working about how efficiently we create concrete value.

Further, the graph shown is pretty noisy and I'm not sure the upward move which counters the downward trent is statistically significant.

This literally is a brand new phenomenon; it's only a matter of time.

Now I have no need for anyone from a coding perspective.. I can keep up with multiple clients requests with a breeze. I don't have to manage anyone. I type of my phone while I'm on a walk and work gets done for me.

So yeah... it's not good.

Maybe all the job cuts from ai were filled by fixers of ai output

Or maybe, no one ever heard of jevons paradox. Or maybe everyone ignored it and preached job apocalypse as risky but a high reward marketing tactic

If this kind of argument were generally valid, it would imply that:

- all change neither accelerates nor decelerates, which is absurd, on the face of it;

- the initial stages of a deep change are always surface-visible; for instance, cancers announce themselves when they begin to gestate, rather than when they metastasize

- A few recent points of data of questionable significance outweighs a hypothesis with considerable support from reason, intuition, and other (unpresented) data. For example, the plight of recent CS grads, which _is_ new, and _is_ on graphs, just not the one the author here chose.

So, since these implied claims are self-evidently _false_, it means that the author would, at a minimum, need to provide an explanation as to _why in this one instance, these considerations do not matter_; for example, the author could have argued that the graph positioned at the center of their argument is the one to look at (as opposed to, say, recent CS grads,) but that _itself requires further argumentation._

It also does not account for the other obvious possibilities; e.g.,that there is a delay between the (as it were) lightning and its thunder; or that even strongly nonlinear effects would have shown up by now in the metric chosen; etc. But since these contributions were not included in the original post, I have no choice but to discount it.

Much of the "AI job crisis" rhetoric was PR comms to manage conversations around corporate restructuring (even ZIRP is a lazy PR comms excuse).

Most decisionmakers by 2025 already agreed they didn't expect AI to have a significant impact on hiring [0].

I've pointed out the reasons ad nauseum on here but no one listens [1].

[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-10/wall-stre...

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47174561

1. AI ATS systems have made posting jobs "cheap", such that too companies post jobs that don't exist (ie "ghost jobs") to keep up appearances they're hiring or just to keep people in the pipeline in case they hire. This is a huge waste of everybody's time and should be illegal;

2. The hiring process itself gets increasingly Kafkaesque. AI screening, automated online tests, unpaid take-home work, etc. You have to get pretty far until a human gets involved. 10+ years ago this didn't happen because people needed to be involved much sooner and that's expensive;

3. In a lot of companies, getting employees to interview people is unpaid extra work effectively. They say it's important. You might even get dinged for not doing it. But anyone who has done it realizes pretty quickly a bunch of people who shouldn't get interviewed are getting interviewed and management doesn't care, even though employee time is expensive, because you essentially have to "make up the time" so it's still "free";

4. Even if you go through all that and get hired, you get laid off within a year such that income isn't dependable and you end up wasting a ton of time on the job-seeking process itself.

I've been thinking about this recently and high-information is part of the problem. In years long gone, it was hard to reach applicants so you'd have a small pool of higher-relevance candidates applying for a job. Say 10 people applying for 10 jobs. The odds were better. It was less work on everybody's side.

But now you have 200 people applying for 200 positions. This wastes everybody's time but the problem is that companies have offset this by pushing filtering onto these automated systems. People still need to enter all their bio information, etc. So it's just much more inefficient inherently even if the job opening is legitimate.

The disclosures are longer than the content

the claim "hey there is no AI job crisis", when previous SWE of 6-figures now takes job dishwashing in McDonalds + one more gig as Uber driver + food delivery gig is "job creation! now they have 3 jobs!". does not make any sense.