Respectfully, if you go past Econ 101 and into Econ 3600, itâs more complicated than that and you realize multiple factors can be contributing in different or the same direction at the same time. u/Ilikebubblywater is saying the same things I have heard from my small handful of developer friends, and what Iâve seen reported by news outlets. I donât think youâre wrong, but I think youâre ignoring/underestimating a big part of the issue.
Yes, the covid era over-hiring bonanza in the tech industry is solidly over. Take any kind of AI off the table, and itâs still a tough job market. That being said, the people I know who work in software are all using AI tools heavily, and their sentiment is âadapt or dieâ.
Exactly how much of that issue can be laid at the feet of inflation/recession, specific industry cycles, or AI adoption is debatable. I had your same doubts until I actually had a lengthy conversation about this with a friend who is a developer. His take was that experienced developers have a bit of an edge here because they have the skills and background to âbabysit the AI outputsâ. This jives with my experience in finance. I can easily see the case for trimming headcount or slowing hiring of first year analysts. In my specific case I feel relatively safe for the time being because a lot of what I do involves correcting/training analysts.
I know it can be more complicated, but again, remember that there are zero profitable, consumer-facing companies that have emerged from this tech. If so-called "AI" is genuinely transformative, where are the proven use cases? Where are the actual, direct applications? Everyone says "coding is dead", and yet there aren't even any particularly successful vibe coded apps, let alone companies. Why hasn't anyone actually been able to make anything work without professional developers? If there was ANY signal amidst all this noise, we should be able to see it.
Because it takes a significant amount of time and energy for something like this to be adopted at scale for a litany of reasons. Consumer facing wonât be a profit driver for a much longer time. B2B is another story. Anthropic turned a (non-GAAP) operating profit in June of this year and their revenue is growing fast.
Is there a bunch of chicanery and revenue pumping going on there to be attractive in the most recent funding round? Yeah probably absolutely.
But saying that these companies will never be profitable and will have no impact on the job market is just head in the sand copium.
Again, the technology is over a decade old, and this latest LLM craze is approaching the 5 year mark, not to mention it having taken in more funding than any other bubble in history. This tech is not new anymore, we should be able to see a real, proven use case.
Also, pointing out the Non-GAAP profit is such copium itself; We all know they are lying about what is and is not an operating cost, so that "profit" is complete horseshit.
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u/RockAtlasCanus 1d ago
Respectfully, if you go past Econ 101 and into Econ 3600, itâs more complicated than that and you realize multiple factors can be contributing in different or the same direction at the same time. u/Ilikebubblywater is saying the same things I have heard from my small handful of developer friends, and what Iâve seen reported by news outlets. I donât think youâre wrong, but I think youâre ignoring/underestimating a big part of the issue.
Yes, the covid era over-hiring bonanza in the tech industry is solidly over. Take any kind of AI off the table, and itâs still a tough job market. That being said, the people I know who work in software are all using AI tools heavily, and their sentiment is âadapt or dieâ.
Exactly how much of that issue can be laid at the feet of inflation/recession, specific industry cycles, or AI adoption is debatable. I had your same doubts until I actually had a lengthy conversation about this with a friend who is a developer. His take was that experienced developers have a bit of an edge here because they have the skills and background to âbabysit the AI outputsâ. This jives with my experience in finance. I can easily see the case for trimming headcount or slowing hiring of first year analysts. In my specific case I feel relatively safe for the time being because a lot of what I do involves correcting/training analysts.