Tech Job Market Is Shrinking as AI Reshapes Industry Requirements (msn.com) 67
The US tech sector shed 214,000 jobs in April amid continuing economic uncertainty, according to CompTIA analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Companies are extending hiring timelines to two or three times longer than last year while significantly raising skill requirements, particularly for AI competencies.
"It's the great hesitation," said George Denlinger of Robert Half, noting employers now demand 10-12 skills instead of 6-7 previously. Entry-level programming positions are disappearing as AI assumes those functions, with Janco Associates CEO Victor Janulaitis observing that "a job that has been eliminated from almost all IT departments is an entry-level IT programmer."
"It's the great hesitation," said George Denlinger of Robert Half, noting employers now demand 10-12 skills instead of 6-7 previously. Entry-level programming positions are disappearing as AI assumes those functions, with Janco Associates CEO Victor Janulaitis observing that "a job that has been eliminated from almost all IT departments is an entry-level IT programmer."
Working in automation... (Score:3)
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Well, it has been a long term trend. Automatic systems for things like warehouses have existed a long time, so it is really not a "OMG, everything is changing right now", but instead a continuum where more and more things are automated as the time goes on.
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Indeed. Low-skill, mechanical work is going away everywhere. It is slowly going away, because the investments and customization needed are high, but dumb "AI" can help a lot with that and hence the trend is accelerating at this time.
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Automatic systems for things like warehouses have existed a long time,
Indeed. For example here's this from 7 years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
very heavily automated. Other companies use mostly humans, but it's different. Ocado don't have any shops so it's all done via warehouse distribution. Sainsbury's for example has a huge network of supermarkets which they are not planning on dropping so they have people who can operate in human spaces instead.
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Not so much. It started at a very low level but has been increasing on a logistic curve for a while now. The exponential rate of growth finally became large enough to be noticeable about 15 months ago. Short of legislative bans, it has the potential to rapidly automate a third to half of jobs over the next 5 to 7 years. With a focus on low end manual labor and high end analysis and research but also many artistic jobs where AI art will duplicate the elimination of human calculators and secretaries
Great hesitation my ⦠(Score:4, Insightful)
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Feels another "sell AI" excuse, especially with tariffs now? LOL, okay... have fun with wasting money.
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I agree with your sentiment that this "great hesitation" explanation is horribly wrong, but not for the same reason. US tech sector employment is dropping because it was in a bubble. US Software developer and QA jobs tracked by the BLS grew by 35% from 2019 to 2023. This 7.8% annual increase was over 60% higher than the 10 years preceding this bubble, which was arguably caused by excessive Covid-related hiring.
AI is just being used as an excuse instead of admitting these companies over-hired for the last fe
Re:Low Hanging Fruit (Score:4, Insightful)
>So AI will come along and scoop up the relatively straight-forward/mundane jobs.
At first.
It will not stop there, just as the car assembly thing did not stop at welding robots.
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Time marches on. Most of us no longer ride horses to town either....or hire a linotype operator to create our own Xmas cards....or use ice to keep food from spoiling in the "ice box."
You can participate in the future or you can get run over by it.
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It's not that you're wrong. Indeed, you're absolutely right. And yet people deemed surplus to purpose don't just walk into the nearest suicide booth, nor sadly, it seems, do they try to improve their skills. In fact, an entire political party has made it their goal to tell these people that not only do they not have to do a damned thing to improve their lot, that the party will find groups to blame for everything wrong, will raise tariffs to punish other countries for... reasons, and will dismantle the judi
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It's a fool who doesn't learn from history, where old jobs died, new jobs appeared and replaced them.
It's also a fool who assumes that history is a perfect guide and the future will be just like the past in this respect, rather than considering the possibility that automation and AI may render entire segments of the population effectively useless to our trillionaire masters, with disastrous results, because there will not be anything like enough of the "new jobs" to support even a fairly basic existence in
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It did stop there for about 40 years.
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Indeed, it did. But the AI fanbois are not rational and do not see reality. They just want to believe in their fetish, no matter what.
Re: Low Hanging Fruit (Score:2)
A new shiny thing after cryptocurrency wound up as a commodity traded like so many others, and not the civilization-changing invention envisioned.
AI looks like it'll be hampered by power generation and delivery (or rather the lack thereof).
On the upside, there'll be ungodly amounts of money spent upgrading and expanding the power grid.
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Yet, you're going to have to have people who setup the welding robots and jobs to maintain the robots. Then you have to have engineers who make alterations when the program changes. You also have to fund people to feed the robot unless you fully automate the production. Then again, this only works if you have a model that doesn't change that often. When you have product lines change rapidly, it becomes more problematic to have welding robots create a production line than it does the use manual labor to
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The real trick, of course, for the C-levels keeping AI out of the primary job that AI could do best: CEO / C-Level work. The compensation package those employees receive could easily finance a large team of AI specialists, and the hardware for a trained AI, to make company decisions far more efficiently. The remaining money could be used to hire more workers in the proper areas for competition and customer satisfaction, rais
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So AI will come along and scoop up the relatively straight-forward/mundane jobs. The only folks that need to really worry are those bottom feeder companies peddling low-cost "by the pound/kilogram" labor to excrete low-end java code for companies who won't pay skilled folks that are being snapped up by companies that WILL pay folks that can provide value.
Just like robots are replacing people who used to weld chassis for cars...
Before you assume about the “only folks” who are affected, try and remember every one of those jobs YOU had that represented the Ladder of Success in previous times.
Now tell me how many of those “low-cost” rungs on the Ladder of Success are now or soon will be done by machines, permanently removed from human benefit.
When you remove the bottom rungs from the Ladder of Success, you better have something to replace it. Especially since Success is requisite to human survival. Crushing
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The only folks that need to really worry are those bottom feeder companies peddling low-cost "by the pound/kilogram" labor to excrete low-end java code
I do not think even that will work. I just ha students working in a small game in Python, where they needed to add components. Overall 50 lines, no complexity, no advanced algorithms. They universally told me that for getting an explanation for a few lines or a suggestion for a very simple component, ChatGPT worked, but anything beyond that it failed and often started to hallucinate. This is even more pathetic than a no-skill coder.
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They universally told me that for getting an explanation for a few lines or a suggestion for a very simple component, ChatGPT worked, but anything beyond that it failed and often started to hallucinate. This is even more pathetic than a no-skill coder.
and when you tell ChatGPT it got the code wrong (with a brief explanation of what it got wrong), it'll admit that it gave you incorrect code. Then it'll give you replacement code that also fails (or at least fails enough to be untrustworthy).
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Yep. Great tool. And we already have "Slopsquatting". I wonder when attackers will be able to scan for typical AI-made security fails in code.
The tech job market has tanked (Score:2)
I’ve seen this from personal experience. Pure coding jobs are evaporating; the only way to make a living is by building new products or shifting into sales and marketing related work.
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Who are those sales jobs going to sell to?
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Who will they sell to?
People who produce value that cannot easily be replicated by a machine. Time to adapt or wind up in the dustbin of history.
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"Time to adapt or wind up in the dustbin of history."
I love reading all these smarmy fatalist glosses for a society that is actively eating itself.
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> People who produce value that cannot easily be replicated by a machine
at this point, I don't think there are that many, even CEO. The point remains. Once you automate everything and nobody is employable, to whom are you selling to exactly?
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Pure coding jobs were a dead end all along. Sure, they worked for a while in a limited fashion, but even a "technician" (as opposed to "engineer") person should be doing much than mindless production of simplistic code. There are things like, reviewing a spec, optimization, communication with the customer, writing documentation. etc. Pure implementation is something like 20% of a software project.
This is new? (Score:3)
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What is new is that fewer and fewer companies are offering those entry level jobs. Before there were a lots of companies that needed the "grunt level" coders in large numbers too.
So before it was indeed as you describe: Some companies only want experienced people, but there were still those entry level jobs in other companies.
What is changing: Many of those entry level jobs are going away or atleast there is a greatly reduced number of people needed for such.
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Well. Long-term this will mean that wages will raise and that education will get better. But the time of cheap "code monkeys" are over and the industry has nobody to blame but themselves. Overall this is a good thing though. Bad software is getting wayyyyy to expensive to society. For example, damage from IT attacks in Germany in 2023 was about one average person's monthly salary per capita. That is unsustainable, especially as that damage is steadily increasing.
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What is new is that fewer and fewer companies are offering those entry level jobs. Before there were a lots of companies that needed the "grunt level" coders in large numbers too.
So before it was indeed as you describe: Some companies only want experienced people, but there were still those entry level jobs in other companies.
What is changing: Many of those entry level jobs are going away or atleast there is a greatly reduced number of people needed for such.
Not really, automation has been going on for a very long time, it may be speeding up now because of AI but automation it's nothing new. What this will likely do in the short to medium term is increase the amount of education people are going to have to get and change the kind of education they will need. Forecasting what AI will do to employment long term is above my pay grade.
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What companies want today is a senior level position with entry level pay.
Re:This is new? (Score:5, Interesting)
Indeed. This stupidity and lack of strategy is not limited to software, but other engineering disciplines fall for it not that often. I do remember one time when in Germany, Siemens stopped hiring EEs for a year. (At that time they were the largest employer of EEs in Germany.) That cost them dearly. A few years later a) there were not enough EEs because people switched to other subjects and b) nobody wanted to work for Siemens anymore. Probably a few 10 billions in damage, maybe more. Just hiring these EEs and giving them some research work or something would have been orders of magnitude cheaper.
Bottom line: Competent businesses plan with a horizon of years and decades, not just the next quarter...
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Right,
I learned at a lot at University but I learned at least as much form working thru the effort and eventual peer reviews on real world low stakes projects I was assigned early in my career.
Maybe some chat bot could have done the requirements gathering, generated the schema information for the DBAs, and helped some business analyst vibe code their way thru some of those early vb5/6 and php2/3 line of business applications I put together 30+ years ago at the start of my career.
I would have lost the opport
Time to go union! (Score:2, Insightful)
Time to go union!
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Re: Time to go union! (Score:3, Funny)
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Time to go union!
Who's going to join? The AI? The robots?
The whole point is that human jobs are being replaced, as has been predicted would happen for years (and quite often laughed off in Slashdot when discussing automation).
Good luck unionizing the, oh, three humans left in the production facility. This couldn't possibly have the opposite effect of incentivizing companies to increase automation even more. Heavens, no.
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In the tech world isn't AI eating up the union type jobs first?
Are you thinking management can be pushed to treat AI as union members?
It might be fun/interesting to see how that argument went.
what's included in "tech sector" (Score:2)
They should have just made IT products easy to use and opinionated in the first place. Application developers having to even think about lower level OSI stuff like virtual nics is ridiculous. Cloud infrastructure today is like the olden days where you had to execute your sound blaster driver in a terminal before you booted up wolfenstien3D. Its only a matter of time before somebody remembers that resource allocation is initialization and all of that magic IT stuff in the cloud just melts away.
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Cloud infrastructure today is like the olden days where you had to execute your sound blaster driver in a terminal before you booted up wolfenstien3D.
Heh, I'd forgotten about that. Good 'old sound blaster 16
recession (Score:5, Insightful)
Little from column a (Score:3)
And also if all else fails AI becomes your incompetent co-worker. Your boss firesa bunch of people and replaces them with AI and if the AI works that's fine and if it doesn't anyone left is going to have to work double shifts to pick up the slack.
AI isn't reshaping requirements (Score:3)
We are in a third industrial revolution. And it's frustrating because practically nobody knows about all the social upheaval and mass technological unemployment that occurred during the first two.
History books below college level gloss overall that and pretend we went from losing our jobs at the loom and buggy whip factories to banging out code for websites in an afternoon.
Time bomb? (Score:2)
So if no one hires entry-level coders, then in 10 years, there won't be any experienced programmers, either.
We'll either be totally dependent on AI, or software quality will go (more) into the toilet. Probably both.
The British building industry did this (Score:3)
Bright new brooms at the senior management level identified entry level posts as a cost to be cut. Now we have a shortage of skilled labour and most of the new houses that are being produced are poor quality. There used to be a 10 year guarantee against a need for repairs; now you're lucky to get five and often have to call on it.
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So if no one hires entry-level coders, then in 10 years, there won't be any experienced programmers, either.
We'll either be totally dependent on AI
This was the whole point. You don't need human programmers in the future if you make machines that make all the new code. All you'd need is a small number of specialists who understand the process and keep the wheels greased. Programmers have developed a technology that literally kills their own jobs.
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Based on previous experience with the company replacing most IT staff with programmer/DBA's from 'Tata' we have been hiring way below entry level people for decades.
Yes that former billion $ company went down and disappeared in a leveraged buy out.
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remember that scene in the second matrix, when the old dude in zion says they have no idea who built the thing that keeps them alive and how to manage it?
that.
Karma (Score:2, Interesting)
I think it would be the perfect karma if programming jobs dried up considering they are the ones that invented this garbage.
It has almost nothing to do (Score:3)
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And we're screwed... (Score:2)
This kind of short-sightedness will cost us. Some companies just want -- 'poof', magically experienced programmers/engineers and want 'someone else' to give them entry-level work to get them to mid-senior level. They don't want skilled and they don't want to pay/invest. Same reason company loyalty died a while back, no one wants to invest in their younger employees, and they also try to force out the most senior (e.g. expensive high-salaried) ones.
Between this, and now many young programmers/college student
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and they also try to force out the most senior (e.g. expensive high-salaried) ones.
I'm not feeling forced out. Honestly, worse. I'd prefer that I think. Really, I'm being forced to herd a growing flock of ChatGPT-dependent morons.
It's becoming actively stressful.
Not AI: routine economy + Trump deglobalization (Score:2)
Back when borrowing money was nearly free, companies could hire aggress
Anatomy lesson (Score:2)
"A job that has been eliminated" (Score:2)
... from almost all IT departments is an entry-level IT programmer, an IT analyst, someone who has got a degree in computer science,”
Yet another article emphasizing that if you are a software developer you better get with the program ASAP and use AI to help you do your work. If you can't bring yourself to do that on principle or whatever I am sorry, but you may soon be unemployable.
Learn how to make the best use of AI and be ready to demonstrate that you can. A job interview these days may consist of
student loan collapse incoming (Score:3)
So now we have a bunch of people who spent years graduating in these fields in high demand when they started, that now will not find a job, and won't repay on their loans. Have fun.