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AFAICT, the "Rising layoffs year after year" news lately has been an intentional misreporting of "Layoff rates slowly returning to normal after the hiring spree during COVID stimulation"

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.

I'll need to look at the underlying data, but it seems that the job "classification/category" should be more important than the raw number. A boost in lower paid/service industry jobs does not mean that there wasn't a loss in a category where AI can be more easily dropped into existing businesses.

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

It's crazy that so often I see articles, here on HN and elsewhere, where some pundit claims that there is no AI job crisis, AI isn't replacing any jobs, that layoffs are actually due to post-pandemic ZIRP overhiring, etc.

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.

The AI job crisis is large tech employers firing workers to free up cash for AI capex, and those workers competing with everyone else in a competitive job market.

I’ve been unemployed and actively looking for a job for about 6 months, the longest stretch of active job searching I’ve ever done in my career. Several close friends who work in tech or tech-adjacent fields are in the same boat. Anecdata on Hacker News or LinkedIn tells the same story.

A chart showing “total number of jobs” is not meaningful. I took a temp job in a metal shop to make ends meet while I wait for the endless rounds of interviews I’ve now gone through with 4 companies. It pays less than half of what I was making before, and I am barely making ends meet. It’s not sustainable, even though the pay is more than fair for the work.

There are also a lot of job openings for home health care workers, or seasonal resort workers, that used to be filled by immigrants. Those jobs are not going to be taken by any of the engineers who just got laid off by Meta.

I have the strong impression that people who write articles like this are very disconnected from the reality of the economy right now, and that their curiosity ends at the line on the chart they cooked up to make a contrarian point.

I run a job search site and I don't see a crisis in terms of job openings even for SWE - but there is very clear signal that AI is deeply getting embedded in every SWE job.

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

I am a manager with former FAANG experience followed by mid-size comanies. Most people here saying there is no AI job crisis dont know what they are talking about and talking out of their ass.

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.

Anecdotally, there's an AI job crisis for juniors right now

It's really funny that the first thing in the article is a graph showing a long downward trend with a tiny, brief uptick circled at the end and then the entire article appears to be written about that.

Bold claim to say "no signs" based on non-contextual numbers. I think I recall somewhere that most jobs added were in healthcare.

>> 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.

The most glaring gap in this "analysis" is that it's too early to tell. I don't understand how people can be certain in both extreme viewpoints.

First of all the May jobs report was mostly in temporary workers possibly due to the World Cup. Second as already noted the jobs are mostly in healthcare. Third job openings does not equal employment. These numbers have been diverging for a while likely due to people holding multiple jobs. Also I believe the evidence suggests the job crisis is due to WFH and not AI https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48326721

Hum... That's a huge conclusion from a single graph, I expected to see more data.

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.

A "job opening" is not a job. It's an aspirational advertisement.

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

The jobs AI crisis is me being stressed and overworked as management demands more AI, showy (but shallow) "look I made a skill" presentations grab attention, and my PR review queue grows every day as people generate more code than ever.

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.

I'm a consultant, and had my first conversation about an AI clean-up job this week. I'm also just starting another gig analysing LLM output, my sell is that the analysis is hand-coded, as they weren't able to do it themselves with LLM support.

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.

The expectation of linear presentation of change in a bistable system is gobsmacking here.

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.

I guess there are those who might say, "Well, hang on, give the crisis a minute to unspool..."

Well, I'm on a small two person team.. for the last few years I would have loved to have 2-3 people under me.. I've been underwater constantly, but we couldn't afford it.

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.

To me, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to hire fewer juniors because of AI. This assumes that the only thing AI can’t replicate is experience. This in itself already seems questionable, but most importantly what about creativity, relating to humans, common sense, etc.?

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

Btw. we haven't yet builed the whole Agentic AI layer which is coming and companies are working on.

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.

Exactly.

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

Someone here said that they get paid 50k to fix the ai code.

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

AI Has Broken Hiring https://hbr.org/2026/06/ai-has-broken-hiring-heres-how-to-fi...

These analyses always crack me up. "There's 1 at least 1 job per person, why are people complaining" is the vibe I always get.

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.

That little arrow on the right of that graph is wishful thinking.

If America becomes wealthier due to AI, it will mean more follow-on jobs such as people using their newfound fortunes to remodel their homes, consume more , vacation, etc. Companies will expand and hire. All of this creates jobs even if AI may also destroy some jobs. The net result is more jobs. There is a huge market for upper-middle-class people in their 30-50s to look younger. This means more health clinic jobs and demand for pharma.

Gedankenexperiment: If it turns out that the uptick in hiring is due to having to clean up after the first generation of vibecoded apps, is that really a net gain?

I'm pretty sure I have enough tech debt built up to last through the singularity. And AI somehow is only increasing the amount of things I want to do.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1WPjJ

Companies learned one weird trick, that's why you don't see job opening collapse. Most of the job openings listed are fake. Companies aren't hiring despite showing signals that they are; you can ask any engineer that's been laid off over the past year and they'll tell you the same story of how bad the job market is right now.

I don't see a software jobs crisis but I see a software industry crisis. The AI slopmageddon is upon us.

Pretty shallow analysis. Doesn't account or what sectors the new jobs are occurring or account for the extended length of unemployment many are experiencing or underemployment. If only he had asked chat GPT, it would have provided more context and nuance than a single chart.

If there's no jobs crisis, where are the productivity gains to offset all the massive datacenter spending?

If we need to spend just as much on salaries, while shelling out $700B/yr on AI, how does all that spending get paid for?

Wrote about this https://julienreszka.com/blog/robots-create-more-jobs-than-t...

I wonder when we’ll reach diminishing returns on new AI models. Haven’t tried Mythos or Fable yet but it seems like Anthropic is already priming itself for this by calling for a “slowdown” of AI development.

You can't draw any conclusions based on "job openings" without dealing with, or at least addressing, "ghost job listings". There are several issues here:

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.

We're on the cusp of it. Models JUST got good enough to be better than the average white collar worker at nearly everything.

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

If every company only hires seniors from now on, and if we assume that the number of senior level jobs is steady, why do I not perceive an increase in leverage like during covid?

The tech co I work for just massively scaled token usage after the copilot price changes. If there was a chance for ai to replace anyone, it's gone now.

We're still going through the post-ZIRP job crisis.

20 years ago, everyone was whining about losing their jobs to outsourcing. Seems like the more things change, the more they stay the same.

My anecdote is there was a single wave of cuts and a bit of a shuffle, but for most part it's business as normal now

Maybe AI will finally be the tool that allows us to get rid of some of the people we have who do nothing more than push paper around. Maybe. But somehow I doubt it, at least not in a typical big corporate environment. And I have zero concern about us letting actual software devs go. Things will have to change pretty dramatically before we get that far.

AI creates more work

What kind of jobs are these? Volume is just one factor.

This is a spin piece from a private equity firm. Hardly the most unbiased and credible source for this kind of reporting.

I used to think comparisons of AI with the web where ridiculous, but increasingly it looks like they're not that dissimilar as far as how they change how we work. But as someone who graduated college during the bust there was a loooong gap between peak hype and things like online banking and e-commerce becoming standard.

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.

Maybe give it some time?

Like others, let me call bullshit on that graph.

It just gives a general "job" going up, but

* how many of those are real jobs? I've seen the amount of scam/fake jobs go up a lot since 2022

* How many are jobs only for PhD with 20 years expereince?

* How many jobs for actual juniors / newcomers?

Just taking the aggregate is a bit scummy

the AI job crisis will be because the AI bubble will pop and th economic fallout is going to be tremendous. dotcom and GFC might not be as bad as what the AI bubble popping might be.

i swear people will always say it's just another fad until they lose their job themselves, might be a coping mechanism

I mean, hasn't practically every single Trump-era jobs report been massively adjusted downwards after the fact?

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Now that Claude Fable is out I’m sure it will finally come true /s

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maybe look into industries AI is best at automating? like constant layoffs in Software? 160,000 people lost jobs in just 2026?

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.