The uncomfortable part of all this is that it is not a technology problem. It is a leadership problem. AI does not make bad executives worse. It gives them a faster way to prove they are bad. The leaders still standing in 2030 will be the ones honest enough to put the rehiring cost in the business case before the ink dries on the layoff letter.
ROFL
I thirst for the carnage ahead At the thought, I wet my bed To see CTO’s, in Arby vests Serving Karen her breakfast
most tech /startups, companies are going to Conventions peddling only AI now, once/if it all burst all these employees having to go to these conventions are going to find themselves out of a job soon.
leaders still standing in 2030 will be the ones honest enough to put the rehiring cost in the business case before the ink dries on the layoff letter.
Forbes is always willing to spout transparently fictional business ideology and so often just delusional. It’s really hard to tell when they’re drinking the koolaid and when they’re just selling it.
In business, leaders don’t disappear for making objectively terrible decisions and no company is ever going to consider firing employees a bad move. If rehiring is needed it’ll be at lower salaries because of a larger job-seeker pool due to all the firings.
Everyone will agree they all did the right thing and bonuses will be unaffected.
I’ve seen corporates layoff massively people in Q4 and hire just as many people in Q1 the very next year. No apology (are you fucking kidding??), no self-reflection, just “the market changed and we need to react to it!”.
So no, it’s not going to be funny. It’s going to be a blood bath and chaotic times.
And the leaders in 2030 will still claim they did an outstanding job and give themselves generous bonuses.
“We did everything right, because that’s what is industry standard” 🤑😵
Enrolment in CS degrees is already crashing as people hear about how horrific the job market is from new graduates. My bet is that this will persist for at least 5-8 years, if not longer, as negative impressions remains resident in the population for a lot longer than actual conditions.
By the time companies realize that they have starved the employee channel of new talent, they will be handing out $150k+ jobs to anyone who can fog up a mirror, and anyone having demonstrable senior-level skills will make an average of triple that.
SEEM CS already has problems for like 10+years, while researching my major(which is pretty much close to cs in unemployment if you dont count health industry jobs and its never reported in news or any studies) people on different forums/platforms already reported having extremely if not impossible time to find jobs as it is. I had a cousin that has a CS degree, no job prospects in the west, he had to go back to east coast to find work, and before that was teaching english in CHINA and this was way before the pandemic. AI layoffs is likely making CS like studies, psych degree, lib arts degree no jobs at the undergrad level.
I’m willing to stomach the short term pain of no jobs for this.
Work on projects regardless of whether they can be monetized or not. Stand up your own forgejo so you can also demonstrate DevOps and sysadmin skills. Try to be as flexible as possible - remember the entire saying of “a jack of all skills is a master of none, but is still better than a master of one”.
When you need two weeks and two people to do the work of dozens over the course of months the number will never recover. My son got a CS degree just before AI exploded and I think it was a terrible choice and a huge waste of time and money, thankfully he did land a job and I hope he can cash out and go be trained for a sustainable career before too long
When you need two weeks and two people to do the work of dozens over the course of months the number will never recover.
That’s not the reality though. There’s no good evidence showing any software engineering productivity gains from AI. Maybe in the future, but not now. If that becomes the case, there’s also Jevons Paradox. However, I think companies will just backfill offshore.
I’m not sure if you work in tech, but I have a front row seat from people very near to me. Some people are AI-assisted or vibe coding very discrete projects that are useful, but those are the senior people who understand the limitations of the LLMs and how to put up project- and enterprise-codebase-specific guardrails during prompting.
Junior coders are producing worthless unworking or buggy code that is worse than unproductive - it is slowing down the productive senior coders who need to review it (because the junior coders don’t understand enough to know what is even wrong with it). That’s if it gets reviewed. Plenty of tech are allowing AI code to be directly merged in some cases, creating quite a few bug/security time-bombs that will explode in the next few years.
That doesn’t even get into the non-coding AI magical thinking around UX, design, and all the related fields - people are using it because they’re afraid, to please the c-suite, even though it isn’t solving any problem faster or better than a skilled human.
It’s a speculative bubble but with a mirage of productivity. Most tech employees are using it similarly according to the greater-fool theory, selling hype to the next fool at an optics profit. That will end sooner or later.
There are specialities that can extend his time in the industry, allowing him to build up more of a nest egg before he makes any kind of a jump.
For example, DBAs (database administrators and specialists) will not go away any time soon. Same goes for observability (tracking user behaviour and system errors). Both of those require a sense of “correctness” and intuition that AI hasn’t gotten anywhere near to mastering.
Good luck.
Man who didn’t see this one coming
My brother in law
