The real impact is for indie-devs or freelancers but that usually doesn't account for much of the GDP.
Don't know if this is effective and I don't think management knows either, but it's what they're doing
Doesn't mean the two are related.
Is AI just the excuse? We've got tariffs, war, uncertainty and other drama non stop.
"We've frozen hiring because our growth potential is tapped out."
"We've frozen hiring because AI can replace employees."
Shipping speed never/is was the issue. Most companies are terrible at figuring out what exactly they should be allocating resources behind.
Speeding up does not solve the problem that most humans who are at the top of the hierarchy are poor thinkers. In fact it compounds it. More noise, nice.
It is absolutely likely. The hiring market for juniors is fucked atm.
Also dont forget theres only so many viable revenue-generating and cost-saving projects to take. And said above - overhiring in COVID.
(And if it is, what is the cause?)
> We find no systematic increase in unemployment for highly exposed workers since late 2022
This is already happening. Fewer people are getting hired. Companies are quietly (sometimes not, like Block) letting people go. At a personal level all the leaders in my company are sounding the “catch up or you’ll be left behind” alarm. People are going to be let go at an accelerated pace in the future (1-3 years).
> We find no systematic increase in unemployment for highly exposed workers since late 2022
Being overworked is sometimes better than being underworked. Sometimes the reserve is better. They both have challenges.
Best time to be a solo founder in underserved markets :)
Every time I say this people get really angry, but: so far AI has had almost no impact on my job. Neither my dev team nor my vendors are getting me software faster than they were two years ago. Docker had a bigger impact on the pipeline to me than AI has.
Maybe this will change, but until it does I'm mostly watching bemusedly.
I can turn out some scripts a little bit quicker, or find an answer to something a little quicker than googling, but I'm still waiting on others most of the time, the overall company processes haven't improved or gotten more efficient. The same blockers as always still exist.
Like you said, there has been other tech that has changed my job over time more than AI has. The move to the cloud, Docker, Terraform, Ansible, etc. have all had far more of an impact on my job. I see literally zero change in the output of others, both internally and externally.
So either this is a massively overblown bubble, or I'm just missing something.
Humans are funny. But most cant seem to understand that the tool is a mirage and they are putting false expectations on it. E.g. management of firms cutting back on hiring under the expectation that LLMs will do magic - with many cheering 'this is the worst itll be bro!!".
I just hope more people realise before Anthropic and OAI can IPO. I would wager they are in the process of cleaning up their financials for it.
People who actually know how to think can see it a mile away.
The specific way it applies to your specific situation, if it exists, either hasn't been found or hasn't made its way to you. It really is early days.
Anthropic can cause layoffs through pure marketing. People were crediting an Anthropic statement in causing a drop in IBM's stock value, which may genuinely lead to layoffs: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ibm-stock-plunges-ai-threat-1...
We'll probably have to wait for the hype to wear off to get a better idea, but that might take a long while.
Then the 2008 crash happened and those people were gone in a blink of an eye and never replaced. The companies grew in staff after that, but it was in things like sales and marketing.
The TL;DR is that there is little measurable impact (and I'd personally add "yet").
To quote:
"We find no systematic increase in unemployment for highly exposed workers since late 2022, though we find suggestive evidence that hiring of younger workers has slowed in exposed occupations"
My belief based on personal experience is that in software engineering it wasn't until November/December 2025 that AI had enough impact to measurably accelerate delivery throughout the whole software development lifecycle.
I have doubts that this impact is measurable yet - there is a lag between hiring intention and impact on jobs, and outside Silicon Valley large scale hiring decisions are rarely made in a 3 month timeframe.
The most interesting part is the radar plot showing the lack of usage of AI in many industries where the capability is there!
His rationale is he won’t let the company log his prompts and responses so they can’t build an agentic replacement for him. Corporate rules about shadow it be damned.
Only the paranoid survive I guess
rishabhaiover•2h ago
There goes my excuse of not finding a job in this market.