Where is the AI jobs crisis?

7e

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.

BaconPackets

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

Apocryphon

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

adamredwoods

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.

alephnerd

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

amelius

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

b-man

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

abalashov

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

rootusrootus

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.

ams92

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.

dywilby

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

sp1982

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_...

jmyeet

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 .

julienreszka

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

5701652400

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.

wxw

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

RigelKentaurus

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.

paulpauper

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.

kingkongjaffa

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

juleiie

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