Tech Job Market Is Shrinking as AI Reshapes Industry Requirements (msn.com)
- Reference: 0177653867
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/05/20/0947254/tech-job-market-is-shrinking-as-ai-reshapes-industry-requirements
- Source link: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/the-great-hesitation-that-s-making-it-harder-to-get-a-tech-job/ar-AA1EZEZk
"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."
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/the-great-hesitation-that-s-making-it-harder-to-get-a-tech-job/ar-AA1EZEZk
Great hesitation my ⦠(Score:4, Insightful)
Most of these hiring managers know squat about business or tech. We all saw their competent hiring in the COVID times. They are In great hesitation because everyone else are, and in doing so they are handicapping their companies in short term and the industry in the long term
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Have to agree, with the uncertainty in the market, I would think that would be the greater driver to this than "AI".
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
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> 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 will not stop there, just as the car assembly thing did not stop at welding robots."
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.
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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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That along with offshore employees. Oh and don't forget recent college graduates.
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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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)
As long as I have been in the IT business this has been a problem. Companies are constantly SCREAMING for experienced skilled labor but nobody wants to provide young workers with the opportunity and experience they need to acquire those skills. If you are graduating in this day and age, expect dozens, or even more depressingly, hundreds of answers like; "go work for company X that still offers entry level positions, work there for a few years and then come to us and we'll be happy to hire you" from companies run by clever CEOs who aren't offering entry level positions but that's OK because everybody else is and they them clever selves can just poach from those dummies. In the end the CEO class will have to decide whether they are willing to do what it takes to generate that new skilled and experienced labor and punish the parasites that don't participate in that effort or whether they really can replace all IT labor with chat bots and robots. If those predictions that AI will end all human labor by 2027 come true that latter option should be the easy one.
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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.
Re:This is new? (Score:4, 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:3)
Time to go union!
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In the rust belt, we go enum.
Re: Time to go union! (Score:2)
Left join or right join?
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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.
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)
they cannot say we are laying people off because sales are dropping because of the recession then the stock price will fall. Instead they say AI is so great we are replacing people with AI so you should invest more with us.
Little from column a (Score:3)
Little from column b.. remember it doesn't even have to be AI. Every CEO on the planet is now looking to automate work away because they heard about all this AI stuff.
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)
And fuck the corporate speak that says that. The entire purpose of it is to replace workers. Either directly or by increasing productivity enough that they can lay people off and not have to worry about the work not getting done.
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.
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:2)
with AI and everything to do with the regular business cycle of expansion and contraction.
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
Working in automation... (Score:2)
I have seen this first hand. The systems that used to require human interaction for part removal, stacking, packing, and floor transport, are all now fully automated. Those people are either shifted to other departments, or they are temps who were released to work elsewhere. This is already having an effect in my field.
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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:
[1]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.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DKrcpa8Z_E