Is AI Causing Tech Worker Layoffs? It's Complicated (apnews.com) 56
The Associated Press investigates whether tech industry layoffs are really being caused by AI.
Their conclusion? "The reality is more complicated..." "We're kind of in this period where the tech job market is weak, but other areas of the job market have also cooled at a similar pace," said Brendon Bernard, an economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab. "Tech job postings have actually evolved pretty similarly to the rest of the economy, including relative to job postings where there really isn't that much exposure to AI...."
Tech hiring has particularly plunged in AI hubs such as the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as Boston and Seattle, according to Indeed. But in looking more closely at which tech workers were least likely to get hired, Indeed found the deepest impact on entry-level jobs in the tech industry, with those with at least five years of experience faring better. The hiring declines were sharpest in entry-level tech industry jobs that involve marketing, administrative assistance and human resources, which all involve tasks that overlap with the strength of the latest generative AI tools that can help create documents and images...
Microsoft, which is staking its future on AI in the workplace, has also had its own researchers look into the jobs most vulnerable to the current strengths of AI technology. At the top of the list are knowledge work jobs such as language interpreters or translators, as well as historians, passenger attendants, sales representatives, writers and customer service representatives, according to Microsoft's working paper. On the other end, leading in work more immune to AI changes were phlebotomists, or healthcare workers who draw blood, followed by nursing assistants, workers who remove hazardous materials, painters and embalmers.
Their conclusion? "The reality is more complicated..." "We're kind of in this period where the tech job market is weak, but other areas of the job market have also cooled at a similar pace," said Brendon Bernard, an economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab. "Tech job postings have actually evolved pretty similarly to the rest of the economy, including relative to job postings where there really isn't that much exposure to AI...."
Tech hiring has particularly plunged in AI hubs such as the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as Boston and Seattle, according to Indeed. But in looking more closely at which tech workers were least likely to get hired, Indeed found the deepest impact on entry-level jobs in the tech industry, with those with at least five years of experience faring better. The hiring declines were sharpest in entry-level tech industry jobs that involve marketing, administrative assistance and human resources, which all involve tasks that overlap with the strength of the latest generative AI tools that can help create documents and images...
Microsoft, which is staking its future on AI in the workplace, has also had its own researchers look into the jobs most vulnerable to the current strengths of AI technology. At the top of the list are knowledge work jobs such as language interpreters or translators, as well as historians, passenger attendants, sales representatives, writers and customer service representatives, according to Microsoft's working paper. On the other end, leading in work more immune to AI changes were phlebotomists, or healthcare workers who draw blood, followed by nursing assistants, workers who remove hazardous materials, painters and embalmers.
Joy! (Score:3)
The future's so bright, I gotta wear them shades.
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So the real question is: why aren't we developing an embalming robot?
Re: Joy! (Score:2)
I just copy pasted your comment into chatgpt, and it's done. Embalmers can retire now.
Re: Joy! (Score:4, Funny)
I just copy pasted your comment into chatgpt, and it's done. Embalmers can retire now.
I hope you were specific and told it that the procedure is only for deceased humans. Otherwise this could get a bit messy.
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I just copy pasted your comment into chatgpt, and it's done. Embalmers can retire now.
I hope you were specific and told it that the procedure is only for deceased humans. Otherwise this could get a bit messy.
That's okay. Chat-GPT will program a check to see if the embalmed human is alive. If they are discovered to be alive after embalming, they get a full refund.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not dead yet!
One moment....OOOF
Enbalming procedure commencing.
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I just copy pasted your comment into chatgpt, and it's done. Embalmers can retire now.
Crap, there goes my new career path!
AI is causing working hiring pauses (Score:5, Interesting)
AI is already causing hiring pauses and we’ll all be waiting for the damage to come in from the hesitancy. I’ve seen something very similar on automation projects where customers can delay waiting on making decisions on what to commit to for automation for a myriad of reasons. So instead of forward progress they lag, atrophy and don’t have healthy discussions of what their needs are.
This is a game of chicken: how long can businesses hold off hiring or wait for the promise of AI. Until a decision/discovery is made their customers and employees suffer the consequences of understaffing.
Re:AI is causing working hiring pauses (Score:5, Interesting)
AI is already causing hiring pauses and we’ll all be waiting for the damage to come in from the hesitancy. I’ve seen something very similar on automation projects where customers can delay waiting on making decisions on what to commit to for automation for a myriad of reasons. So instead of forward progress they lag, atrophy and don’t have healthy discussions of what their needs are.
This is a game of chicken: how long can businesses hold off hiring or wait for the promise of AI. Until a decision/discovery is made their customers and employees suffer the consequences of understaffing.
Is it AI though?
Occams Razor leads me to believe this is more of a classic case of an economy worsening and budgets tightening.
Sure, the snake oil salesmen are out trying to tout AI as a people replacement (for the avoidance of doubt, we all know it isn't) but all their looking at replacing are the people who they've already outsourced.
You're quite right that this will lead to understaffing, specifically more tasks being lumped onto smaller numbers of staff. The work needed to be done doesn't reduce or at least nowhere near as much as the staff that they've lost. By the time the tree of bad management decisions bear fruit, the managers have either moved on or become so entrenched that it will take a Herculean effort to remove (see: Alan Joyce and QANTAS). The irony is, the C-Levels tell us they get paid so much because of the responsibility they must bear... but when it comes to taking responsibility they're never the ones who do.
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Re: AI is causing working hiring pauses (Score:2)
You're probably right. But I also think Musk's X experience, of firing 80% of the company and mostly maintaining revenues has a lot to do with the tech job slowdown... as it turns out, a good 60-80% of employees in many tech firms are not "needed" to maintain revenues...
A. "Mostly" doing a lot of work there, lol
B. He saddled the company with debt and had to lay off most of the workforce, so you have a skeleton crew toiling away to make interest payments. This is a well recognized unhealthy pattern in the industry not some magic trick the Muskrat discovered.
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You're probably right. But I also think Musk's X experience, of firing 80% of the company and mostly maintaining revenues has a lot to do with the tech job slowdown... as it turns out, a good 60-80% of employees in many tech firms are not "needed" to maintain revenues...
You've seen X since Musk took over?
It's gone from a barely contained cesspit under Dorsey to a hive of hatred and scum under Musk. If anything he's demonstrated that firing 80% of the staff results in a massive decrease in product quality.
It doesn't have to be AI (Score:2)
CEOs were holding off on a lot of automation because they didn't really believe it could be done. The AI boom has convinced them it can be done
So either way we are going to see a shit ton of automation. We are also going to see a ton of customer service jobs automated away and replaced with crapp
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I think AI is causing a pre-emptive wave of layoffs too. ie: Many companies aren't waiting for any payoff.
Re: AI is causing working hiring pauses (Score:3)
It's nothing to do with AI.
The tech industry saw absolutely bonkers growth from 2019-2022, and no one should ever be comparing growth to anything in that period without a lot of caveats. Nothing since then has been normal, so blaming the current trend on something else without looking back is useless.
Even if you can't read this article, the chart at the top says it all. Look at 2018-2022,2023
https://www.wsj.com/economy/jo... [wsj.com]
OpenAI didn't cause that peak in 22, Federal Reserve policy did. It undid the change
Contract "ant hill" labor model (Score:2)
It will be interesting to see the impact on the hordes of consultancies that specialize in low bidder "ant hill" labor to do things like "eyes on glass" for operations, man call centers, and perform basic coding. I suspect that model is about to be turned on its head.
Best,
Junk "science" at its worst. (Score:5, Insightful)
Paid "research" by a company that would benefit from the result? Check.
Questionable self selection of data sources ("We focus only on conversations in the United States to align with occupation and work activity information from O*NET.", "Note that Copilot-Thumbs may not be representative of overall task success, as some types of users may be more likely to provide feedback, or some types of tasks may be more likely to elicit feedback from users.")? Check.
Oversimplification? Whoo boy, they are killing it on this one. An economist is described as "Compile, analyze, and report data to explain economic phenomena and forecast market trends, applying mathematical models and statistical techniques.", which is simplified to "Forecast economic, political, or social trends.", which is simplified to "Analyze market or industry conditions.", which is simplified to "Analyze market or industry conditions." Check.
Using the thing being studied in the study ("we use a GPT-4o-based LLM classification pipeline to identify all intermediate work activities (IWAs)"? Where's Kramer? Why don't you just tell me the name of the movie you would like to see? Check.
Conclusions that defy basic logic. "Passenger Attendants" scores high on can be done by AI. Flight Attendants who bring you drinks and evacuate you in an emergency are going to be replaced by AI? Or maybe redcaps, the AI is going to carry your bag to the plane or train? Or maybe the sleeper car attendant on the train who makes your bed. Check.
Is AI taking some jobs? Probably. Is it taking most of them? No way. The tech economic bubble burst. Too many tech things have reached saturation, there's no more up and to the right for them. Companies predictably have gone into cost cutting mode as a result, and the stock isn't being juiced by 10x growth. So they are selling an AI snow job to cover up that the core businesses have reached saturation and aren't going to generate 10x results anymore. Tech is in for a hard time in the near future, not because of AI, but because people have as much social media, streaming, etc as they want, and everyone now has it. In fact many are fed up and giving up parts of it, because they have learned it's garbage. There's no new people to feed into most of the systems anymore.
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Not that complicated. (Score:2)
Companies are hiring overseas in massive numbers. Why would they be hiring there if these US hiring stops and layoffs are because they need fewer people because of AI? There is just one reason for these layoffs and that is that companies prefer to have cheaper workers elsewhere.
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TCS (Tata Consulting) announced last week they were going to be laying folks off.
https://www.hindustantimes.com... [hindustantimes.com]
Though they are claiming these are not driven by AI.
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All these guys claiming it's not for AI are telling the truth.
Not because of, just in case of.
The fact the business community has something to rally around to punish labor, even if it doesn't pan out, is not an opportunity to be wasted.
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Companies are hiring overseas in massive numbers.
That was true up to a few years ago, I have not seen any evidence of it having increased in the last few years, do you have some report showing this recent overseas hiring?
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Are you like retired and don't follow news and not inside big companies? This is happening right now.
NY Times: https://archive.is/8HaGW [archive.is]
India numbers: https://timesofindia.indiatime... [indiatimes.com]
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Are you like retired and don't follow news?
I guess I am :)
Thank you for the links
Any new technology will shuffle jobs (Score:1)
Refrigerators caused many ice factory workers to lose their jobs.
Self-service gas stations caused many workers to lose their jobs.
"Computers" was originally a term for a room full of women doing math. All of them lost their jobs.
Robots have replaced many workers in factories and farms.
Despite all these job losses, unemployment remained roughly the same. The reality is that yes, new technology replaces workers all the time. Society adjusts and those workers move to other sectors that need labor. "Jobs" is no
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Paul, this stopped being a clever post like 8 years ago, Stop being and old fuck.
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AI idealizes finding and replacing any work that can be done by a human on the premise that AI can do it better. I'm so tired of these posts pretending that that is the exact same thing as cars replacing buggies, etc.
The cuts would have occurred regardless of AI (Score:5, Interesting)
Then we had the data mining boom...I know
But now what?...we have no massive market expansion...the poor have devices & are fully connected...the mobile device market is saturated...the data broker market is saturated. Any gains in one business typically come at the expense of another. We're running out of reasons to motivate businesses and consumers to spend new amounts of money.
So now, companies have been staffing up for years...and some of their hires are total duds....some products are not really needed...but in tech, everyone had a growth mindset and wanted to hire the best talent to prepare for the next expansion and to take marketshare away from their competitors. If Amazon is laying off developers and Google isn't, then this makes new grads greatly prefer Google. So no one wanted mass public layoffs.
After expansion, you typically do need to cull a few people. Some hires just suck. Some are AMAZING in the interview and lazy or entitled when you hire them...especially when you seek geniuses. We've had HUGE issues with MIT hires...you hire some elite kid who wants to change the world and he doesn't want to design customer-facing applications. He spend all those years working his ass off to get into a top school and no amount of pay will make a real-world job with actual customers in a profitable business anything but boring AF to him...so he needs to go. I sympathize, he's an amazing genius, but he needs to start his own pioneering company, not service the needs of a mutil-billion dollar stable business. All the people who frauded their way into the interview and it shows a few years later need to go...all the people who just had a life change and no longer want to work need to go. All the people who argue with their boss on every assignment for no good reason need to go. Most MBAs need to go.
This should have happened around 2020 gradually, but COVID caused an increase in demand so companies held off. Then the triple threat of Elon Musk bumbling his way through managing Twitter + interest rate increases + BS AI hype gave them the cover to cut jobs. Once everyone was doing it, you had no disincentive to clean up your own organization.
AI is not causing the job decline. AI isn't useless....but it's FAAAAR from useful enough to replace an employee. It might cause hesitation to expand from people who have never used AI and believe the bullshit from Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg and Jensen Huang, but....anyone who actually uses it knows it can't even write code that compiles. At best, it can make existing developers a l
Probably some of A and some of B (Score:3)
Where A is causing, and B is being used as an excuse for.
There's definitely AIs answering phones now.
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article doesn't even show a correlation (Score:3)
News sites are such a joke. The article doesn't even show any hiring trend data, just picks arbitrarily that hiring is down 20% from 2020 levels. It also doesn't try to compare these layoffs with a general cooling off of the economy by showing how it relates to other jobs. It also doesn't compare this round of layoffs, if there even is one, to previous ones.
So in about 18 months (Score:5, Insightful)
So we're going to take about a trillion dollars out of our healthcare system. Expect layoffs. Big ones.
Our entire civilization is collapsing. It's a big thing so it doesn't do it all at once and unfortunately the way most people's brains work if something doesn't happen all at once they can't comprehend it.
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It's not just the US, it's pretty much the entire West since it all adopted the same crazy policies and put idiots and psychos in positions of power because they believed America would always protect them no matter how insane they became.
If anything, the US will struggle along trying to fix itself while Europe and the rest collapse.The US has the resources to become self-sufficient, particularly if Trump takes Canada and Greenland. Europe can't. New Zealand can't. Australia maybe could but lacks the high-te
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I agree that the Big Beautiful Bill is an atrocity.
But the world isn't about to collapse. There's another acronym that helps us understand Trump: TACO. Wen push comes to shove, politicians, including Trump, will change their tune in order to keep from losing power.
In any case, none of this has anything to do with AI.
Trump doesn't chicken out (Score:2)
Nobody is chickening out there. What's happening is they are testing the limits of what they can get away with, getting away with more than those limits, backing off just enough and then trying again pushing past the boundaries a little bit each time and shifting the Overton window in their favor.
They've been doing that for 50 years and it's been working with zero opposition.
On
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There clearly won't be "chickening out" regarding cutting government agency staff.
But as soon as the changes, like tariffs, start to send the stock market in a tailspin, the chickening out begins. That's why there is wave after wave of delays in the whole tariff scheme.
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The reason I think our civilization is going to collapse is that there is no viable opposition to the fascists.
Unfortunately, it looks like that. The reason is that there are too many plain bad people and too many that do not understand what is going on and hence are easy to manipulate.
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It is worse: Healthcare is mostly being done because it makes economic sense, reduces cost and improves productivity. Yes, it is not completely utilitarian, but it has a strong component of it.
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Our entire civilization is collapsing.
LOL, no. China and India will survive. It is only the West, and Western adjacent (Russia) that are collapsing. The Western Elites got way too complacent and lazy, which is how Fascism crept back in. The West is entirely morally bankrupt and we get to experience it. The only question in my mind: Is the West going to take out the entire planet when they/we fall? The Western Elite (lol) are so morally bankrupt that I feel certain they have a biological agent ready to be released just to say, "fuck you" to the
possibly 2 different reasons (Score:2)
1. impact of tariffs - this is an actual disruption in business
2. AI but not as a real effect but because share holders like to hear how companies are on the cutting edge of technology... and how it allows to cut costs... so companies claim they use AI and they freeze hiring and trim the excessive positions they opened during COVID
The problem with AI (Score:1)
So we are going to be left with two classes. People we need to work and people there's no work for.
We live in a society where if you don't work you don't eat.
So there's going to be conflict between those two groups.
This happened before. Shortly after the two major industrial revolutions and before new technology got us back to full employment we had mass technological unemployment. They gloss over it in high sch
stewardesses? (Score:2)
So AI is going to replace "passenger attendants" aka stewardesses?
That seems silly, the AI is going to bring me a drink without a robot body? I don't see how this makes sense. (also uber drivers?)
Re: stewardesses? (Score:2)
They correlate (Score:2)
- references to saving money by using AI
- cutting costs by laying people off, hiring freezes, etc.
Even if it is a CEO of a public meat packing company or other industry where AI will have little impact.
Corporate Greed + Drugs fuel ... (Score:1)
... a deadly and vicious downward spiral
Sad to watch
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=... [youtube.com]
I speak as a proud American of Indian origin, but alarmed about this sharp doom loop I see in the US Silicon Valley (moved here after Covid from 22y on the US NorthEast Coast, and its alarming to watch this unfold.
Many oldtimers like me are considering or have already moved back to India, as SFO is not a family friendly place anymore, and Indians are very orthodox + family oriented (in a good way).
https://m.youtube.com/wa [youtube.com]
Also tge law and order situatiin in the... (Score:1)
... Bay Area is ridiculous
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Nastiest place I've ever been on this entire planet. Broke my fucking heart to see how those people live.
Frankly, the Bay Area is better off without you if you consider India better.
Pipeline problem (Score:2)
The bigger issue with entry level positions is the vastly increased scale at which universities have been pushing out students in software or CS. The number of jobs is actually growing, just not as fast as the number of applicants is growing.
These sorts of things are relatively common. Something similar happened after the dotcom bomb.
If you want to be successful, the easiest path is usually going to be the one less travelled.
Industry (with the help of government) has been pushing really hard for decades to