Companies just laid off thousands of people. Not looking to hire anytime soon.
this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2024
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It's actually picking up a bit now, at least anecdotally
Yeah but it's mostly specialized positions. If you got a certification with a high demand you'll be alright.
This isn't actually accurate - the layoffs were performative to boost their stock prices... most of those big tech firms are still aggressively hiring people.
I wonder if it's more to get rid of bad employees. In most Western countries it's really hard to fire people that are just a bit crap, or even very crap. If you have big layoffs then the bar is much much lower so you can get rid of them all at once. It also sends a very strong message to people to not take their jobs for granted.
I dunno; I haven't actually been involved in layoffs yet fortunately.
Ooh, this is a particularly good point:
Tools that make coding easier make coding more accessible to more people; they make coders more productive, and like magic, this means somehow more of them exist and more of them get hired to do more things.
Thisis what Python did to the job market.
Fuck 'four spaces' straight to hell, but even I will admit Python is a good tool and has allowed more people to make good software.
AI's long term impact will be the same, after the hype train bullshit dies down.
"Rightsizing" makes stock prices go up. I'm trying to find my first position in tech, but every position is advertising for 3+ years experience. Guess I'll have to work for pennies on Fiverr.
Also with highlighting:
Even if I’m right and that a lot of this money is being wasted (they are right), my rant doesn’t change the reality of the ground situation today. VCs have always dumped their money into burning fire pits with the hopes that the companies that 10x offset the returns of the companies that fail. The difference in 2024 is that this money doomed to incineration trickles down to data centers in Virginia, not to fresh-out-of-college CS majors.
Also worth highlighting:
We’ve been through this hype cycle before with machine learning. Companies claimed to rely on super sophisticated machine learning and data science internally, when like 90%+ of these companies were at best exaggerating and at worst lying about not only impact but even the implementations themselves.
Not only is AI not replacing you today, the fantastical bull case of AI achieving sentience and building everything for you is nowhere in sight. It is not. Nobody knows how to achieve this! Anyone who says they know is lying! ASI has been 3 months away for the last 3 years, always based on bullshit rumors about some cryptic message an OpenAI employee said which ended up being a nothingburger. People who say ASI or AGI is around the corner are lying to you. Recent (last 3-4 years) developments in LLMs are impressive as is, you don’t need to lie about it. [2]