Tell HN: Who wants to be hired" posts outpace "Who's hiring" 2 to 1

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• Hacker News
• Started to reverse before ai though. With the law in US (which was reverted) that you couldn't use all software research as expense so you needed to pay tax on no-profit.

  Then with increased interest rates. Which are still active and weirdly should've caused more hardship than ~3 months lower stocks.

  And now ai, but this depends on demand for software too, which I don't how big it is, like can demand scale too with ai?

  Like when you lower electricity cost people just use more electricity.

  by ddorian43
• I'm tired of reading job adverts for 3 people's jobs (frontend, backend, DevOps) all in one, all lead/staff/senior but not the salary to match any of that, not even close
  by gib444
• That’s true! Naysayers keep mentioning it’s due to over hiring during Covid. I’d say it’s AI investment related and AI replacing a lot of software needs. Plus, people seem to use just a couple applications or platforms nowadays.
  by punkbit
• It'd be interesting to go slightly farther back to better gauge the impact of the covid hiring craze.
  by zamadatix
• Could it actually be that the United States is in a plain old recession?

  I know the stock markets are higher than ever due to AI investment. But the real economy may not be in a great shape hence the layoffs.

  While the cause may be not be AI, but instead policy, e.g. tariffs. But also multiple conflicts ( Ukraine , Iran, Lebanon), leading higher oil , gas, critical raw material prices. China heavy exporting economy but not having domestic demand to fuel growth and bilateral trade with other countries.

  All leading to less consumer consumption, slower economy , more layoffs to cut costs, less consumer consumption etc.

  So no ai related but many external factors at the same time. But ai is hiding the pain due to the high stock market valuations. Which may explain that despite all the usual recession symptoms we aren’t treating it as a recession.

  I am curious what other think.

  by elthor89
• Back in 2023 when I was reading the "Who's hiring" for March I wanted to ask aloud "truly, who is?".

  I'm happy my junior years passed before all this and I don't envy those who are just coming into this field.

  And it's not just tech - all over my extended social circle there are people in various fields who were laid off. It's a crawling, largely invisible in the usual indicators, crisis.

  by Tade0
• I've been tracking this as well [1], and there's indeed a clear difference between pre-2023 and 2023 onward.

  [1] https://hnjobs.mathieularose.com

  by larose
• I'm kind of surprised that this is even moving the needle.

  Really, what do you expect from a "profession" that has been trying to lower the entry level to a point where anyone with access to an AI is a programmer?

  I remember when folks had to have a degree to enter the "profession" of software developer. Nowadays all you need to be a "programmer" is access to AI. And correspondingly the quality of the output has fallen to such a level that it no longer possible to distinguish between human generated or machine generated code.

  The bad quality is hidden away with euphemisms such as "release early, release often" or "move fast and break things". The constant requirement to update because updates were broken is just another symptom of an industry gone badly wrong.

  Worse still, the solution coming out the tech hubs isn't to slow down and reflect about these issues in IT, rather it's to throw even more technology at it. Technology that then also fails. Technology that is designed to cause vendor-lockin and dependence on a few controlling companies (OpenAI & Anthropic being the latest in a long line ... AWS for servers and Google for spreadsheets and email).

  Hm ... now what do we do? More of the same probably.

  by Towaway69