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- Hacker News
- "AI startups are hiring like there's no tomorrow."
For AI startups there eventually may be no tomorrow
How many of these startups are profitable
Perhaps the greatest "AI"-related job losses will be failed "AI" startups
More BS "jobs" created from throwaway investment capital instead of business success
- > AI startups are hiring like there is no tomorrow.
This is not reassuring
by inquist - Yeah. It’s like well, that would be great if there was no tomorrow, but the thing about tomorrow is that it always famously comes.by mcphage
- Does anyone here question the integrity of the US government’s jobs report two months away from a mid-term election?
- Not really. We'd see a lot of resignations if the numbers were being fudged. Statisticians, as a rule, take a dim view of falsifying data.
- Yes, but if you haven't been questioning them for the past couple of decades, you haven't been paying attention.
- While I'm still catastrophically worried about what AI means for my career, I've noticed that my current employer - very AI forward, and growing the team - is still facing an ever expanding backlog.
High productivity is generally good for the employee, unless you're productive enough you run out of work to do. So how much code is needed?
by windward - Yes I’ve seen very little change over the past 3 years in my role (platform engineering) except mostly JIRA tickets are more unreadable because people just have Claude vomit a novel into it.
I mean I use it every day of course, but the velocity of work doesn’t really seem to be budging lol. And frankly a lot of time wasted on AI made gadgets, and meetings about those gadgets (look at this dashboard Claude made! etc)
by pram - I was also sure to be homeless by now. But despite aggressively trying to automate myself away I'm somehow more busy than ever.by ngruhn
- by flypunk
- If most of the jobs its creating are related to construction of infrastructure then that's not really positive news as these jobs are temporary, once demand settles then why kind of jobs are going to be created?
It might be benefiting other areas, but I think as the technology improves a lot of those are going to start looking like what's happening in software development (which is arguably what the technology is best at right now).
So yeah, idk.
by jerojero - The construction jobs are only temporary if the compute infrastructure build-out decelerates. That seems pretty unlikely in the mid-term! It would mean that, like, there's a fixed appetite for data centers, and once we satisfy that appetite, we stop building them.
For better or worse, it looks more like that we're gonna tile the whole damn planet in data centers, at a faster and faster clip.
by jephs - Everything is temporary, especially jobs.by charlieyu1
- There is almost always a next big thing. What happens when it ends is people move to the next thing. Practically everything needs some kind of construction, management, software, hardware, etc.
I'd be rich if I knew what the next big thing was but the economy has been running on the assumption that there will be a next big thing for many, many decades. Each cycle has the same rhymes of "what happens when it ends" questions but there has always something.
by parineum - Most of these jobs are the same jobs that arose thanks to the CHIPS and IRA. Much of the AI boom and trade is building on top of the capex that arose from the semiconductor/hardware portfolio during that era.
Many of the current DCs being built out are also being powered or tied with renewable energy projects that were funded by the IRA, as many DC builders with deep pockets do know the political dimension. If this is what keeps the CHIPS, IRA, and the IIJA alive I'm happy.
Every industry and career type goes through ebbs and flows. The 2010s was a white collar boom, and the 2020s is now a white collar bust. Meanwhile the 2010s was a skilled trades bust and the 2020s is now a skilled trades boom.
by alephnerd - Isn't this true for "all" construction? Nobody says,
"The housing construction jobs are temporary, we shouldn't count them."
There will always be CapEx to spend.
by pj_mukh - AI construction jobs are temporary up to Kardashev 3 or so.by delichon
- I can’t read the article but in my group, which is not terribly AI exposed due to its hands-on nature, we are in fact hiring extra people into next year to handle additional AI initiatives that I am confident will succeed. In subsequent years, the plan as I have heard it is to let headcount go down by attrition.
I would not take extra hiring now as evidence that AI is preserving job numbers.
- What type of activities your group performs?by dbolgheroni
- This is indeed HN, so comments are of course skewed to a particular upper echelon of knowledge work, but I'll ask anyways:
When you say (and perhaps you might speculate across other businesses) "hiring extra people... To handle AI initiatives" does that mean you're hiring Very niche and specialized AI people to handle these initiatives? I'm curious because I have seen some versions of this sentiment on HN and it sort of feels like reading "at my company we're hiring more quantum physicists because of these initiatives".
Basically, how much of the general populace is actually going to have a shot at nabbing a slice of this meager pie?
by R_D_Olivaw - The article mostly cites the huge growth in blue-collar jobs caused by the data center buildout. It’s very handy-wavy about white collar jobs, “yes lots of jobs have been lost, but also the tech sector always has a lot of year-to-year churn, maybe this is just churn”.
Not a super insightful article. The AI jobs apocalypse may or may not be real, but this article doesn’t provide any compelling evidence for its thesis.
by Ifkaluva - > The Economist estimates that AI has so far created around 1m new jobs in America. That easily exceeds the roughly 200,000 lay-offs attributed to AI since mid-2023, and appears more than enough to offset weaker hiring in many back-office roles. America’s AI infrastructure splurge has created many of them. (...) That building spree requires armies of workers: electricians to wire them, HVAC specialists to stop racks from overheating, grid engineers to hook them up to the power supply and technicians to install and maintain the machines.
I'm not sure whether the salaries of the new jobs are on par with those of the lost jobs.
by alanmoraes - “One million high-paying upper-middle class family supporting jobs were destroyed, but on the bright side, one million minimum-wage Walmart greeter jobs were created! See? We’re breaking even!”by binary132
- I thought the whole thing was AI was leading to underhiring not necessarily layoffsby asdff
- "easily exceeds the roughly 200,000 lay-offs attributed to AI "
Except that is hogwash, "attributed to AI" is basically the CEO screwing up something in the business and AI-washing their mistake because it's convenient.
by pj_mukh - But what happens when the exec level managers are done with all these AI training sessions and rollouts and realize nothing has improved?
What about the loss of productivity of developers who are forced to entertain tons of noise about AI and take training and attend sessions which do not increase their productivity and instead takes time away from real work?
Are employers running a software shop or a church?
by BatchJob - AI is a religion that promises CEOs, VCs and other various assorted sociopaths the promised land of not having to pay for the most expensive part of any business, its workers. They will do anything and everything in their power to reach this promised land, regardless of the cost to themselves, to their businesses or to society at large.
It is entirely irrelevant to them how useful LLM tech is. It doesn't matter that productivity is the same as it ever was just with a 10-fold increase in costs due to token-maxxing behaviour. They don't care if their software is buggier than ever, or their workers unhappier than ever, because AI promises to replace them anyways
by sensanaty - The Church of Chief Executives.by zx8080
- They can't afford to miss out or be seen as missing out. It's not rational, yet it is in a way.by visarga
- I'm a consultant and I've already worked for multiple AI companies that shut down over the last two years. I think the main problem is that they all are relying on the big token providers and trying to capture value with various services.
At some point the token costs will increase so much, it will put all of these AI companies out of business.
Don't get me wrong. AI is definitely useful. The high costs are currently being subsidized by VC and other investors and unless there is a major breakthrough, it's just not going to work in the long-term.
by elmer2