Discussion

Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

rishabhaiover: > There's suggestive evidence that hiring of young workers (ages 22–25) into exposed occupations has slowed — roughly a 14% drop in the job-finding rateThere goes my excuse of not finding a job in this market.

behnamoh: I don't think there's been much of an impact, really. Those who know how to use AI just got tangentially more productive (because why would you reveal your fake 10x productivity boost so your boss hands you 10x more tasks to finish?), and those w/o AI knowledge stayed the way they were.The real impact is for indie-devs or freelancers but that usually doesn't account for much of the GDP.

piyh: Work is freezing hiring and upping spending on tokens for everyone.Don't know if this is effective and I don't think management knows either, but it's what they're doing

re-thc: > Work is freezing hiring and upping spending on tokens for everyone.Doesn't mean the two are related.Is AI just the excuse? We've got tariffs, war, uncertainty and other drama non stop.

piyh: It's what they're telling us

programmertote: In the "Theoretical Capability" chart, it's curious to see that AI can cover just 0.6 (60%) of the capability for healthcare practitioner. As a spouse of a specialist doctor, I can tell you that my spouse and her colleagues use AI A LOT for diagnosis and treatment plans (before then, it was uptodate.com).This leads me to wonder if the remaining 40% are procedural stuff that AI cannot replace. OR is Anthropic underestimating what AI can do in healthcare?This is me saying as a middle-of-the-road AI-skeptic (i.e., I don't believe AI will take over all the job in the world; I also believe AI has its use and can help us in many ways as long as we check its outputs carefully in serious use-cases).

yodsanklai: > that my spouse and her colleagues use AI A LOT for diagnosis and treatment plansI hope they know what they're doing.

shimman: Oh wow the company that sells AI services is putting out research on AI, definitely no conflict of interest here!This is on par with cigarette companies doing research on cigarettes or oil companies deliberately lying about climate change... can't wait for the current crop of sell outs at the NYT, Washington Post, The Atlantic, or The New Yorker to start gobbling up this slop as true and agreed upon within the industry.Maybe the Department of War was right to declare them a supply-chain risk.

tl2do: From my experience as a software engineer, doubling my productivity hasn’t reduced my workload. My output per hour has gone up, but expectations and requirements have gone up just as fast. Software development is effectively endless work, and AI has mostly compressed timelines rather than reduced total demand.

MeetingsBrowser: The goal has always and will always be to complete as much as possible in the time allotted.

nickphx: You know you're having a real impact when you have to self-report on the impact you're having.

alexpotato: "A rich man doesn't need to tell people he's rich" comes to mind.

alexpotato: There was a recent anecdote from the head of radiology, Mayo Clinic I believe, that went something like this:- AI has allowed radiologists to review a much higher rate of x-rays- The above has led to a dramatic increase in need for faster processing, more storage of scans etc- which in turn led to needing a bigger IT department to manage all of the additional workloadThere was a similar anecdote about the IRS where the claim is they went from having N accountants to having much fewer accountants but now they need N IT people to manage the new systems.

rishabhaiover: I'd be curious to see the shift in numbers since December, 2025.

sp4cec0wb0y: My speed shipping software increased but so did the demands of features by my company.

MeetingsBrowser: Or worse. I’ve heard stories from friends where leadership expects huge boosts in productivity due to LLMs, and perceive anything but an order of magnitude boost as incompetence or a refusal to adapt.

aeon_ai: What’s your proposed alternative, hotshot armchair expert?They do nothing?

shimman: My alternative? Nationalize the company and implement a workplace democracy to replace the executive team + board.I trust the workers more to dictate the direction of a company than most executives.They can't do worse.edit: or what another commentator said, fucking academia. Public universities have done more for humanity than nearly anything to come out of SV. Surveillance capitalism, mass misery + psychosis; it's very telling what our society values when mass amounts of the Earth are desperately trying to ban these very same services to protect children.

g947o: Well, there is such a thing called academic institutions whose revenue does not depend on selling AI products, just as an example.

DiscourseFan: Just like anything else, you either think "that's definitely wrong" or "huh, I guess that's probably it." If its really serious, you have to pause and make of a judgement call of course.

22c: PMs can now also ship their half-baked requirements documents even faster thanks to the help of AI.

g947o: I am not going to trust a single word from a company whose business is selling you AI products.

thatmf: cigarettes don't cause cancer! -cigarette companies

liuliu: It is not going to reduce your workload. It is going to remove one of your co-workers.

bicx: In a bear market in a bloated company, maybe. We’re still actively hiring at my startup, even with going all-in on AI across the company. My PM is currently shipping major features (with my review) faster and with higher-quality code than any engineer did last year.

johnfn: This seems unlikely. My company is in competition with a number of other startups. If AI removes one of my co-workers, our competitions will keep the co-worker and out-compete us.

vkou: > This seems unlikely.It is absolutely likely. The hiring market for juniors is fucked atm.

IsTom: Or just make time for more Very Important Meetings.

zthrowaway: My day to day is even busier now with agents all over the place making code changes. The Security landscape is even more complex now overnight. The only negative impact I see is that there’s not much need for junior devs right now. The agent fills that role in a way. But we’ll have to backfill some way or another.

shimman: You should look into the concepts of skepticism, materialism, and cynicism. Maybe don't trust the leadership of where you work, the leadership that sees you as a number and not a human.

pydry: Which story sends a more positive signal to shareholders?"We've frozen hiring because our growth potential is tapped out.""We've frozen hiring because AI can replace employees."

causal: This - I can't think of any place I've ever worked where development ever outpaced backlog and tech debt.

bandrami: I don't write code for a living but I administer and maintain it.Every time I say this people get really angry, but: so far AI has had almost no impact on my job. Neither my dev team nor my vendors are getting me software faster than they were two years ago. Docker had a bigger impact on the pipeline to me than AI has.Maybe this will change, but until it does I'm mostly watching bemusedly.

Rury: That's not necessarily a result of AI, you also have to consider the broader economic environment. I mean, it was also difficult to get a job as a graduate in 2008, whereas it's typically been easier to get a job when credit is cheap.

api: That’s the economy in general. Labor saving innovations increase productivity but do not usually reduce work very much, though they can shift it around pretty dramatically. There are game theoretic reasons for this, as well as phenomena like the hedonic treadmill.

dvt: Because of overhiring during the post-COVID free money glitch, not because of AI.

sdf2df: Erm its been fucked for many years across many professions, it was just less so for software engineering in particular. Now entry into the S-E profession is taking a hit.Also dont forget theres only so many viable revenue-generating and cost-saving projects to take. And said above - overhiring in COVID.

darth_avocado: > This seems unlikelyThis is already happening. Fewer people are getting hired. Companies are quietly (sometimes not, like Block) letting people go. At a personal level all the leaders in my company are sounding the “catch up or you’ll be left behind” alarm. People are going to be let go at an accelerated pace in the future (1-3 years).

ipaddr: When you work long enough you'll find it. Places where changing software is risky you can end up waiting for approvals. Places where another company purchased yours or you are getting shutdown soon and there is no new work. Sometimes you end up on a system that they want to replace but they never get around to it.Being overworked is sometimes better than being underworked. Sometimes the reserve is better. They both have challenges.

thewebguyd: Same here, more or less, in the ops world. Yeah, I use AI but I can't honestly say it's massively improved my productivity or drastically changed my job in any way other than the emails I get from the other managers at my work are now clearly written by AI.I can turn out some scripts a little bit quicker, or find an answer to something a little quicker than googling, but I'm still waiting on others most of the time, the overall company processes haven't improved or gotten more efficient. The same blockers as always still exist.Like you said, there has been other tech that has changed my job over time more than AI has. The move to the cloud, Docker, Terraform, Ansible, etc. have all had far more of an impact on my job. I see literally zero change in the output of others, both internally and externally.So either this is a massively overblown bubble, or I'm just missing something.

sdf2df: Youre not missing anything.Humans are funny. But most cant seem to understand that the tool is a mirage and they are putting false expectations on it. E.g. management of firms cutting back on hiring under the expectation that LLMs will do magic - with many cheering 'this is the worst itll be bro!!".I just hope more people realise before Anthropic and OAI can IPO. I would wager they are in the process of cleaning up their financials for it.

nozzlegear: It was fucked before AI became "mainstream" too. Companies overhired during and after covid.

sdf2df: I will personally say right now... its not gonna change lol.People who actually know how to think can see it a mile away.

bandrami: The dev team is committing more than they used to. A lot, in fact, judging from the logs. But it's not showing up as a faster cadence of getting me software to administer. Again, maybe that will change.

righthand: In my experience it is now twice the amount of merge requests as a follow-up appears to correct any bugs no one reviewed in the first merge request.

vkou: It sure was, but as far as I'm aware, 2026 isn't in the middle of a generation-scale economic collapse.(And if it is, what is the cause?)

johnfn: Aren't we both responding to an article which says:> We find no systematic increase in unemployment for highly exposed workers since late 2022

byproxy: See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

bandrami: We're even wondering if there's different releng we could be using. We do a "dirty head/clean tag" model where we release by milestone completion rather than on a fixed schedule, but switching to a scheduled release model would make the QA bottleneck we already seem to have that much worse (and the QA standards are contractual so that's not going anywhere). Not to mention that I'm also unfortunately wearing the security hat (yes, we know that's a bad idea but we're small and Any Quarter Now™ we should be able to split that part of the job off).

nitwit005: The problem with using unemployment as a metric is hiring is driving by perception. You're making an educated guess as to how many people you need in the future.Anthropic can cause layoffs through pure marketing. People were crediting an Anthropic statement in causing a drop in IBM's stock value, which may genuinely lead to layoffs: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ibm-stock-plunges-ai-threat-1...We'll probably have to wait for the hype to wear off to get a better idea, but that might take a long while.

andai: How is Anthropic getting this data? Are they running science experiments on people's chat history? (In the app, API or both?)

willmadden: Build a new feature. If you aren't bogged down in bureaucracy it will happen much faster.

bandrami: Most of these are new features, but then they have to integrate with the existing software so it's not really greenfield. (Not to mention that our clients aren't getting any faster at approving new features, either.)

recursivedoubts: A possible outcome of AI: domestic technical employment goes up because the economics of outsourcing change. Domestic technical workers working with AI tools can replace outsourcing shops, eliminating time-shift issues, etc at similar or lower costs.