It's not AI. We are in a recession caused by fear and instability.
Tech may just be dying in general.
This could finally be the collapse we have been waiting for.
While the US was allowing capitalists to hoard all of the USs excess capital, China was facilitating the development of important industries via central planning.
Look at Intel. The owning class has become so greedy and incompetent. They aren't even running functional companies anymore: just grifting for government money then using that for stock buybacks.
I think it is possible that the widespread introduction of ChatGPT will cause a brief hiatus on hiring due to the inelasticity of demand. For the sake of argument, imagine that ChatGPT makes your average developer 4x more productive. It will take a while before the expectation becomes that 4x more work is delivered. That 4x more work is scheduled in sprints. That 4x more features are developed. That 4x more projects are sold to clients/users. When the demand eventually catches up (if it exists), the hiring will begin again.
I was talking to the head of accounting for a small biz the other day, and they were talking about buying an AI accounts payable solution. And how typically they would hire a person for this but now they use the AI.
Now this solution might not even use an LLM , it existed pre-chatgpt , but I think the word of mouth of chatgpt and AI is causing business people to seek out automations where they would normally hire.
I run a mature software company that is being driven for profit (we are out of the fantastic future phase and solidly in the “make money” phase). Even with all the pressure to cut costs and increase automation, the most valuable use of LLMs is to make the software developers work more effectively, producing the feature improvements that customers want so that we can ensure customers will renew and upgrade. And to the extent that we are cutting costs, we are using AI to help us write code that lets us use infrastructure more efficiently (because infrastructure is the bulk of our costs).
But this is a software company. I think out in the “real world,” there are some low hanging fruit wins where AI replaces extremely routine boilerplate jobs that never required a lot of human intelligence in the first place. But even then, I’d say that the general drift is that the humans who were doing those low-level jobs have a chance to step up into jobs requiring higher-level intelligence where humans have a chance to really shine. And companies are competing not by just getting rid of salaries, but by providing much better service by being able to afford to have more higher-tier people on the payroll. And by higher-tier, I don’t necessarily mean more expensive. It can be the same people that were doing the low-level jobs; they just now can spend their human-level intelligence doing more interesting and challenging work.
Okay. It also coincides with the end of the post-pandemic hiring boom and the UK bank rate going from 0.1% to 5.25%. It's kind of funny that reliable data analysis has never been part of the AI hype when you consider that AI is used for data analysis.
Soon the meme will be true. Entry level jobs will require 5-7 years of experience and you will need to be an expert in the 23 technologies mentioned in the job req. you will also continue to get spammed by recruiters seeking Java engineers because your resume say Javascript
> However, these broader improvements are not benefiting all parts of the workforce equally. Graduate job postings dropped by 4.2% in May and are now down 28.4% compared with the same time last year—the lowest level seen since July 2020.
> More broadly, entry-level roles (including apprenticeships, internships and junior jobs) have declined by 32% since November 2022, when ChatGPT’s commercial breakthrough triggered a rapid transformation in how companies operate and hire.
> Entry-level roles now make up just 25% of all jobs advertised in the UK, down from nearly 29% two years ago.
That's such a poor presentation of the numbers. If only they could have included a small data table with something like date|total-jobs|entry-level-jobs|percentage-entry-level.
Can't help but wonder/predict that this will cause a long-term deflationary trend. Basically labor is going to peak and then get cheaper and cheaper. So those with capital are going to benefit from this (obviously).
Hopefully this transition benefits everyone. I just don't see how those with zero capital are going to survive well. Most of the US economy (sorry to be US-centric but I am American) is people performing services and information based work (or at least _tons_ of it is). This is the portion of the economy that is going to be the most and first affected by AI.
Could this also be attributed to rising interest rates, a giant tax increase (tariffs), and the highly uncertain - err I mean “dynamic” — operating environment caused by the current administration?
From my viewpoint, companies are in a soft hiring freeze so that they can maintain a cash cushion to deal with volatility.
1. For business stakeholders, they are motivated to find ways to use AI to achieve whatever they want, because business requests are always ASAP and they don't want to wait for downstream software engineers to do the job. This has always been the case since the start of the computing business, I believe. (Maybe not the case during the mainframe/supercomputing era as the "business" sometimes are engineers themselves so it's easier to communicate)
2. Many software engineering jobs are not that technically challenging. For example Frontend, Data engineering, etc. A lot of time is spent on requirement clarification and collecting. Business might eventually figure out that the best way to use AI is NOT to make AI adapt to humans, but to make humans to adapt to AI. I'm pretty confident that if we have an integrated AI and the business stakeholders can ask questions in a way that AI can understand, 80% of my job (as a DE) could be done by AI. But it requires feeding data into AI and training the business stakeholders to use it properly. TBF, a lot of my work COULD be solved by automation, but we never had the time to properly automate the data pipelines.
3. Whatever the outcome, junior software developers are having and are going to have to a tough time. Unless they work in some low level system programming positions, they have to prove that they are MUCH better than AI to justify for a hire. Nowadays companies expect senior developers to use AI to enhance their productivity, so juniors need to learn that too to catch up -- but they also need to learn to program without AI to actually obtain the knowledge properly.
4. AI is going to impact every field, not just programming. Office work is the first to get impacted, and then blue collars too. Unions and governments are going to hold for a while, maybe a long while, but as long as there is one major player (China for example) that is pushing for AI advancement, the others HAVE to follow suite, or they run the risk of losing everything. The Russo-Ukraine war and Israel-Iran war are the bells that toll for all of us, and the existence crisis brought upon all of us by the increasing numbers of hot wars are going to make everyone push for productivity, whether in production or killing.
5. If we can't figure out how to make the world a bit more fair and happier for the average people (you and me) because AI really takes off, a dark dystopian future awaits us. Good luck. We might have some 10-20 years to achieve that.
When we went from typewriters to computers you still needed a human to type something. Typing is just the output of thinking. Now we are trying to build thinking machines.
Guys, that article is by a web scraping job search website seeking free publicity.
It will be blocked by the big players such as indeed and LinkedIn, and possibly also blocked by direct corporate websites. So wouldn't take any notice of it.
If the average salary and employment rate both drop then that would be a sign.
The article makes a correlation between the loss of "entry-level jobs" and the release of ChatGPT, implying that AI is displacing those "entry-level" jobs.
But then it gives details:
> By contrast, the healthcare and nursing sector – previously a consistent driver of job growth – saw vacancies fall by 10.21% in May. Other sectors with notable drops included admin (-9.22%), maintenance (-7.95%), and domestic help and cleaning (-5.72%).
Am I missing something here ? Apart from the "admin" part, I fail to see how the reduction in "healthcare, nursing, maintenance, domestic help and cleaning" can be attributed to ChatGPT, or LLMs in general.
Or am I misunderstanding the claim ?
I can completely imagine why people would fire their house cleaner, care for they elderly themselves, postpone repairing that fridge, etc... But it would purely be because: "we can't afford it". So, revenue inequality, energy shortage, world insecurity, etc... could play a part.
LLMs ? I don't see how.
(Or would it be a ripple effect of growing inequality ? The AI boost is increasing inequality, and now, tech bros are the only one who can afford going to the restaurant or hiring a cleaner - but they only eat 3 times a day, and only have x rooms to clean ?)
Quite frankly: "in the last 2 years since ChatGPT came out, we had dozen of trade wars and three real ones, no one wants to invest any more" looks like a more plausible explanation.
36 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 47.5 ms ] threadEngineering / programming entry level jobs down by one third: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/02/23/fears-of-ai-...
Finance / corporate sectors entry level jobs down by one third: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/06/22/city-giants-...
So we are currently in 3 AD, where the last remaining entry level jobs are being hunted and made extinct.
Tech may just be dying in general.
This could finally be the collapse we have been waiting for.
While the US was allowing capitalists to hoard all of the USs excess capital, China was facilitating the development of important industries via central planning.
Look at Intel. The owning class has become so greedy and incompetent. They aren't even running functional companies anymore: just grifting for government money then using that for stock buybacks.
Now this solution might not even use an LLM , it existed pre-chatgpt , but I think the word of mouth of chatgpt and AI is causing business people to seek out automations where they would normally hire.
But this is a software company. I think out in the “real world,” there are some low hanging fruit wins where AI replaces extremely routine boilerplate jobs that never required a lot of human intelligence in the first place. But even then, I’d say that the general drift is that the humans who were doing those low-level jobs have a chance to step up into jobs requiring higher-level intelligence where humans have a chance to really shine. And companies are competing not by just getting rid of salaries, but by providing much better service by being able to afford to have more higher-tier people on the payroll. And by higher-tier, I don’t necessarily mean more expensive. It can be the same people that were doing the low-level jobs; they just now can spend their human-level intelligence doing more interesting and challenging work.
> More broadly, entry-level roles (including apprenticeships, internships and junior jobs) have declined by 32% since November 2022, when ChatGPT’s commercial breakthrough triggered a rapid transformation in how companies operate and hire.
> Entry-level roles now make up just 25% of all jobs advertised in the UK, down from nearly 29% two years ago.
That's such a poor presentation of the numbers. If only they could have included a small data table with something like date|total-jobs|entry-level-jobs|percentage-entry-level.
Hopefully this transition benefits everyone. I just don't see how those with zero capital are going to survive well. Most of the US economy (sorry to be US-centric but I am American) is people performing services and information based work (or at least _tons_ of it is). This is the portion of the economy that is going to be the most and first affected by AI.
If companies can’t hire people to build the product they can’t afford to invest in entry level people to push it.
From my viewpoint, companies are in a soft hiring freeze so that they can maintain a cash cushion to deal with volatility.
1. For business stakeholders, they are motivated to find ways to use AI to achieve whatever they want, because business requests are always ASAP and they don't want to wait for downstream software engineers to do the job. This has always been the case since the start of the computing business, I believe. (Maybe not the case during the mainframe/supercomputing era as the "business" sometimes are engineers themselves so it's easier to communicate)
2. Many software engineering jobs are not that technically challenging. For example Frontend, Data engineering, etc. A lot of time is spent on requirement clarification and collecting. Business might eventually figure out that the best way to use AI is NOT to make AI adapt to humans, but to make humans to adapt to AI. I'm pretty confident that if we have an integrated AI and the business stakeholders can ask questions in a way that AI can understand, 80% of my job (as a DE) could be done by AI. But it requires feeding data into AI and training the business stakeholders to use it properly. TBF, a lot of my work COULD be solved by automation, but we never had the time to properly automate the data pipelines.
3. Whatever the outcome, junior software developers are having and are going to have to a tough time. Unless they work in some low level system programming positions, they have to prove that they are MUCH better than AI to justify for a hire. Nowadays companies expect senior developers to use AI to enhance their productivity, so juniors need to learn that too to catch up -- but they also need to learn to program without AI to actually obtain the knowledge properly.
4. AI is going to impact every field, not just programming. Office work is the first to get impacted, and then blue collars too. Unions and governments are going to hold for a while, maybe a long while, but as long as there is one major player (China for example) that is pushing for AI advancement, the others HAVE to follow suite, or they run the risk of losing everything. The Russo-Ukraine war and Israel-Iran war are the bells that toll for all of us, and the existence crisis brought upon all of us by the increasing numbers of hot wars are going to make everyone push for productivity, whether in production or killing.
5. If we can't figure out how to make the world a bit more fair and happier for the average people (you and me) because AI really takes off, a dark dystopian future awaits us. Good luck. We might have some 10-20 years to achieve that.
they fired lots of people. and the ones left were happy to do the extra work.
It will be blocked by the big players such as indeed and LinkedIn, and possibly also blocked by direct corporate websites. So wouldn't take any notice of it.
If the average salary and employment rate both drop then that would be a sign.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/oct/30/bosses-reeve...
But then it gives details:
> By contrast, the healthcare and nursing sector – previously a consistent driver of job growth – saw vacancies fall by 10.21% in May. Other sectors with notable drops included admin (-9.22%), maintenance (-7.95%), and domestic help and cleaning (-5.72%).
Am I missing something here ? Apart from the "admin" part, I fail to see how the reduction in "healthcare, nursing, maintenance, domestic help and cleaning" can be attributed to ChatGPT, or LLMs in general.
Or am I misunderstanding the claim ?
I can completely imagine why people would fire their house cleaner, care for they elderly themselves, postpone repairing that fridge, etc... But it would purely be because: "we can't afford it". So, revenue inequality, energy shortage, world insecurity, etc... could play a part. LLMs ? I don't see how.
(Or would it be a ripple effect of growing inequality ? The AI boost is increasing inequality, and now, tech bros are the only one who can afford going to the restaurant or hiring a cleaner - but they only eat 3 times a day, and only have x rooms to clean ?)
Quite frankly: "in the last 2 years since ChatGPT came out, we had dozen of trade wars and three real ones, no one wants to invest any more" looks like a more plausible explanation.