(I suspect some very junior jobs have genuinely been taken by AI, but it seems to me that the driving factor is still a return-to-mean after ZIRP).
I think the glut is ZIRP, but the lack of recovery (or very slow pickup) is AI.
AI is just a plausible scapegoat that sounds hip.
AI is having some effect at the margins but it’s mostly an excuse.
Companies always prefer to avoid saying they are just laying people off. It can be a negative market signal to investors, which is paradoxical, since it might indicate lower growth expectations. It also creates possible exposure to lawsuits depending on the circumstances and state.
The nice thing about AI as an excuse is you can say to your investors and board “we are shedding cost but still growing and in fact our productivity is up because we are leveraging AI!”
Communication skills matter.
As companies tighten their belts, they cut low performers that had been hanging around for too long anyway because:
1) cost reduction
2) companies had been lazy at getting rid of low performers when the market was hot and they didn’t need to cut (and couldn’t find better devs to replace them anyway)
3) with the market this skewed towards employers, you can replace low performers with better talent anyway because everyone’s looking
This is the company so large, their jobs data was used in lieu of the Fed's jobs data when the gov was shut down.
It is hard to tell what is really going on. No company will admit that they are firing, e.g., DEI hires from 2023. I have seen some open source CoC loudmouths being fired, but that is not enough to establish a large trend.
Data scientist is an exception based on title, but in my experience there are a large number of people with that title who have never heard of the scientific method, let alone could apply it with any rigor.
I'm sure LLMs are taking some of these jobs, but a lot of the decrease is probably due to general cutbacks on overhead and a realization that they produce limited value.