Flat at 60% of pre-covid hiring while the number of graduates continue to increase and there's still a backlog of people who were laid off. That's not a particularly optimism inducing hiring market.

Do not with a straight face act like pre-COVID hiring levels were a Good Thing. They weren’t. They were a symptom of a broken economy that you personally happened to pretty directly benefit from.

I think it's much better for society for companies to overhire than underhire, especially when they can easily afford it.

This is an idealistic view and makes hiring seem like charity.

There will always be steep corrections when they overhire driven by economic cycles or otherwise (and we're living through an otherwise).

Thing is, the companies doing these layoffs rarely actually end up losing money from overhiring. They’re still profitable. Just not profitable enough for the people on top.

That’s a bit perverse. In democracies, corporations ultimately exist to serve society, not shareholders.

The plutocracy is forgetting that a working and productive populace - with fair wages and representation - is their end of the deal for disproportionally benefitting from the fruits of labor from others; and directly prevents violence against the status quo. See: The top articles in the last 3 days.

Sure, but all they have to do is not hold up their end of the bargain. Who enforces that? These are just norms from 60 years ago that the rich decided they no longer have to follow.

They’ve started treating incorporation like a modern day papal indulgence, something that absolves whatever they do in the name of profit. It doesn’t. Limited liability buys you forgiveness in court but it doesn’t buy you forgiveness in the court of public opinion. Doing harm for a company is still doing harm.

I think you are correct in asserting the mercy-disciple of market forces.

I also think that counter points on the inhumanity of firms, misses that economies are an objective way to structure incentives to achieve subjective ends.

If you want more money to travel to other parts of the pyramid, or you want to disincentivize certain behavior, then economic incentives can be set up to achieve those goals.

Expecting firms to do charity is pointless. Expecting firms to optimize under constraints is not.

At societal scale hiring people is self-interest, not charity. Otherwise you'll get to exactly where the US is heading now: large parts of the consumer market are mostly dead because people have no discretionary spending power left, and the only way to make money as a business is to become a monopolist.

That's the problem, they can't afford it

They can afford it. They just want to make even more profit.

There have been a lot of headlines the past couple years about companies stating they are doing layoffs or slowing hiring because of AI. I would bet the average adult pays way more attention to news headlines than FRED reports.

I also don't see why everyone would dismiss the statements of large company CEOs about why they are making hiring/firing decisions, regardless of what some statistics say.

Because the messaging of the CEOs is intentional, to both do 'damage control' and influence stock price / valuation. It's not neutral messaging.

Yet, that is what the markets are operating on.

Dismissing their words, just brings us back to the issue of what is really going on.

And lest it is forgotten - AI is a huge part of the US economy at this point. It is highly dependent on firms spending tokens.

Saying it’s just CEO market speak means we have an AI bubble that is more worrisome.

The companies doing the layoffs are themselves stating AI as a reason; that’s the news people are responding to. The parent didn’t claim that it’s based on reality, but it informs public opinion.

Quite a convenient excuse, isn't it? I hope no one figures out that AI is still just kinda meh.

“I’ll take a CEO’s very calculated word for something if it supports my existing worldview” is intellectually dishonest.

Whether or not the CEOs' statements are true, they affect public opinion.

You have CEOs claiming that AI is driving layoffs alongside CEOs of Anthropic and OpenAI talking about the end of white collar work. All this is then amplified by tech journalists like Casey Newton and Kevin Roose. The biggest public proponents of AI keep telling people that it will take their jobs.

What comes after the end of jobs? Who knows. Sam Altman occasionlly making vague statements about curing cancer. There are vague hand-waving notions of a Star Trek utopia.

But to be honest it feels more like a Cyberpunk future, where the Altmans and Musks get to live cancer-free and the rest of us eek out an existence without jobs or any prospect for a better life. Or maybe it looks more like Star Trek, but we're all red shirts.

Can you blame people for hating this?

Anything Musk or Altman say is just about raising money. Nothing they say can be taken at face value. There’s a funny interview with Mark Anderseen, where he talks about how he never looks backwards and doesn’t have any sense of introspection and then gets into a rambling and completely wrong history lesson. That’s what these guys do.

The better question to ask is what happens after the end of OpenAI/Tesla/etc? AI may take your job away, but not because of robots replicating your labor, just good old-fashioned economic collapse.

Blame then then. Simple as that. Lying to "just raise money" is one of the most harmful ways of lying. It distorts the whole economy.

> There’s a funny interview with Mark Anderseen, where he talks about how he never looks backwards and doesn’t have any sense of introspection and then gets into a rambling and completely wrong history lesson. That’s what these guys do.

Yes, we know they are psychopaths and assholes. The blame is on them.

>According to FRED/Indeed[1], software job openings have been roughly flat for 2-3 years, and they've actually been slightly increasing again.

None of this contradicts OP's claim, because at least anecdotally, juniors/interns are getting disproportionately squeezed by AI. Why hire an intern to write random scripts/tests for you, when claude code does the same thing? Therefore overall job posting could be flat or slightly rising, but that's only because everyone is rushing to hire senior/principals staff to wrangle all the AI agents, offsetting the junior losses.

I thought the main value of juniors was that you grow them into seniors, not really the random scripts they write?

That is the value of other companies doing that and you going to poach those new seniors. With the money you saved not training those juniors you can offer better salaries and still have higher profits.

Their main value is in being cheap before they realize that they're underpaid and hop jobs.

They tend to catch on quicker these days, making companies more reluctant to hire them. It has little to do with AI.

I want to agree with you but when was this ever true?

It was true when I started to work in this industry ~8 years ago. But of course YMMV especially depending on country and company

We haven't hired for about 6 months, but the value of a junior is that they eventually become not junior, and if you value them, you pay them what they're worth and they stay.

My guess is that AI can now assist juniors just as it can assist seniors, and they'll become competent in the correct skillset needed for the future, just as everyone before them has.

They are increasing, but the level is still lower than it's been since Oct 2020. In my experience at two different companies since 2020, hiring more or less stopped sometime in 2022 to early 2023. In early 2025, some hiring started again but it's still a very low rate compared to pre-COVID, particularly for new college grads. While I don't believe that AI has actually taken any significant number of jobs in the software field, I do think it's being used as a convenient excuse by executives to lay people off. Regardless of the actual numbers though, the general perception in tech is "lots of layoffs are happening with not so much hiring" and "AI has something to do with it (either directly or as an excuse)."

"Opening" doesn't mean anything. An actual job where someone is working and is being paid a salary means something.

Separately, I'm curious how that URL (IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE) is encoded.

IHL (Indeed Hiring Lab) + IDX (Index) + US (country) + TP (topic) + SOFTDEVE (software development)

Software job openings are mostly bullshit. Companies post ghost jobs en masse, while refusing to hire people. You can ask anyone that's had to look for a job recently and see how bad the market is.

Is that data useful at all? Indeed postings are a poor proxy for how many people actually get hired. One of the major problems we have is that employment statistics are largely just estimates, and don’t reflect reality on the ground. Factor in the Trump admin firing most of the BLS and other agencies for not giving him the numbers he wants, and there really is no reliable data.