I’m not in that sector, but I hear a lot of people complaining that they can’t get IT jobs anymore.
That makes complete sense to me – they either get outsourced cheaply to India or Eastern Europe or they get decimated by AI.
A very basic personal anecdote – a graphic designer here in the US asked me for $300 and 2 days to design a company logo. I found a young woman from Bangladesh on Fiverr who did it for $25 in 30min after multiple adjustments. The US-based designer can’t compete with that in mid to long term.
Now I got offered a $100 promotional / AI generated video for my trucking company and I got blown away by the samples! They are super realistic, they can recreate foreign accents, landmarks, landscapes, facial expressions,they can imitate areal footage from a drone… it’s top quality stuff, far more than I need! And that’s a super basic example.
Now, I understand some of you IT people will say “That’s not true, Imake $500k/year scratching my balls”. But there are millions of you in the US alone and a very small fraction do very well. Not even 5 years ago everybody parroted “learn to code”. Today I see former IT sector professionals drive uber and work retail.
What’s your opinion, experience or observation?
Comments
Since you shitlords like to delete your posts, here’s an original copy of /u/VladTheBanned’s post (if available):
I’m not in that sector, but I hear a lot of people complaining that they can’t get IT jobs anymore.
That makes complete sense to me – they either get outsourced cheaply to India or Eastern Europe or they get decimated by AI.
A very basic personal anecdote – a graphic designer here in the US asked me for $300 and 2 days to design a company logo. I found a young woman from Bangladesh on Fiverr who did it for $25 in 30min after multiple adjustments. The US-based designer can’t compete with that in mid to long term.
Now I got offered a $100 promotional / AI generated video for my trucking company and I got blown away by the samples! They are super realistic, they can recreate foreign accents, landmarks, landscapes, facial expressions,they can imitate areal footage from a drone… it’s top quality stuff, far more than I need! And that’s a super basic example.
Now, I understand some of you IT people will say “That’s not true, Imake $500k/year scratching my balls”. But there are millions of youin the US alone and a very small fraction do very well. Not even 5 years ago everybody parroted “learn to code”. Today former IT sector professionals druve uber and work retail.
What’s your opinion, experience or observation?
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
Bloodbath.
The Fiverr designer most likely gave you generic clip art/stick design that’s not custom in any way except your company name on it. Ea does given to dozens of other gigs. Expect no revisions, or custom design attention. Fine if your small time and local and your brand doesn’t matter. not a great idea for a company they does real business.
It’s fast food vs fine dining situation.
IT jobs aren’t tech industry jobs. IT is an internal business support role and those non revenue adjacent jobs tend to get cut first.
Tech industry jobs like software engineers/sales/marketing focus on consumer facing products.
It’s not that bad. FAANG companies over hired during covid. There are plenty of regular ol software jobs out there.
Did the invention of the calculator make mathematicians go extinct?
An IT professional isn’t the same as a coder btw. IT is generally on the expense side of the business whereas for a tech company a coder is often as not involved with producing product. There is outsourcing going on with coders but having them in the same time zone or same office has a lot of advantages. I won’t be expanding my US teams because I’ll always want some close enough for a lot of the iteratives stuff but overseas is way cheaper and there’s some good people out there.
With the top guys here, they make a lot more and generally are worth it in productivity and sheer inventiveness. When you get to the lower tier ~ 25% then they’re going to be at a disadvantage because a lot of the overseas coders are very good. Top half here don’t have much to worry about.
That’s going to be same as any business that can be done remotely. If you can work from home you’re a lot easier to replace with someone else.
It’s bad, but I see a lot of blue collar guys doing victory laps like they won something because the pencil-necks got knocked down a peg.
Nothing’s gonna get better for those dudes. The last remaining nerds with AI assistants will find ways to work them harder and pay them less than they ever thought possible.
Amazon Home Services: All your home maintenance needs in one easy monthly subscription.
It’s got a nice ring to it.
Combination of events, job markets in general always do the same thing, nobody in the field, so those in the field are in high demand so they get paid more, everyone sees that, and everyone gets on the train to go into that field, and then there’s suddenly too many people in the field.
Another thing that is relatively new to jobs is the ability to work remotely. It not only expands the range that a job could hire from but makes it less of a commitment. 10 years ago if you lived in New York and wanted a tech job in California, you’re moving to California, not everyone wanted to do that, but now you don’t even have to move.
With those two factors, it’s not that there are fewer tech jobs, just more competition from a wider range.
Most importantly the company heads are making the grave mistake of thinking they can replace their IT department with AI. They might be able to cut some manning or work time in certain areas with AI, but not fully replace it.
If you have experience, it’s pretty great.
If you’re entry level, forget it.
The bottom of the market falls out first, top is fine. People have been having the same conversation about graphic designers for 2 decades. You’re buying services at the bottom of the market, so that’s what you notice.
There’s still just as much of a market for guys charging 10k+ for a logo, because those logos come with trade marks, proper consultation and entire brand strategy. Last website I sold was $20k. It’s about risk, trust and availability.
Same with IT. I’m not outsourcing the server infrastructure for my app to India – if they fuck up it’s a serious issue. But you might outsource some of the lower level and lower risk services.
I work in a tangential field (hardware integration).
At the moment AI hype is overblown and distracting from the real issue (higher interest rates, geopolitical uncertainty, changes in an esoteric tax law, market saturation, etc…)
Much of what’s going on in tech is normal industry maturation behavior occurring at the speed of tech. Most growth industries eventually get to a point where maximizing short term profitability becomes more feasible than long-term sustained growth. They cut speculative projects and focus on core profitability. A lot of the big tech companies were green lighting a lot of projects which they’ve clawed back funding from.
At the moment AI is certainly being used experimentally in a lot of applications, but it hasn’t really begun to broadly eat into the jobs market. It’s mostly still a tool to increase the productivity of productive people.
People certainly use it, but AI + experienced professional is still noticeably better in most fields at most tasks.
The bad news for the near future is that AI will likely increase the skill divide between midcareer professionals and entry level professionals.
Now if we get some sort of AGI singularity where the machines are simply better than people, a lot of people are going to lose jobs.
There was massive over hiring. Then there were cuts to correct that. Then there were cuts to help profit margins because I think companies expected a recession.
It’s not good but if you are skilled you will land on your feet. There are way too many low skilled coders and tech workers in general that should not be doing this for a living.
This happens in all industries. It’s time it happens to tech
Show us the logo..
It’s relatively less in demand but it is still better than other industries. It was too hot, especially during the pandemic, and now it’s just cooling off. It’s nowhere near the “former IT sector professionals drive uber and work retail” that you claim, that’s bullshit.
Alot of my tech friends are unemployed. Several friends laid off from Intel and can’t get a job for over a year. Others potentially could be laid off in July. It’s bad.
It was a bubble, the bubble burst
Has been a bubble that has needed to pop for awhile, we all know it.. everyone wants the cush jobs and thats not what makes the word go around (yes they are needed but not everyone can have the same job lol)
I’m an outsider looking in, motivation comes from me being an investor and (hobby) economic analyst. Seems to me that on one hand a lot of the tech hype is bound to disappear, which we are currently seeing. The other thing which I think will have a bigger impact is that there is a rotation out of high risk, highly leveraged businesses (and high tech like AI is maximum leverage – leveraging finance, commodities and knowledge to advance on something without certainty what can be achieved when) back to underinvested fundamental businesses. There have been VERY few investments in base metals and energy security in the past 40 years, thats where all the buzz from “drill baby drill” and the uranium came from… but in many critical minerals the “West” has basically zero production, while getting a permission for and opening a mine has become an endeavor of almost 15 years on average now. The sectors, neglected but essential, have yet to account for the trillions upon trillion that have been conjured up and are – from the point of the cycles theory – insanely undervalued.
So unless tech can jump on that wave, I wouldn’t be surprised to see more jobs being cut and business focussing elsewhere until the recent successes of tech have been consolidate… and that process can easily take 5+ years.
It’s hard to say, I give vibe coding tools to a thousand developers and only have 80% adoption. And there’s still a mile wide gulf between top performers and medium. The best will always manage, I fear for everyone else. I tell leadership that if company A has 10 devs using these tools and company B has 20, they are still going twice as fast. AI replaces people
Not using AI at scale from what I can see so far