Firstly, there's the massive confounding factor of Covid, the stock market went crazy, companies went on crazy hiring sprees etc. and the tail of that bullwhip effect is clearly still putting downward pressure on hiring from organisations that overhired.

But secondly, are we seriously saying that in the last 2 years, relatively slow moving companies adopted AI LLMs to help coders, integrated them into our work flows, and saw the results of those productivity gains in business outcomes?

I think it's unlikely. I think it's much more likely that CEOs love to watch where the crowd is going and then run to the front and shout "follow me". You don't actually need to have productivity gains for shareholders to reward you for saying how this is going to boost your margins and cut your costs. And this is even more true for companies like Salesforce for whom "AI" is a product they're selling. Marc Benioff isn't actually doing "AI is great I'll fire all my engineers", he's saying "AI is great, come buy Salesforce's AI products!". As for Microsoft, they employee almost a quarter of a million people, laying off 6,000 is a drop in the ocean, that scale of layoffs happen frequently at companies the size of Microsoft.

It's very much more just vibes than real data driving this. "<CEO who sells product> says product will cure cancer".

The underlying truth is that the competitive environment hasn't changed, if you can hire fewer engineers to do the same job, great, but your competitors are going to hire more engineers and out-compete you.

the top of the pay scale were elite ai labs such as Openai, as well as hedge funds such as Jane Street that are also betting heavily on machine learning. In this tier, median pay exceeded $400,000 a year. Below that were tech giants including Alphabet, Microsoft and, until recently, Meta, where median pay was closer to $300,000. Experienced developers at most other companies earn much less. Their median was around $180,000 (see chart 2).

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A median of 180K is mostly definitely raking it in compared to the median of all US employees.

I’m well over double the household median income in my metro area and while I don’t feel like I’m raking it in, I guess I am when compared to others.

This just seems like a silly article.