IT job market is still shrinking but not as quickly as last year

The IT jobs market has shrunk for a second year in a row, says tech consultancy Janco Associates, but at least things weren't as bad in 2024 as they were in 2023. Nearly 71,000 IT-specific roles have been eliminated in the past two years, Janco said in a report released Friday, as a downward trend continues in the industry. …

[Paul Crawford]

"No longer are IT organizations populated with secretaries, data-entry operators, administrative monitoring clerks, and a massive help desk staff," Janulaitis added

The enshitification continues. Every AI 'help' bot I have interacted with has done bugger-all to help and simply wasted my time unitl a human dealt with it.

[The Man Who Fell To Earth]

It looks like you are trying to jump off a bridge.

Do need help with that?

[Nifty]

"Every AI 'help' bot I have interacted with has done bugger-all".

I was having a conversation with the helpbot for my Windscribe VPN. Wasn't expecting much, however as I fed it context and the error message it got more precise and spot-on, replying within 250ms. So there are some companies with a clue. Ironically I work in a helpdesk role too and am waiting with curiosity to see AI streamline my role. I know with certainty that if a basic support role like mine could be streamlined, there's higher value work I would be doing.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. I expect it's not that "AI" (so to speak) can't be a valuable tool, rather it's that management types, beancounters, and HR view it as a headcount replacement, rather than staff enablement/augmentation.

The ultimate goal of folks like that is pretty much always replacing pesky humans who need to eat, sleep, take breaks, and (horrors!) expect to get paid for their efforts.

And if the end result is a worse product, crappier service, etc. that's viewed as an acceptable tradeoff.

Never underestimate the ability of management types to take a good (or mediocre or even bad) idea and use it to make almost any situation worse.

[chuckamok]

For tech research - if you have learned how to pose good google search phrases to find technotes and forum posts that provide help for error messages, then you can usually get copilot or similar AI help apps to return helpful results for technical issues - I 've found it is good for that. Like an improved search with no ads, but with some hallucinations. Also good for bringing back nicely formatted survey reports or plans that can be cleaned up and used as a draft.

[Anonymous Coward]

Its not just low end jobs. A lot of companies are cancelling graduate jobs. My daughter is due to graduate with a first in Computer Science with AI from a top tier uni and finding it very difficult to get a job. She did a years work placement with an enterprise company last year with a view to returning to a job. The company has cancelled their grad program but have offered a glowing reference which hasn't helped much. Over 50 applications made so far and just nothing new appearing at the moment, so many responses saying in the current climate that recruitment has been frozen.

[J.G.Harston]

50 applications? Slacker! I've had to apply for over 3000 jobs in 15 years to get a smidgen over 90 months employment - and not even in work I have the skills, experience and apititude for, but "labouring" jobs. Your daughter's 40 grand of debt will get her minimum-wage work resetting passwords and changing toner cartridges.

[OldGeezer]

Wasted aspirations

Pity you spent so much time/effort/money on a dead end. I have been telling anyone who would listen since approx Y2K "Why would you start a career in an industry that is doing everything it possibly can to outsource and/or eliminate you?"

Fortunately I got out and no longer care.

[Anonymous Coward]

no such thing as a top tier "uni"

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at syllabus, job rate and salary. There are differences. While hopefully most employers ignore the university, from my experience in recruiting grads I can see trends in technical tests and assessments centres. She did well enough to get 6 placement offers.

[ComicalEngineer]

IMHO, the AI bubble will burst at some point once organisations realise that it's little more than a waste of computer power.

BTW, my experience of AI chatbots is also that they are nothing more than something designed to get in the way of speaking to one of the few humans in an organisation who can actually solve the issue.

E.ON, are you listening?

[cschneid]

"Help" AI chatbots are the new phone menu.

[cookiecutter]

And yet.....

Apparently they're a shortage of it skills and companies have to be allowed to offshore & bring in 100,000s of cheap staff.

The government should put a 500-1000% tax on any job offshored & charge companies like wipro, tata, Infosys et al, £100k/ year for every visa given out

[IGotOut]

Don't worry....

...as all the commentards on here repeatedly bang out in support of AI, when it comes to replacing warehouse, call centre, admin, and other "meanial" jobs, all those can just simply retrain in IT

Oh wait.

Yeah, best become a hairdresser.

(Don't become a barista, as my home coffee machine does a better job than 90% of them)

[J.G.Harston]

Re: Don't worry....

My local hairdresser has just let "the girl" go, as she complained that turning up for work was interfering with her social life.

[spacecadet66]

Re: Don't worry....

> she complained that turning up for work was interfering with her social life.

I mean, that's probably accurate.

[Nifty]

Re: Don't worry....

"she complained that turning up for work was interfering with her social life"

Ah yes, work is the curse of the social media classes.

[Korev]

Re: Don't worry....

Don't forget to hit like and subscribe...

[David Hicklin]

Re: Don't worry....

Or whatever the current flavour of shop is at the time

We had a glut of coffee shops...mostly all gone now, then cake (??) shops (again gone) and currently awash with barber shops.

About the only outlet that does survive are the charity shops...even WH Smith is closing on our high street and former shops are being turned into flats luxury apartments

[naive]

There is great potential

Replacing all humans in the value add chain Amazon/Ali-express/Banggood --> Customer --> Trash --> Recycling --> Products --> Amazon/Ali-express/Banggood is a great idea.

Jeff Bezos, or any other billionaire engaged in this, should be lobbying to replace humans with robots, since it presents a great business potential. Taxing children seems like a good start here.

It can easily be proven that AI driven robots make better choices, there will be less product returns, resulting in a greener supply chain.

Companies producing AI driven robots could also lobby with democrat politicians to give robots voting rights, if one can buy, one has the right to vote. Democrats would argue denying voting rights to robots would be discrimination, since robot would just be another gender in their dictionary.

The future is awesome.

[Mike007]

I am a developer with explicit instructions to try and find ways to integrate AI in to our software.

The only thing I have integrated which looks like it might actually work without much effort is a project I am currently working on. I have added an LLM to generate a summary of the notes that have been attached to a task. The magic prompt to get this to work properly seemed to be "do not just output a list of the notes, write an actual paragraph". The need for this kind of instruction, along with it's inability to comprehend "do not make shit up" are the problem.

I have tried adding chatbots to other applications and I had to add specific "tools" (functions that it can call) to answer questions like "how many widgets did we produce today?". Which wouldn't be a problem if it would 1. Use the tool every time it is asked. 2. Use the tool correctly (I said yesterday, the prompt includes the current date... why did you pass a random date in march to the tool?). And of course 3. Not just make up random numbers and pretend it got it from the database!

These issues can be solved, however our clients don't want to pay for a development team that is bigger than the one that created the actual software in the first place just to add a chatbot that that has no more information than what the system already shows them in pretty graphs etc.

[Anonymous Coward]

As a developer I would have thought that you would have integrated AI into your development process.

[Anonymous Coward]

As a developer...

Integrating an autocomplete that writes worse code than me is not an improvement to my workflow, funnily enough.

[Mike007]

Re: As a developer...

That!

The only thing an LLM can do code wise is spit out example code of the sort you might find in a stack overflow answer, but customised to your scenario. *Most* of the time they can manage to produce 2-3 lines of working code using libraries that actually exist.

I have tried chat style extensions where the LLM has direct access to edit and rewrite the code. This results in previously working code being replaced with crap. Or you ask it to edit a function and it deletes an unrelated function from the file while it is at it, because you didn't say anything about wanting to keep the other functions!

I have also tried the ones that offer auto complete suggestions. These are quite frankly less useful than the built in "complete the variable name" that it replaces.

I should add that I do occasionally use LLMs to generate text. For example when we were coming up with our company wide Christmas out of office I suggested ChatGPT and it came up with something better than any of us humans. "Write a generic blob of text" and "summarise this document" are things they can do reasonably well. I may or may not know of a company whose AI policy was written by ChatGPT...

[Lusty]

Re: As a developer...

“The only thing an LLM can do code wise is spit out example code of the sort you might find in a stack overflow answer”

So either you’ve not tried GitHub copilot or you’re not asking it for the right help. Try asking it to write your unit tests for you, you’ll be surprised how useful it then seems.

[Mike007]

Re: As a developer...

Auto-generated unit tests aren't exactly helping me write code... Or ensure that anything is actually being tested!

The fundamental problem is that they don't understand what the code is doing or how it works.

Our code is clear and easy to follow and understand for someone who has seen the application in use. We have a non-developer employee who is at the "learning to program" stage and he has no difficulty understanding the codebases for projects initiated since our current conventions were put in place.

Does the LLM need me to add a readme file explaining that that the frontend communicates with the backend by calling the API() function located in API.js? And that the first parameter is a string in the format "A/B/C" which translates to the C() function in the B class located in the file API/A/B.ts file in the backend?

I just pulled up a project with such an example and asked GitHub copilot which function on the server executes when the project details page initialises. I gave It a clue by having the correct frontend page open when I asked. It helpfully told me that it calls "the Init function in the ProjectsPage API endpoint" and gave me a clickable link to the Init function in the frontend file. Which contains one line of code:

this.setState({Data: await API("Projects/Get", this.props.id)})

When you realise that it doesn't understand this, how can you expect it to be able to write code involving the frontend talking to the backed?

[Mike007]

Re: As a developer...

I mean I could be holding it wrong, however I suspect it is more a case that most of the stuff it is actually able to do is so basic that I can write working code quicker than I can explain it to an LLM and then fix its output.

[Lusty]

Re: As a developer...

Sorry but it’s obvious you’ve not used the product, go and try it before commenting.

The absolutely do understand what the code is trying to do and anyone who has used it knows that.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: As a developer...

Are you paid to be this stupid, or does it come naturally?

[spacecadet66]

As a developer I know a lot of developers, including myself, who would prefer not to have a jumped-up autocorrect foisted onto them.

[herman]

Less Windows support needed

As the use of MS Windows declines, support personnel demands also decline. Windows need many times more support staff than any other OS and this has been known for decades.

[Lusty]

Re: Less Windows support needed

Really? Most folk struggle with taking a screenshot on Mac so I don’t think that’s true at all. If Apple ever work out what the GUI is for they might get parity with Windows, but from what I can see they’re still a graphical keyboard driven OS. For the average user Linux is and always will be problematic.

[Timto]

Where?

Is this article about USA or UK or the whole world?

[Anonymous Coward]

Cyber Security

Get a job in cyber you say?

Cool if you like being expected to run the firewalls (every variety), run pentesting manually, design networks, audit software, audit the developers, keep up with policy requiremements, any certifiation audit activities, keep up with legal and regulatory changes, incident managment (always Friday afternoon), HR investigations, reporting to board, report to team leads, ensure no down time, negotiatate patching, explain why the CEO really does need to do phishing training, explain why the CEO shouldn't use his personal Yahoo for critical data, explain why the CEO's kids shouldn't download games on his laptop, clean the pr0n off the CEO's laptop, write the phishing training, assess your suppliers, and do it all on a budget of $0, with no team, and you have to keep the certs HR demanded by doing CPE but you're not allowed to attend events that count (no travel budget, no time). And I guess you'd better be an expert in all forms of AI and ML now.

Still the money is usually not bad until you have your breakdown.

[Excelziore]

The jobs are gone yes, but the tasks still need to be done...

"No longer are IT organizations populated with secretaries, data-entry operators, administrative monitoring clerks, and a massive help desk staff..."

Well, I would say that "on-the-ground" these same tasks have now been transferred to more "qualified" and more expense roles, that are expected to do both their own job and the job of the roles that no longer exist...and then additionally manage "AI" tools that may add even more extra work...

[Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck]

I wouldn't want to work for any company stupid enough to think that an LLM can replace a competent programmer; retirement is much more appealing.