Unemployment is spiking for US IT pros - unless you want to babysit bots The IT job market in the US is being hit from two sides at once: Companies are grappling with fears of a recession stemming from the Trump administration's erratic tariff policy, while AI is increasingly mopping up entry-level jobs. The latest look at Bureau of Labor Statistics data by IT management consulting firm Janco found …
You will find something eventually. Keep the faith despite it sagging at times.
I was egregiously made redundant in Sept after 18 years - job offshored to Bangalore - despite 100% utilisation, high chargability, great customer feedback and good performance metrics. Took until Feb.
AI efficiency gained elsewhere and hundreds of thousands of others turfed out of the door too.
If it’s the cesspit that is LinkedIn ….AI rejecting you from jobs that don’t exist - often just harvesting resume contact details to seek you out on for ‘training/recertification opportunities - 40% off’ or basic fraud.
The IT job market isn’t collapsing - it’s being ritually harvested.
For years, companies sold the dream: tech was the future, code was the new literacy, and IT was the engine of innovation. What they didn’t mention was that the real job description was glorified babysitting.
You babysit the flaky infrastructure nobody budgeted to maintain. You babysit the CI/CD pipeline that breaks every other Tuesday because someone pushed a “quick fix.” You babysit project managers who’ve never seen a shell prompt but confidently assign you 3 sprints of work in one. You babysit product owners who change requirements mid-demo, and junior devs who commit .env files to GitHub. You babysit the printers, the coffee machine, the Slack channel, the passive-aggressive Notion board, and every piece of tech duct-taped into this Kafkaesque tower of false productivity.
And now, the corporations - bloated with buzzwords and allergic to wages - are replacing even that with AI “agents.” Not because they work better. Not because they’re safe. But because they don’t ask for a salary. Or parental leave. Or respect.
The irony? These agents won’t eliminate busywork. They’ll generate more of it - endless synthetic noise, half-broken automations, phantom tickets and hallucinated reports that still need a human to untangle them. But that’s fine, because the only thing cheaper than AI is the contractor you’ll offshore (and then onshore to keep an eye on them! - they also make a nice commercial property filler to keep the value of assets inflated) to fix the mess it made.
What’s left of IT isn’t a profession anymore. It’s a containment zone - a slow, quiet collapse buried under motivational posters, dead Jira tickets, and a CEO’s LinkedIn post about “embracing disruption” while laying off the last person who understood cron jobs.
These agents won’t eliminate busywork. They’ll generate more of it - endless synthetic noise, half-broken automations, phantom tickets and hallucinated reports
Sounds like how network monitoring was sold starting the late 90s. Free your staff to work on proactive projects, because they won't need to babysit systems any longer. The network monitoring tools would do that and generate a ticket telling you exactly what's wrong and where so it can be corrected without having to waste time looking for the source of the problem. Would have been fabulous if true.
I never once saw an organization that worked like that. Instead the IT staff was overwhelmed with junk tickets they spent most of their time in service desk tools instead of doing real work. I actually had a nine month consulting gig once at a big three automaker where my only task was to try to reduce the flood of tickets overwhelming the helpdesk and second level IT staff. I'd never done something remotely like that but like all my gigs it was via someone I knew from previous work and she was able to get me a rate I couldn't pass up. I just sorted tickets to find the biggest "problems" and attacked the top 20, finding root causes of things that had been popping tickets for years that no one bothered to dig deep enough to properly fix (probably because they were evaluated on metrics like ticket closures, which I advised the PHBs to stop doing) or just disabling the monitors in the case of those that were truly noise without meaning.
The total number of tickets went down by 90%, and I trained a couple of people on what I'd done at the end so they could keep attacking the new top 20. But in that last week I also caught wind that they were replacing their old monitoring solution with a new one next year. I always wondered whether a bunch of new tickets started flooding to them via misconfiguration or noise, and if they ended up back where they were when I started.
“…babysit project managers who’ve never seen a shell prompt but confidently assign you 3 sprints of work in one” - true dat.
Sadly, the herd-following ‘decision makers’ and PMs constitute the ~90% or so of the IT staff budget that is spent on non-technical meta workers who deliver very little of value.
Surprisingly, they never show themselves the door.
It’s been a long time since skilled IT folk have been able to recommend a tech career to noobs.
Not a surprise, I'm afraid, as the sole selling point for the LLM-based AI products is to put people out of work. The AI companies spend millions on marketing and sales to convince senior management that they must use these products to slash their staffing in order to keep up with their competitors (i.e. FOMO).
The pushing of AI is becoming hysterical as the AI companies themselves see financial disaster approaching - they desparately need large customers locked into their products so they can increase prices to a point where they actually make money on each interaction, something which none of them have achieved yet. Its not clear what multiple of the current "highest quality" charges will finally produce a return for the AI investors, I've seen estimates of 5x to 10x.
At my place we've burnt a lot of dollar on "AI" and the results are garbage.
Thats probably because most of what they've tried to do wasn't ever remotely possible. Lots of management just saying "AI can do that" without understanding what AI actually is.
The best things they've come up with are some SAAS apps that now have natural language query creation built into them. Its quite good if you have never used that product before, probably less so if you have spent a couple of hours with it previously. Its hardly high gearing.
Oh and we've also got various code creating tools that people who aren't programmers have used to produce code that requires experts to debug it and make it work. Yeah that's my fave so far....
I'm sure all of this will work itself out in the end, but probably not the way things are positioned right now.
So some idiots use AI to generate faulty code. Real software engineers then proceed to fix the cr4p for a nice hourly rate.
You can fix it by deleting all the AI cr4pcode and rebuild it on your own. Use the AI as a search engine. Just dont tell the business muppets what you did. Claim that you "polished the AI code".
Be a smooth operator and never believe the lies pumped through the media.
Never take the MSM and WallStr lies at face value.
A human brain has about 80 000 000 000 neurons, and each of them has about 10 000 connections to other neurons. It takes easily 25 years to nurture, train,educate such a brain from baby to junior software engineer. It takes at least 10 more years to senior engineer. The human brain can do fantastic things, if/when it is nicely treated. When there is true love for the brain and its body.
Compare that to the AI GPU brains with something like 100 000 to 1 000 000 neurons. They are worm-level intelligences. They can do funny stuff that impresses MBA idiots, salesguys and other non-engineers. They fail in spectacular fashion as soon as a hard problem is presented.
So - this is a Money Market Insanity, just like Tulips, square bullets for barbarians, Internet businesses and mRNA vaccines. It will soon be replaced by Covid 2.0 or similar. The money for that has already been created out of nothing, called "BBB".
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