AI Job Losses: let's count the losses up, total losses to AI so far 94,000 and counting

[Space Lynx]

Glassdoor and Indeed lay off 1,300 workers due to AI

Recruit Holdings, the Japanese parent company of job search and employee review giants Indeed and Glassdoor, is cutting around 6% of its HR Technology segment workforce.

www.techspot.com

1300 here as of a new new article posted today.


One analysis suggests that around 94,000 tech jobs have been lost to AI in the first half of 2025—about 507 per day—across Microsoft, Tesla, IBM, Meta, and others
Sauce

Let's then take the techspot article I linked at the top, it mentions that Microsoft has plans to double its coding from 30% of its code to 60% to be done by AI, and all the other big players in the game are doing the same, already using a higher percentage than Microsoft is.

Moral question of the day: is it still appropriate to tell people its a great idea to major in computer science? This number is not going to stop increasing, it's only getting started. I think if one were smart they would major in the in-demand physical trades, or major in robotics/engineering, or anything in the medical fields. Accounting majors? AI is coming for those in mass too eventually. Sure, companies will still have IRL accountants, it just will be a much smaller percentage needed. Downsizing/Streamlining is the new name of the game. Thoughts? Where do we go from here?

edit: keep in mind the 94,000 is not including 2024 numbers.

 

[JustBenching]

This is good, it will likely accelerate as AI gets expotentially better.

 

[evernessince]

It's going to be hard to accurately measure because a lot of these companies have also not hired people as a result of AI as well.

In regards to coding, I can see more big players doing that. The problem with AI coding right now though is the lack of consistency and hallucinations. It makes the writing much easier but the debugging much worse and honestly that's the unpleasant and difficult part. Sometimes it's something simple like the AI using methods or objects that don't exist in a given language or version of the language and others it's a one character issue that doesn't produce an obvious error.

 

[Onasi]

This is good, it will likely accelerate as AI gets expotentially better.

It would be fine theoretically if there would be some sort of new fields where human workers are irreplaceable and that can be transitioned to easily or, barring that, if most countries suddenly decided to adopt some sort of UBI. If that won’t happen, in the long run the economy will just break - it doesn’t matter how much more profitable and efficient AI is if nobody (figuratively) can actually afford anything.

 

[evernessince]

It would be fine theoretically if there would be some sort of new fields where human workers are irreplaceable and that can be transitioned to easily or, barring that, if most countries suddenly decided to adopt some sort of UBI. If that won’t happen, in the long run the economy will just break - it doesn’t matter how much more profitable and efficient AI is if nobody (figuratively) can actually afford anything.

I'm not sure the elites really care if the economy breaks, that just means they scoop up assets at a bargain. If AI replaces the common man and women in the workplace to a significant degree, that unshackles the wealthy even more from the consequences of their actions. Withholding labor was one of the few tools regular people had to demand decent wages. Lacking that, there is certainly a potential for a very dark future (which is really saying something given the state of things).

 

[Onasi]

@evernessince
It wouldn’t work out for them though, would it? No matter how much economic assets you control, if the masses will be displeased en masse (hurr), and I really mean EN MASSE, then what exactly will protect them from millions of people with nothing to lose storming their fancy AI factories and throwing them from the roof? Not to mention that said elites kind of rely on economy working at least somewhat to BE elites - money and assets lose all meaning if the society breaks down completely. This isn’t me being optimistic, just noting that there still would be interest in maintaining at least something resembling the status quo.

 

[Visible Noise]

Think about the millions the PC put out of work.

Think about the tens of millions the industrial revolution put out of work.

It’ll be okay.

 

[Audioave10]

I always thought AI looked like this... ( I was very wrong )

 

[leeamtheone]

@evernessince
It wouldn’t work out for them though, would it? No matter how much economic assets you control, if the masses will be displeased en masse (hurr), and I really mean EN MASSE, then what exactly will protect them from millions of people with nothing to lose storming their fancy AI factories and throwing them from the roof? Not to mention that said elites kind of rely on economy working at least somewhat to BE elites - money and assets lose all meaning if the society breaks down completely. This isn’t me being optimistic, just noting that there still would be interest in maintaining at least something resembling the status quo.

I'm leaning toward this perspective, also not driven by optimism (as I hardly ever am). It's just difficult not to think that it will resemble the status quo less and less down the road.

 

[Vayra86]

@evernessince
It wouldn’t work out for them though, would it? No matter how much economic assets you control, if the masses will be displeased en masse (hurr), and I really mean EN MASSE, then what exactly will protect them from millions of people with nothing to lose storming their fancy AI factories and throwing them from the roof? Not to mention that said elites kind of rely on economy working at least somewhat to BE elites - money and assets lose all meaning if the society breaks down completely. This isn’t me being optimistic, just noting that there still would be interest in maintaining at least something resembling the status quo.

Exactly this.

I do hope we dont need to go there though. Anarchy and lawlessness is going to damage a lot of things.

Think about the millions the PC put out of work.

Think about the tens of millions the industrial revolution put out of work.

It’ll be okay.

We always find new things to do indeed

 

[Hyderz]

I feel sorry for people who majored computer science, they spent along time learning and mastering certain language in their field and in the short few years it’s tumbling down, majority of them are in the late 30s and early and mid 50s are forced to do other things.

The world needs to come together and make a unanimous vote whether ai is indeed the path that is in the bests of interest for humanity.. not the major companies making the decisions they want.

A person in life needs to have a purpose…

 

[de.das.dude]

the joke going around is, you can ask AI to build and code a project for you, but you cant have AI maintain it, or fix it when it inevitably fucks up. Not right now atleast.

 

[remekra]

Well if you are only good at writing code so you're a coder, not a developer then AI can replace that pretty easily even now. But real development work is not so easy to replace with AI. Not to mention all the Ops teams around that. But yeah if you can only write some code and do not understand anything else then I would worry.
As for the future, future who knows what will happen, is it going to go more and more into AGI, or we will hit a wall where AI simply does not improve anymore in it's current form. Nobody knows for sure.

 

[de.das.dude]

Well if you are only good at writing code so you're a coder, not a developer then AI can replace that pretty easily even now. But real development work is not so easy to replace with AI.

yeah its hard to explain to management or other people that designing is like 80% of the work. What interns and low level do is just get instructions to write code, which is exactly what AI can do right now.

 

[Vayra86]

yeah its hard to explain to management or other people that designing is like 80% of the work. What interns and low level do is just get instructions to write code, which is exactly what AI can do right now.

Oh yeah so hard.. experiencing this as we speak. Project in question has been laying in its ass because mgmt keeps pushing for actual results but they skipped architecture entirely. Its like wtf dudes. Dont build a house without a foundation k?

 

[mechtech]

I'm not sure the elites really care if the economy breaks, that just means they scoop up assets at a bargain. If AI replaces the common man and women in the workplace to a significant degree, that unshackles the wealthy even more from the consequences of their actions. Withholding labor was one of the few tools regular people had to demand decent wages. Lacking that, there is certainly a potential for a very dark future (which is really saying something given the state of things).

Until civil war erupts.

Lather rinse repeat.

 

[Splinterdog]

Unfortunately, it's all about the bottom line in the end and keeping the shareholders happy with their dividends. Sad but true.
On the other hand, AI, in my very humble opinion as a published author, will never truly replace skilled authors in literature because it has no heart or soul. It's not sentient, as far as I know.
Examples of this: doing a search on Amazon for Itchy Boots/Noraly Schoenmaker, the round the world motorcyclist will come up with half a dozen 'books' purporting to be written by her, but a closer examination reveals that all of them were written by robots with practically the same structure. Just cold narrative, nothing else.

 

[Veseleil]

If you can be replaced by an AI, you need to seriously question your career choices.

 

[mb194dc]

Indeed are laying off people because almost no one's hiring. Why, mainly because housing is so expensive, most people have little money for other stuff. That simple.

They put "Ai" because, buzzword, sounds better than the economy is stuffed.

 

[lilhasselhoffer]

So...MS is profitable. Wildly profitable according to their reports. Like a profit margin better than 30%. This means that the cost savings are being reaped...for some other reason.

I'm going to laugh for a minute here...but plenty of code comes from India, right? I mean, I know of other companies that outsource low to medium skilled jobs to areas with ultra low wages because they couldn't be automated, but could be outsourced. That largely follows the trend of being less efficient, but much cheaper. AI is taking the subsequent items that could be outsourced, and it's reaping the humanity from them...just like automation replaced low skilled manufacturing...by using the output of high skilled people to automate the jobs. As an example, 20 years ago it was a basic assembler job and today it's a basic code monkey job. The result is that today in the US and the like we have robot programmers and AI developers. The real problem then is that AI is destroying the bridge which covers the knowledge gap between code monkey and AI specialist...which is not a discussion about AI but more about the corporate ladder being full of broken rungs between starting positions and skilled ones.


So...my answer is that this isn't a long term reason to not become a code monkey. Grease monkeys still work on card, with new tools. I'm more worried about the future 50 years from now when there is nobody left who remembers the leap from code monkey to AI coder...caused by the prodigious amount of people who stuffed its ranks when AI stole basic code monkey jobs and nobody wanted to pursue the career for long enough that the need for code monkey experience was forgotten.
-Read, the modern history we write today where places like the US forgot how to be manufacturers because we exported all those jobs, and no longer have the people needed to support them coming back and being competitive-



-I'd also like a sidebar. MS has spent enormous sums of money trying to make Blockbuster for games, and called it Gamepass. They bought the equivalent of Xerox post patent expiry with 343 and Blizzard/Activision. They've plowed enormous amounts of money into bad business models. When do we admit they are either mentally ill or incapable of good investment and attempting to fix bad decisions with worse one? You know, like releasing all of the people they sucked up during the Pandemic because they've got shiny new AI models to churn out good enough code.-

 

[TheinsanegamerN]

Until civil war erupts.

Lather rinse repeat.

LOL yeah right. Most people today are WAY too soft to fight a civil war. And owning guns is verboten for so many youth today, unless they're gonna fight with their lattes they wont accomplish much.

Glassdoor and Indeed lay off 1,300 workers due to AI

Recruit Holdings, the Japanese parent company of job search and employee review giants Indeed and Glassdoor, is cutting around 6% of its HR Technology segment workforce.

www.techspot.com

1300 here as of a new new article posted today.


One analysis suggests that around 94,000 tech jobs have been lost to AI in the first half of 2025—about 507 per day—across Microsoft, Tesla, IBM, Meta, and others
Sauce

Let's then take the techspot article I linked at the top, it mentions that Microsoft has plans to double its coding from 30% of its code to 60% to be done by AI, and all the other big players in the game are doing the same, already using a higher percentage than Microsoft is.

Moral question of the day: is it still appropriate to tell people its a great idea to major in computer science? This number is not going to stop increasing, it's only getting started. I think if one were smart they would major in the in-demand physical trades, or major in robotics/engineering, or anything in the medical fields. Accounting majors? AI is coming for those in mass too eventually. Sure, companies will still have IRL accountants, it just will be a much smaller percentage needed. Downsizing/Streamlining is the new name of the game. Thoughts? Where do we go from here?

edit: keep in mind the 94,000 is not including 2024 numbers.

How many of these "tech jobs" are actual coders? Indeed/Glassdoor, for instance, the majority of those workers were HR, marketing, sales, ece. Not the actual code monkeys keeping things together.

Also, how many of these are the result of overhiring during the covid mania of 2020-2022, when the tech sector was absolutely BOOMING with jobs? Take Glassdoor. They're a website where employees can leave reviews about how good/bad a workplace is. WHY ON EARTH did they have 1,300 employees to cut in the first place? What were all these people doing?

I agree with you on physical trades/robotics/medical. On accounting, you dont need a major college degree to accomplish a rewarding accounting career. The idea that accountants needs bachelors/masters is a leftover from boomer banks running like its the 60s. The successful accountants can get away with no college or a 2 year degree, get a few years of experience, and start their own practice doing work for smaller companies remotely.

AI produces very low quality work and the majority of it has to be gone over by humans, I see this market as the typical overreaction by an industry that thinks it found a magic bullet to make tons of money, just like blockchain before it. What we're seeing right now is a lot of the do nothing/email jockey jobs are disappearing because they are so simple a glorified search engine can do their job. The same fluff we see cut during any recession.

 

[de.das.dude]

guess what. i just got pushed into a spearhead team of looking for AI possibilities. :/ woe is me.

 

[TumbleGeorge]

"I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream".
/Harlan Ellison/. Just find and read the story. Because already have plan for building LLM training facility with size of Manhattan and few gigawatts power consumption.

 

[Vya Domus]

Regular layoffs being rebranded as "AI taking jobs" is very funny.

Example : Microsoft filed for thousands of visa applications after also firing thousands of people, likely in order to hire them for the same roles but lower salaries, in case you weren't sure if this was "muh AI taking all the jobs" or not : https://economictimes.indiatimes.co...s-job-cuts/articleshow/122251450.cms?from=mdr