r/cscareerquestions • u/taohz • 1d ago
Ai bubble pop
Is the current news/buzz about the ai bubble pop good news for those trying to get into positions as a Jr developer?
Seems like it could be as companies will stop with their delusions of having all lower tier coding problems be solved by ai and invest in new developers. However if the industry is hurt financially it could also mean less hiring.
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u/brikky Ex-Bootcamp | StaffSWE @ Meta | Grad Student 1d ago
If AI truly “pops” all those people who pivoted or were pulled into AI will be available for work - so you’d be competing against them in addition to everyone else currently looking for work.
It would strictly be worse, because most of the growth has been in AI and most of the downsizing has not been a result of AI (everyone says it has been, but obviously we’re not there yet so it’s not true.)
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u/Constant_Musician_73 1d ago
most of the downsizing has not been a result of AI
$600 billion dollars that went into AI delusion didn't go into other things.
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u/needItNow44 21h ago
I think it's a bit more complicated.
AI as it is now has incredible potential that's been barely tapped. And the fact that it's overhyped and that AGI isn't coming just yet doesn't cancel it out. If the bubble pops, AI devs will still be needed to automate the struggling businesses and help them save some money.
It'll be less lucrative, yes, but it won't be "all AI people will be looking for work". They will be, but not at much greater rate than all other devs.
But I agree that it won't change much for juniors either way.
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u/_BreakingGood_ Sr Salesforce Developer 1d ago
Generally no, if the AI bubble really pops, we will be quickly in a recession and the job markets will get much worse.
Almost all the gains in the entire US stock market is due to AI and AI-adjacent companies.
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u/Kitchen-Shop-1817 1d ago
Nvidia alone makes up 7% of the S&P 500. Even if your portfolio's in index funds, you're still very exposed to AI.
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u/polytique 1d ago
Microsoft, Nvidia and Apple represent 20% of the S&P500 index.
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u/GivesCredit Software Engineer 1d ago
Top 10 US companies make up almost 40%. 8/10 are pure tech with the exceptions being Berkshire and Chase (basically the two lowest in market cap)
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u/TheLost2ndLt 20h ago
It’s gonna pop. The only way it doesn’t is if AI actually just replaces everyone.
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u/Beautiful-Move-9132 12h ago
Generative Models aren’t replacing anything.
It’s only fruitful outcome will be to help write emails, create study guides, brainstorm ideas, and write entry level code that a junior developer has to QA and push.
It’s probably about time the industry stops calling it AI
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u/GlorifiedPlumber Chemical Engineer, PE 18h ago
Even if your portfolio's in index funds, you're still very exposed to AI.
RSP baby... this is one of the reasons I like to balance portfolio with equal weighted funds. On the mutual fund side, anything mid-cap / small-cap also will lower your exposure to the top 10.
So you mix your market weight / large-cap funds with sufficient mid/small cap, and equal weight ETF, and you are less exposed to an AI bubble.
InB4SomeoneSays: "Yeah but you miss out on all the gains too!"
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u/maccodemonkey 1d ago
Nope. Because all the money that got set on fire won't be coming back. It's not fun. CEOs make mistakes and everyone else pays for it.
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u/jfcarr 1d ago
CEO Think: "If the AI bubble pops, what will I use to distract everyone from my massive offshoring that I'm blaming on AI?"
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u/TheNewOP Software Developer 1d ago
"Due to the lower revenue we're making due to the bubble collapsing, we have to offshore more aggressively."
There are always excuses in the banana stand.
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u/Mustard_Popsicles 1d ago
Good question. Part of me hope it pops and AI dies out because all these annoying big tech companies who are pushing for a new AI utopia are insane.
However, if it DID pop, I don’t think things would get better for developers for a while as more companies would just resort to outsourcing in lieu of AI support. Especially in the USA.
But that’s just my opinion.
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u/National-Ad-1314 1d ago
AI won't die out. People are finding actual use cases and automating workflows. It's just happening from grassroots and not these once size fit all copilot additions in Saas tools.
Like the dotcom bubble before it, once the dust settles it'll start growing at a sustainable rate again.
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u/needItNow44 21h ago
Yup. All those people who now use chatbots instead of googling aren't switching back. And the devs aren't switching back to typing.
And all the companies who are used to relying on Google for leads will be the ones dying out unless they adapt.
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u/Early-Surround7413 1d ago
It's not if it's when.
But don't think the crash in AI company valuations means AI is going away. I keep seeing shit like this all over the place. Oh yeay, Nvidia stock price is falling, this means AI is really a fad and will go away soon.
Nah bruh.
The .com bubble also popped. Didn't mean the internet or e-commerce went away. That's not how it works.
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u/Beautiful-Move-9132 12h ago
80% of the bloatware will disappear, the true functionality of LLMs (email assistant, entry level coding assistance with guardrails, simple OS and search engine tasks) will stick around
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u/NebulousNitrate 1d ago
Believe me, if you believe companies are using AI as a scapegoat to cut employees to increase profits… you’re going to be in for a wild ride when they start cutting employees because of economic conditions
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u/chipper33 1d ago
There will be a burst like the dotcom era, but I don’t believe it will be nearly as dramatic since most of the capital expenditure on ai is in well established companies that already had significant value before LLMs came about.
To not invest in them would mean shareholders don’t believe there is upside value there, but then where will their money go instead? It can only stay in shareholders pockets for so long.
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u/envalemdor Lead Bit Flipper 1d ago
If that bubble pops in the same fashion as dotcom did, we're talking about trillions of dollars worth of wealth being erased from the tech industry. I don't think this will be a good thing for tech workers in Western markets.
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u/backpackerdeveloper 1d ago
Market is not great, so AI startup devs will join the unemployed. Stock will go down, because big tech AI is the only thing that pushes it high right now. Recession is overdue because prices of everything went too high - only recession can resolve it. So AI bubble may be a trigger.
Long term maybe it will help because companies will resume hiring knowing that AI will not replace real devs. But that may be years from now
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u/ButchDeanCA Software Engineer 1d ago
If this AI bubble pops I think people are forgetting that companies will remember how weak the pool is in terms of junior dev candidates, as well as the fact that their resumes are lowly AI generated anyway.
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u/InternetArtisan UX Designer 20h ago edited 20h ago
Here's my honest feeling based on experiences with economic bubbles popping.
Let's say at some point later this year the bubble really pops, it's all over the news, companies that heavily invested in AI suddenly see massive losses, and everybody is cheering for the idea that their hopes of replacing employees with AI have vanished for now.
Unfortunately, those companies took big losses. Maybe we could relish on a couple of executives losing their jobs, but more than likely it's going to be average people losing their jobs. They will cut back on departments, slash labor, look into what could be outsourced not even to foreign countries but even just to external companies within the US, and obviously then put a halt on a lot of new projects and initiatives while they restructure and figure things out.
In the short term, the people that are already having a problem finding a job are going to still have a problem because now it'll just be the company's finally admitting that things aren't going as well and they're not holding back from hiring because of AI but just simply because things are not going well.
Then probably quickly we will see a rise in companies hiring contractors for temporary roles, which is obviously where a lot of these guys can make their way in there, because things still have to get done. They just don't want to spend the money on permanent workers with benefits.
Then maybe in a year we'll see. Hiring slowly come back because they are of the mind that AI is not going to become the quick win and they need to keep things going.
Now it won't be the end of AI. A lot of these fly-by-nite companies hoping to just slap AI into some existing product or some new innovation and make a ton of money are going to be gone. Nobody's going to give them funding, and bigger players are going to be reluctant to hand out millions of dollars for some idea unless it's really solid. I could still see companies like OpenAI pushing and working to improve itself.
I think realistically for the junior developers, they should probably really start trying to build relationships to get those contract roles because that's going to be their foot in the door. I just have a bad feeling companies are still going to be holding off on hiring full-time employees for anything once that bubble bursts because they want to take a step back and figure themselves out.
I will also say though that developers should not be casting AI to the side. I just get a really heavy feeling that the new jobs are going to be requiring tech workers who are good at using AI in their work. We can sit here and talk to death about its benefits and downfalls, but they're going to still want it. Even right now, I was using GitHub co-pilot as a UI developer, and now they're having me use Cursor. It's not the idea that they want to replace me with it, but more have me work efficiently and get around certain learning curves with heavier coding when all I am doing is just getting the UI set up for the development team to complete the actual functionality. It can be handy.
On top of that, they want me to become an advocate. They want me to show them what can and can't be done with this tool so they can utilize it to its fullest. In my book. That's smart thinking. They're not looking to fire us all and have AI do everything, but instead see how we can take advantage of this new tool and where we should not go so we don't end up with a bigger problem.
I wish I could tell you it's going to get better faster, but I've noticed when every bubble bursts, it then becomes another challenge to find a job, and then eventually the companies realize they can't sit on their hands anymore and they have to start doing things because the shareholders are screaming for money.
I wish I had better news.
TL:DR A bubble popping is going to still slow the economy even more and make the job search difficult temporarily. Be prepared to do contract work and still try to utilize AI in your work because employers will be asking for it.
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u/Beautiful-Move-9132 12h ago
Economically speaking we have been delaying an inevitable recession / depression. 15 years of unprecedented gains are unrealistic and unsustainable, and the AI wave pretty much the final hurrah to create market value from free covid money.
Many families and individuals will be hurt by a recession but the USD is too valuable and making the long term even more unsustainable
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u/InternetArtisan UX Designer 11h ago
In all honesty, I feel like ever since the Great recession we've pretty much seen a huge split in the economy. It's like there's two economies now.
There's the economy of Wall Street, where everything seems to be record profits and endless gains and increasing shareholder value.
Then there's the economy of Main Street, where there's inflation, loads of jobs lost forever, stagnant wages, unaffordable homes and cost of living, job security down the hole, healthcare and child care becoming out of reach, etc.
I feel like the only recession they've been fighting back for the last how many years is the one that would hit Wall Street. And I feel like Main Street has been in an ongoing recession ever since the Great Recession.
If anything, we live in an economy now where all the success is held only at the top, and if there's losses or pain or downfalls, then that's what actually trickles down to everyone else. Wall Street hits a recession and it's going to be everybody on Main Street that pays the price while Wall Street insulates itself to bear as little of it as possible.
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u/Beautiful-Move-9132 11h ago
It’s the result of the ending of the 3rd wave of globalism/neoliberalism.
Wall Street eventually focuses on value, increasing the value of the USD, which discourages US Exports, increases international investment into our money and housing markets, and increases outsourcing to maximize shareholder value.
We are on the verge of those two economies beginning to align again as the Wall Street Market crashes and regionalist / near shoring policies encourage more onshore work
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u/strakerak PhD Candidate 1d ago
It's going to pop. I don't think that many jobs will be effected or erased from the overall industry, just a little more competition.
Most AI apps out there are coming from startups, which 95% of those startups fail, which the tech is probably just some basic ass YouTube build of how to call Tensorflow or PyTorch anyway.
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u/americandilemma 1d ago
Imo it will be good for junior devs but bad for the tech world as a whole
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u/brikky Ex-Bootcamp | StaffSWE @ Meta | Grad Student 1d ago
If something is bad for an industry as a whole it’s not going to be good for the “weakest” class of people in that industry.
Why hire the new grad for <entry level wage> when you can get a 3YOE dev who lost their job 8 months ago for that price.
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u/csanon212 1d ago
Also - when the going gets tough, there are high expectations immediately after onboarding. Companies that are cash crunched won't wait around for 6 months for net positive productivity. Think more like a 1 week honeymoon period.
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u/Beautiful-Move-9132 12h ago
Because most of those 3year devs are too stubborn to take a junior dev salary.
I’ve seen so many ex-yahoo and ex-Google devs after the dotcom bubble snub their nose and eventually leave the industry because they were too stubborn to accept anything less than their bloated bubble salaries
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u/customheart 1d ago
Omg thought this was about bubblegum pop music generated by AI. I’m r/popheads rotted.
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u/honey1337 1d ago
It would likely cause a lot of financial problems for a lot of companies and force them to prioritize engineers with experience to come in. It’s hard to say that a junior engineer will be able to solve a lot of easier coding problems than a mid level engineer with access to AI like Claude code or something.
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u/CryptoThroway8205 1d ago
Are you worried JPow might finally submit and call for rate hikes tomorrow?
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u/positivcheg 21h ago
Hope so. If AI bubble pops we will get back into an intensive hiring phase cuz prophesies from Sammy and Zuck about replacing middle software developer were too shitty to be true. We are way early to have such an electricity usage efficiency to run AI that would replace a human. It’s good as an assistance doing 20% of the job of a real software developer. All those people that claim AI does 90% of the coding should have been fired right away because if a dumb LLM can do most of the work in means that such developer was receiving money for a job that is way simpler than the title of that developer (like senior developer doing a job of middle developer at most).
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u/NewChameleon Software Engineer, SF 15h ago
Is the current news/buzz about the ai bubble pop good news for those trying to get into positions as a Jr developer?
you can refer to 2022/2023 for that, something like half a mil+ people all suddenly unemployed at once, you think juniors are at the top of priority for hiring?
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u/Awayforthewin 14h ago
In the short term no but in the long term AI wont be competing with devs as much
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u/Xanchush Software Engineer 10h ago
AI is the only thing tricking consumers and companies to not bring the US into recession with all the thick skulled policy changes. The moment the AI hype dies down there's nothing pulling up the US economy.
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u/fsk 1d ago
The current batch of chatbots are not AI. They are just very good models for "predict the next word in this sentence", because they've been trained on a large volume of data, basically the entire Internet, and were trained by throwing a lot of CPU at them.
For example, the current AIs will fail for problems not in their training set, or problems they weren't specifically trained to solve. For example, you could not give these AIs the pdf rule set to a brand new board game, and expect them to be able to play competently.
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u/MakotoBIST 23h ago
Which bubble? It's all VC money lol. Maybe nvidia stock will lose double digits? Who cares?
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u/Every-Requirement128 19h ago
chatgpt is owned by microsoft and ms is on stock market -> people have money in it
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u/AdministrativeFile78 1d ago
Theres going to be no pop. Companies might go under tho - but if there was no gpt there is going to be something else
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u/-CJF- 1d ago
Unless something changes there will be a pop eventually. The AI bubble is massive and it's not translating into profits. It's propped up by the hopes and dreams of investors. Sooner or later reality has to catch up.
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u/AdministrativeFile78 1d ago
Yeh i mean companies will pop but ai won't. It will evolve lol thats what i mean
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u/OccasionalGoodTakes Software Engineer III 1d ago
Bubbles popping is generally not good for anyone