(2025-02-12) Procopio The Job Market Rebound Is Going To Catch Everyone Off Guard

Joe Procopio: The Job Market Rebound Is Going To Catch Everyone Off Guard. For some companies, a job-seeker’s market won’t be a good thing. (job market)

The good news is that this perennially iced-over and zombified market is finally, slowly starting to thaw. Both survey data and anecdotal evidence point to an uptick in hiring in the near future.

I spent my youth frozen in upstate New York

Everyone loved that thaw, but because the snow had sat for so long, it had built up into a gray mass of grime and filth. And when the snow melted, that grime and filth remained to cover every surface.
The bad news is, in much the same way, when the frozen job market does indeed melt, the whole system is going to be left under a filthy film.

here’s what’s going to catch a lot of folks unprepared to reap the rewards.

This has not been a garden-variety tight labor market. It’s been exacerbated by a breakdown in a hiring process that’s been automated and AI-infused into a hot mess of noise with no signal. That breakdown happened over a decade, not just the last year or two.

it’s not just that the application process got technified to death, it’s that the whole concept of “the future of work” has undergone a major shift while the job market was spinning its wheels.

There are a lot of problems underneath, but these four in particular are going to catch folks flat-footed, mostly on the hiring company side.

Replacing the AI replacements

My rage is — and always has been — directed at how quickly both proprietor and customer of the AI promise went all in on AI-driven automation at the cost of humanity. It wasn’t enough just to dabble, we had to play with it until we broke it.

The cost to clean it up is going to be 10x of what the cost would have been to integrate AI conservatively, especially in the tech industry, where we should know better.

If we thought labor got expensive in 2022, imagine a similar job-seeker’s-market after three solid years of hyperinflation.

This actually scares me because it’s another unintended consequence of the COVID-19 bailouts that no one cared about because everyone was snatching money out of the air like a kid in a Chuck E Cheese ticket tornado booth.

when we combine this problem with the above problem, finding experienced people willing to dig through and fix the trillions(?) of lines of code we asked ChatGPT (copilot) to write, well, they’ll probably just ask ChatGPT to fix it.

And then — ha! — then the companies have to find the people to come back to work for them.

Imagine fewer needles. A lot fewer needles.

Good luck finding them, AI.

The needles are furious

It’s a time in the history of labor that has birthed irony-free CEO quotes like “I am of the opinion that AI can already do all of the jobs that we as humans do.”
Yeah, shareholders heard that. So did the humans who got pink slips.