‘AI will first halt new positions, retire old ones’: Reddit post on job market shift warns of stagnation

Artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud services are not immediately replacing jobs but are significantly slowing down the creation of new positions while reducing workforce demands across industries, warned a recent  Reddit post. 

As companies are increasingly relying on AI-powered tools and cloud solutions to streamline operations, cutting costs and minimizing the need for new hires, a Reddit post highlighted this trend, with the author stating, "AI will not eat the jobs right away. It will stagnate the growth of the current job market." 

According to the Redditor, a major investment banking company, hesitant to use external AI models, developed its own "LLM to help developers speed up with coding, which increased productivity." As a result, a newly initiated project that would have typically required six to eight additional developers was instead handled by the existing team. 

"Now all other division managers are following the same process in their projects in this company," the Reddit user noted, signaling a broader shift toward AI adoption across industries.  

Similarly, a product-based company completely "fired all onsite documentation team" and reduced its offshore workforce from 15 to 8, with plans to cut further to just 5. "They are using a paid AI tool for all documentation purposes," eliminating the need for human workers in this function.  

Beyond AI, widespread adoption of cloud services is driving major structural changes within IT teams. The Reddit user, sharing their personal experience, noted that on-premises infrastructure previously required multiple teams for management, including "networking teams, management to maintain all in-house hosted SQL servers, Oracle servers, Hadoop." 

However, after migrating to Azure, "all these teams are gone." Even transaction systems that once required in-house Oracle servers have been moved to managed cloud services. "The new cloud team is able to manage the same work with only 30-40% of the previous employee count where they worked for 13 years," highlighting the significant reduction in workforce needs.  

Another major shift is occurring in customer service and frontend applications. "Chatbots for front-end app/web portal service – Paid cloud tools. (Major disruption in progress at this space)," the Reddit user observed. AI-powered chatbots are replacing human customer support roles, reducing costs for companies while limiting job opportunities in the sector.  

While AI and cloud services are not triggering immediate mass layoffs, they are "first halting new positions, retiring old positions," according to the Reddit user. Companies are opting to redistribute tasks among existing employees rather than hiring new staff.  

With fewer job openings and an increasing number of engineers competing for roles, only the most highly skilled professionals are likely to secure long-term employment. The user predicts that "only 3 out of 20" engineers may be needed in the AI-driven future, marking a significant contraction in workforce demand.