Notes on AI adoption and employment

I am not a prognosticator and very much not an economist, but here are some links and brief thoughts about the job market: Coinbase is laying off ~14% of its workers, including a bunch of programmers. There are many other such stories. But a lot of the aggregates floating around (e.g., this one) suggest that the overall market for programmers is good. If you had told me six months ago that the average company would do, say, three rounds of laying off 14% of their programmers (so a total cut of 1/3 to 1/2), with the remaining jobs being perhaps 5% to 15% lower-compensated on average, I would have been relieved. Here is Steve Yegge claiming that 20% of Google engineers are "outright refusers" when it comes to AI, and 80% are at most "using Cursor or equivalent chat tool." You can believe that or not, but he's a reputable and well-connected person, and has only (to my knowledge) doubled down on the claim when pressured about it. Finger to the wind, Yegge's numbers feel about right to me…