alt Hacker NewsAI is hitting entry-level jobs hardest, Stanford study finds
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The article assumes that jobs that can be automated are vulnerable. But in the postmortem of the AI driven layoffs so far, it's more that expectations about AI and productivity are driving the job cuts.
In other words shareholders and senior management are being shown the appearance of expectations about AI being met, whether or not it's working. Entry-level jobs are an obvious place to look things that can be cut to create an AI budget.
this is a super non-popular take on HN.
but the entry-level job market has always been tough.
with AI, outside the big tech world, it is hard to justify hiring entry level engineers as the time to train them ( 1 year+ ) to be productive enough is such a drag on the seniors, when the agents deliver things more care and more edge cases.
The implosion in junior quality exacerbates this.
The cohort that started during COVID were first knee-capped by remote classes and exams, and then they lobotomized themselves with ChatGPT.
Partly this is because the big companies are diverting vast amounts of money towards building data centers, instead of hiring new grads. I expect young people who learn AI skills will be fine, once the data center spending binge is over.
When do we declare this status-quo? It was expected for several years, and new data is just piling up with the same conclusions from the last study.
i remember seeing the stats presented on moonshots podcast about 3 months ago. they said every quarter, the percentage of CS fresh grads decreased their placement roughly 10% or so and it was down to about 19% at last count and entry level salaries down from 96K to 61k, if i recall.
AI VENDOR HYPE
I built a digital internship for this very reason, to help the pre-entry level interns get work experience. Given ai has mostly replaced their admin work load. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48914589
Soft people learn that the world is harsh and you either adapt or die.
I wish there were studies on when this situation will normalize. Will the lost jobs ever come back? Or not?
So we have a crunch of expiring/retiring workers on the senior end and a cutoff of the flow of new talent from the junior end.
They’d better pray that we see automation gains above and beyond what we’ve seen so far or else we’ll be paying the price in a single generation.
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To the surprise of who, exactly? Sometimes it feels like HN has never used an AI model past ChatGPT in 2022. Modern AI is so capable nowadays that it _does_ obviate most of the work you'd normally give an entry level person.
Im mostly speaking about software engineering, but the "juniors" I've seen be hired now are basically the equivalent of mid (maybe even low senior) levels of yesteryear. AI is most certainly raising the bar.
No, not AI. AI isn't hitting entry level jobs hardest. People and Businesses are by having "AI substituting for labor".
If we do not pursue the common good of humanity with AI, we will destroy humanity with AI.
It's brutal, my son with a CS degree hasn't been able to get to single live interview ina year. A couple of screens has been it. I've reached out to my network, and the reply is always we're not hiring any juniors.