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.
I don’t understand this logic. If I’m being honest, the most productive people with AI on my team are the two youngest. They don’t have product wisdom, yes, but the gap is so noticeable that I pushed my manager to forego the full-time work experience requirement that we have always had so that new hires don’t even know the old way of working and can just reframe the field in terms of AI.
AI is the biggest threat in over a generation to seniors who aren’t investing in keeping up. Managers without an instinct for AI are an endangered species as well.
Right now my company seems to be only hiring people they already know or have worked with before. Every single hire in the last 4 months I've seen get on-boarded has been back-channeled. I've had 4 direct referrals and none of them have gotten in but all made it to the final round just to be surpassed by someone the hiring manager already knew and liked from their previous teams. Even with a strong referral it's hard!
We hired one junior out of maybe 10 hires. I don’t really know where to slot them in currently, as they lack the background knowledge of what is good or bad from AI. It’s a shame because years ago, I would have hired them and pointed them at a million small projects. Best of luck to your son. I wish I had advice
This sounds much like the civil engineering crisis in my region of the world after the 2008 financial crisis.
There was barely any new construction going on for a couple of years and once it started anew, there was a gap as while people were retiring, new hires weren't replacing them.
I guess we're just going to shrink as a field until the market won't be able to handle it.