Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- It’s not just juniors in CS. If you lose your job, you’re not getting another one. You better not quit your job without having a new one lined up. Many have had to retire early.by deadbabe
- Sadly, this is just the beginning.. As AI models improve in performance and cost, each technical job level will be replaced until it's just C-suites managing a bunch of ai agents.
- Who needs C-suites?by beej71
- hmm, I wonder what happens if we reach mass unemployment and homelessness...by smcg
- 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.
by ofjcihen - My really big worry is that the people making these choices just do not care about a single thing beyond this single generation
Not a psychologist but my take on most of the wealthy people in the world is they are essentially narcissistic hedonists. They only care about growing wealth as a means to the end of maximizing the amount of fun they can have and to keep their egos happy that they have the most.
They don't seem to care about the future at all
- 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=48914589by joey9prints
- 1. The papers author's never claim causality. 2. There are other large macro forces at play, like firm consolidation, proliferation of NDAs, interest rates*, lack of growth (without Nvidia, the US economy would basically be in a recession?) and probably many more that are putting the job market into a low hire/low fire state.
Consider how we're actually not seeing much layoffs (some, but not much). So what were seeing in tech specifically is more like hiring freeze, so people with experience or in jobs aren't feeling much of the pressure, but new grads are hitting a wall.
Im posting this to resist the "ai is taking away people's jobs" narrative. It's definitely a factor but it's probably one of many and it's sloppy thinking to point fingers at ai and not other probably bigger factors.
* To their credit, the papers author's try to factor for zirp.
- > 1. The papers author's never claim causality. 2. There are other large macro forces at play, like firm consolidation, proliferation of NDAs, interest rates*, lack of growth (without Nvidia, the US economy would basically be in a recession?) and probably many more that are putting the job market into a low hire/low fire state.
And the backdrop of an aging population that needs asset prices to keep rising to meet benefit and retirement obligations, so stagflation it is.
by lotsofpulp - 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.by d_burfoot
- they really dont need to divert. They are sitting on historical unfathomable amounts of money.by dominotw
- What does "learning AI skills" even mean? You're typing into a prompt box. You are not applying any skill, the model is. At best, the skill you need is discernment about _what_ to type in this magical box. But if that gets cheaper and the output of your company doesn't necessarily scale horizontally that well. Why would I need as many people as before?by boshalfoshal
- 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.
by fny - I consider myself a high-quality junior, rivaling my senior industry peers on flexibility, systems thinking, low-level engineering, and understanding of user experience. yet all I found this year was a place I got fired from 2 weeks after getting hired. the reason? I called Claude Code "a decent search engine" on a meeting. perhaps I would have been fired anyway because the heatwave was building in Ukraine and I had absolutely nothing but a basement (where I can't move my desktop to) to cool off.by bpavuk
- It’s almost impossible to prove that you aren’t one of these people though. People like me get hurt by this, collateral damage.
- I have no sympathy for those that relied on ChatGPT to get through their entire educationby hamzac98
- 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.
by suriyaG - I (and everyone else) had to take an ethics course in college to get my engineering degree, I think the course should include the value of coaching and passing on knowledge to the next generation.
Even from a profit stand point, we need to invest in the entry levels to get mid- senior levels
by MSKJ - >but the entry-level job market has always been tough.
Sure. But it felt like you were able to be hired on merits and potential bore fruit.
It's just gotten tougher to the point where it feels more like you need to be a part time content creator just to get noticed for a junior role. Not hired: noticed.
by johnnyanmac - I've been telling people the same thing. The tech industry has been cargo-culting "scaling the organization" where people are rewarded for org size. That zeitgeist has ended, and we've not even overcorrected much the other way.by CBLT
- The United States corporate culture has reached a failure mode of game theory. The average corporation is allergic to spending any money on training and has pushed all of the costs onto labor.
They hope that some other moron will take up the costs and then they can poach the trained employee for cheap, while any corporation that does actually train feels like they should get the employee for cheap afterwards instead of compensating the employee at market rate.
Simultaneously the average corporation refuses to do something like have a contract with the employee for X years of labor at a set rate in the exchange for the training because they are also allergic to not being able to change their minds and lay off half their staff the next year.
This would be a place for the government to come in and force everyone to pick the good square on the prisoner’s dilemma, but yet again, our corporate culture is allergic to regulation or cooperation.
You can still get through a winter or two by eating your seed corn so I guess we’ll just continue barreling down this path.
by lovich - From personal experience, back in the 2010s it was particularly harsh for those with a non-standard background. What few "opportunities" that existed were a handful of unpaid or grossly underpaid internships which were closed off to those who weren't students or recent graduates. Everybody wanted employees who were ready to start pumping out code with little or no training.
That's not to diminish how much more difficult it's become since then but breaking into the industry has never been easy.
- It's interesting because a study here in Sweden [1] produces identical results. To quote from the study:
"An event study documents an accelerating decline in employment of 22–25-year-olds in high-AI-exposure occupations, reaching 5.5 per cent by early 2025 relative to less exposed occupations within the same employers"
[1] Same Storm, Different Boats: Generative AI and the Age Gradient in Hiring, Lodefalk et al, https://www.oru.se/globalassets/oru-sv/institutioner/hh/work...
by armcat - 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.
by Zigurd - > Entry-level jobs are an obvious place to look things that can be cut to create an AI budget.
Kitchen potwasher, day labourer, apprentice welder etc none of these entry level jobs are affected by an LLM. But nobody on HN works in those industries.... connection maybe?
by bcjdjsndon - Mortgaging the future to pay for the present.
All of these executives are operating under the pretense that they won’t be held accountable when in 10-15yr their middle bench is a disaster, and they’re probably right.
- Yep if a hiring manager wants to open a req for a junior, before AI he'd get praise for being tight with budget and hiring someone cheap and trainable.
Now he gets asked: if a junior can do the work why aren't you using AI? So instead of opening the req he says to the team "we need to figure out how to make AI do more."
by jordanb - 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.by dver
- Make him do side projects, something he can explain and be proud of. Online communities, some github projects he might be interested, ...anything.
Let him contribute to something, yes for free, so that potential future coworkers can see 1) who he is, 2) what he can do, 3) how he approaches people.
by mk89 - Agreed. My daughter with a degree in math from Berkeley served coffee and tutored for a year before being accepted into a math PhD program. Amazingby david38