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AI is hitting entry-level jobs hardest, Stanford study finds

arstechnica.com

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Re: AI is hitting entry-level jobs hardest, Stanford study finds

#51

Post by ghaff »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #25
suriyaG wrote: post #8

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.

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 diffic…

That sounds about right. There was a well-established funnel from schools directly into entry-level positions. Absent that funnel, it's not clear how getting those entry-level positions was ever especially straightforward outside of a very robust tech hiring environment over the past decade.

Re: AI is hitting entry-level jobs hardest, Stanford study finds

#52

Post by dver »

y-curious wrote: post #41
dver wrote: post #32

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.

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

Thanks, it's been tough on him. I'm glad we're able to support him through this, others are not as fortunate.

He's looking into pivots now and taking flight lessons.

Re: AI is hitting entry-level jobs hardest, Stanford study finds

#53

Post by greenowl »

The plus side of all this is that entry level software development jobs are typically pursued by recent college graduates. They are young.

While it sucks to have blown a lot of money and accept they've been duped to get a degree in something that is now "worth" a small fraction of what it once was, time is on their side. There is plenty of time to go back to school, or apprentice, or learn a trade or go to trade school in something else with better long term career prospects.

On the opposite side of this, senior level devs should (hopefully) be on target financially and theoretically should be fine, especially if they make adjustments now (lower COL, layoff preparation, prepare for accelerated retirement timeline).

The folks who are really going to suffer are those early to mid level developers. Not as much of a network, not enough traditional expertise, not enough savings, not as much time to invest and pull the trigger on a career change.

Re: AI is hitting entry-level jobs hardest, Stanford study finds

#54

Post by vanuatu »

boshalfoshal wrote: post #30
d_burfoot wrote: post #10

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.

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?

- knowing what to prompt

- directing the model and knowing when its going off the rails

- verification

- setting up the right loops, harness, graphs around the models

economics still apply to hiring people. if all your competitors are using ai and there's market share to fight over and people still are a productivity positive vs. only ai, hiring will increase as we've seen recently with swes

Re: AI is hitting entry-level jobs hardest, Stanford study finds

#55

Post by armcat »

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...

Re: AI is hitting entry-level jobs hardest, Stanford study finds

#56

Post by Tade0 »

dver wrote: post #32

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.

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.

Re: AI is hitting entry-level jobs hardest, Stanford study finds

#57

Post by Marsymars »

vineyardmike wrote: post #9
jdw64 wrote: post #3

I wish there were studies on when this situation will normalize. Will the lost jobs ever come back? Or not?

Those jobs aren’t coming back as-is, because AI isn’t going anywhere. Job markets change over time. I’ve just started transitioning my career closer to management, so I develop/manage roughly 50/50. At this point, if I had to manage a tight budget, I’d rather have an entry level salary as tokens for a senior engineer. We’ll need a way, as a society, to help new adults transitions from education to productive employee…

> I’ve just started transitioning my career closer to management, so I develop/manage roughly 50/50. At this point, if I had to manage a tight budget, I’d rather have an entry level salary as tokens for a senior engineer.

A high-potential junior you can at least justify as an investment in the future.

The other people who are going to get squeezed are the later-career developers who are below-average in ability. (I'm not using "below average" here pejoratively - just noting that by definition, half of developers are below-average.) Outside of big tech, there are piles of organizations with devs who don't make big-tech salary and who are only marginally productive for what they're getting paid.

If you're an organization that only has the budget to pay non-junior devs $80k... you can see the implications of having the option to spend your dev budget on seniors + tokens instead.

Re: AI is hitting entry-level jobs hardest, Stanford study finds

#58

Post by dver »

randycupertino wrote: post #40
dver wrote: post #32

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.

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…

I had a job search as well and same. Previous slam dunks that stalled at final interviews with someone who had a higher recommendation.

Fortunately I have some unique skills that allowed me to land a gig.

Re: AI is hitting entry-level jobs hardest, Stanford study finds

#59

Post by seanmcdirmid »

georgeburdell wrote: post #39
dver wrote: post #32

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 o…

I think the problem is evaluation. They can't tell who the good juniors are with respect to the new skills that they are looking for, so they go for experience instead. It doesn't seem sustainable though for obvious reasons.

> 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.

New tech has always been the biggest threat to seniors who aren't investing in keeping up.

Re: AI is hitting entry-level jobs hardest, Stanford study finds

#60

Post by y-curious »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #25
suriyaG wrote: post #8

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.

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 diffic…

I got my first dev job by moving laterally within a company from customer support. Helpdesk aka “Helldesk” was a common pipeline for people. I don’t think those jobs are easy to get either now.
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