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

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

#101

Post by dimaaan »

glimshe wrote: post #69
Tade0 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Our field started as a niche for geeks. For a long time, CS paid you the average for engineering work - hardly equivalent to six figures today for most with the exception of seniors. It's still like that on most of the world. Many people here lived through ridiculous times. It was possible to make 1M in a year without incredible skills/hard work. Big tech was and still is full of these people. I'm not saying that was…

That resonates me.

When I was in high school, I lied to girls about what I was planning to major in just so I wouldn't sound like some antisocial nerd.

Nobody back then thought coding was cool. It was just the thing the weird kids did in the computer lab.

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

#102

Post by harvey9 »

bpavuk wrote: post #50
fny wrote: post #27

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.

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…

Some percentage of engineering is actually people and politics. The more power (or alternative options) you have, the more you can speak your mind. But if you need the job then argue your case just to the boss, discreetly.

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

#103

Post by 1970-01-01 »

jiaosdjf wrote: post #93
1970-01-01 wrote: post #31

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.

Robots will be the real status-quo changer. Information/office jobs have never really felt real to society, we are all living in a bubble of corporate daycare. Half the jobs being replaced are jobs that didn't exist a decade or two ago that the average person on the street doesn't even know exist. The rest of society unfortunately have to work "real" jobs where they have to turn up early to do things like stocking, c…

Full self driving is next. Gig delivery jobs such as Doordasher and Lyft have single digit years remaining.

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

#104

Post by vanuatu »

bogzz wrote: post #81
vanuatu wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- 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

Again though, these recommendations are so vacuous. If you already are a capable developer, then you can pick all of that up within a week. "Learn AI skills" is such a low effort reflexive response that I'd expect it from a non-technical executive, not from an HN commenter.

You'd be surprised, I used to do a first round technical screen where we let the interviewee use any ai tool they want to build a simple api (and they can oneshot the problem if they just pasted it into any capable agent). I quite liked the problem, it was really a system design problem for senior+ but more algorithmic for junior/mid

The more senior the candidate the less they took advantage of the tools. Most commonly they would manually copy/paste error or syntax errors and then run out of time. One candidate only copy pasted his questions into google and used the AI overview

Junior candidates tended to be overly ai eager, a lot of them oneshotted the problem but were unable to explain any of the details

That being said I think 80% of the skills should come easily to a capable dev that is willing to put in the effort to learn and get used to managing agents. Building agents that perform work themselves is a lot harder (and still pretty unsolved)

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

#105

Post by risyachka »

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…

If you find a proper senior dev - it will be like 10 or more of that junior you described.

Because you can’t shortcut experience. And AI multiplies that.

I’ve seen what ai-focused good senior dev can do and it is scary.

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

#107

Post by darth_avocado »

throw849494499 wrote: post #100
asdfman123 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the AI transition is different than old technological changes in that you don't really have to learn anything. You don't have to memorize keywords and new concepts like you'd have to for, say, a new JavaScript framework. If you don't know something about AI, you can just ask it and it will tell you. Basically the only hard part for old people is getting USED to using AI. Some haven't, but it only takes a few week…

[flagged]

Why not use your actual account instead of creating a throwaway one if you feel so comfortable saying this?

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

#108

Post by SoftTalker »

asdfman123 wrote: post #48
georgeburdell wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But the AI transition is different than old technological changes in that you don't really have to learn anything. You don't have to memorize keywords and new concepts like you'd have to for, say, a new JavaScript framework. If you don't know something about AI, you can just ask it and it will tell you. Basically the only hard part for old people is getting USED to using AI. Some haven't, but it only takes a few week…

Yeah that's my feeling about it. I don't code much these days so have not used AI very much in that respect, so for me it's basically a superpowered search agent that can formulate relevant answers based on the details I provide, without the "why do you want to do that" or "tell us what you're really trying to achieve" that you'd so often get on tech forums.

But if I had to use AI for coding I don't think that it would take me very much time at all to get into the swing of it. I wrote code by hand for decades, so I know how to judge whether it's producing something that looks reasonable.

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

#109

Post by EagnaIonat »

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…

Depends on the nature of the work. In highly specialised work the junior would train with a senior while the senior can offload the easier work.

Now the senior can use the AI instead of dealing with a junior.

Plus the biggest danger I’ve seen numerous times is the junior engineer can’t easily tell if the AI is wrong.

They either accept it as correct or spend more time trying to fix AI output with an AI in an area they don’t have the skills for.

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

#110

Post by Kim_Bruning »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #62
asdfman123 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the AI transition is different than old technological changes in that you don't really have to learn anything. You don't have to memorize keywords and new concepts like you'd have to for, say, a new JavaScript framework. If you don't know something about AI, you can just ask it and it will tell you. Basically the only hard part for old people is getting USED to using AI. Some haven't, but it only takes a few week…

>If you don't know something about AI, you can just ask it and it will tell you. If your questions are sharp, probing for detail, and intelligent . Have you seen how people question AIs? It's as if they can't even conceive of the AI being able to supply specific detail.

I'd love to see examples of that! Just from debates on HN alone, I get the idea that there's huge deltas, and I'm getting really really curious.
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