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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

#111

Post by elmer2 »

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…

On the contrary, new generations are skipping the fundamentals and using AI instead.

Seniors will become more valuable as that knowledge is lost and AI isn't capable of full replacenent.

I use AI daily and it takes almost no extra brain power to use.

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

#112

Post by dimaaan »

A_SIGINT wrote: post #82
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.

Can you give me an email to reach out to you at? My company may need an intern/Junior here soon. I'd be happy to take a look at his resume. Fully remote, Full stack .NET in addition to AI/Python/data-science work

Honestly, that is way too much for a junior.

I'd side-eye that list as senior .NET dev full stack.

You're asking one person to do frontend/js/css, backend/databases/Redis/MQ, and Python with all that math behind data-science, but i doubt he can understand and review all of this

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

#113

Post by bogzz »

vanuatu wrote: post #104
bogzz wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 common…

But I don't believe what you've said disproves my point. To me, it boils down to attitude, not so much aptitude when it comes to "AI skills" in this context. You even admitted that some of the solutions could be one-shotted by copying and pasting the problem.

As for building agents that perform work themselves, in my opinion it boils down to understanding the problem space, isolating the key business logic, and determining what the pertinent requirements are. Kinda sounds like looping back around to software engineering skills IMO.

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

#114

Post by kcexn »

lovich wrote: post #76
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.

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…

You can't really force someone to work for X years at a place they don't want to. I don't know if what you're describing is an enforceable contract term.

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

#115

Post by kcexn »

jambalaya8 wrote: post #88

Most of these jobs were already essentially taken away by outsourcing. It is so disturbing that countries like Australia only offer work visas for jobs that are difficult to fill, and only in certain locations as needed, but America actually encourages the ouster of skilled local talent for immigrants.

Australia's bar for skilled employment is pretty low and deflates wages as well. That's before we get into the prevalence of exploiting working holiday visas for practically slave wages.

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

#116

Post by A_SIGINT »

dimaaan wrote: post #112
A_SIGINT wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give me an email to reach out to you at? My company may need an intern/Junior here soon. I'd be happy to take a look at his resume. Fully remote, Full stack .NET in addition to AI/Python/data-science work

Honestly, that is way too much for a junior. I'd side-eye that list as senior .NET dev full stack. You're asking one person to do frontend/js/css, backend/databases/Redis/MQ, and Python with all that math behind data-science, but i doubt he can understand and review all of this

Of course I wouldn't give all that to a Junior! It's just what they could expect to work with if they stayed long term.

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

#117

Post by vanuatu »

bogzz wrote: post #113
vanuatu wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 common…

But I don't believe what you've said disproves my point. To me, it boils down to attitude, not so much aptitude when it comes to "AI skills" in this context. You even admitted that some of the solutions could be one-shotted by copying and pasting the problem. As for building agents that perform work themselves, in my opinion it boils down to understanding the problem space, isolating the key business logic, and deter…

To be clear, I think young people need to learn traditional software engineering skills too (.. maybe having the wrong attitude towards it is even worse than the aptitude!) A junior with no foundational SWE skills will just become a meat wrapper. But thinking more about it I wouldn't discredit these "AI skills" so much. A lot of it is either using AI as a force multiplier or learning the specific skills around deploying it which I'd still categorize as 'AI skills'

building agents is just a completely different ballgame, theres a lot of infra and harness engineering around handling the nondeterministic behaviors that are nonobvious unless you've shipped agents at scale

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

#118

Post by MSKJ »

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.

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

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

#119

Post by francisofascii »

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…

How are the youngest more productive than the seniors? As an aside, I have seen that the newest employees are performing better than those hired during Covid. I think the quality of recent hires are just better because no one is hiring, and so many quality candidates are available.

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

#120

Post by cheesecakegood »

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.

It’s almost impossible to prove that you aren’t one of these people though. People like me get hurt by this, collateral damage.
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