Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 188 posts

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

#121

Post by JeremyNT »

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 don’t understand this logic. If I’m being honest, the most productive people with AI on my team are the two youngest.

It's high variance. A young person can move fast because they lack the accrued assumptions of a senior, but that also means they can quickly move in the wrong direction because they lack the wisdom to identify mistakes before they pile up.

"Use AI" isn't really a skill, getting an implementation is now as easy as google for an answer was for our generation. A senior can trivially learn this. But sniffing out the bullshit and knowing when you're going astray still requires a critical eye that not everybody is going to have.

So it seems reasonable to me that moving more slowly and being more cautious, letting the uncs use their knowledge to keep things from going too far afield, is a really smart idea.

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

#123

Post by danans »

Another impact that doesn't get discussed as much when the primary discussion is around job elimination is the downward pressure on software engineering salaries. Of course it's a different scenario if you are working at a frontier AI company, but outside of that, software engineers are becoming cheaper (relative to inflation) while they simultaneously get more productive due to LLMS.

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

#124

Post by r_lee »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #103
jiaosdjf wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

saw an article about former Lyft drivers now cleaning Waymos

it really is something

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

#125

Post by lovich »

kcexn wrote: post #114
lovich wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The terms involve the person paying back the training costs or some penalty if they quit before X years.

I saw it once at the beginning of my career but that was nearly 15 years ago.

US companies are usually unwilling to enter into any contract with labor because they want the ability to renege on the deal at will, hence the at will states.

You see companies making contracts like this with other companies all the time, so I can only assume it’s a cultural value to never make a deal with labor.

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

#126

Post by bogzz »

vanuatu wrote: post #117
bogzz wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 deploy…

I'm not discrediting them as being of no value, I am just discrediting the notion that devs who are unable to find work now should be beefing up their AI skills so that they can get a job in the future. "AI skills" as they are talked about are easier and quicker to pick up than working with a library, e.g. React. And if they are not difficult to learn, then they are not a differentiator nor should they be treated as such.

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

#127

Post by wuschel »

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…

> 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

Is it Software or another problem domain? What problem are they attacking, what stack/method are they using?

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

#128

Post by cheesecakegood »

I feel like we need to take a page from the past. Apprenticeships with lock-in. Sponsorships. And so on.

Imagine if even one billionaire dedicated themselves to be a modern “patron of the arts” on a more down-to-earth level. Imagine if people started to run “adopt-a-student” type frameworks for individuals. If fresh grads found it easy to get “grants” for things. And so on.

The first job is often a bit “take a chance on me” in its paradigm, but companies these days don’t want bets, they want sure things. Unfortunately this is to some extent unrealistic, but also it’s true that cutting out entry level roles entirely does cut down on uncertainty. It cuts down on upside too, but that’s more invisible.

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

#129

Post by pianopatrick »

FpUser wrote: post #71
pianopatrick wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would plan based on the lost jobs not coming back. I would also plan that the trend of AI getting better and taking more jobs will continue. Plan for the worst, hope for the best. A lot of people may have to transition to careers that people do not want to have AI do, like nursing. The earlier you start such a transition the easier it is because you still have resources to make moves.

>"A lot of people may have to transition to careers that people do not want to have AI do, like nursing." Becoming bum or going off the grid would be way more attractive to me than working my ass of in stressful conditions for meager pay so some motherfuckers can buy yet another yacht

Suit yourself, I won't get in your way.

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

#130

Post by tstrimple »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #110
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

[dead]
Post reply on HN