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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

#141

Post by smcg »

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…

Hmm, maybe we should tax these corporations and use the money for free education. Crazy idea but it might work.

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

#142

Post by orwin »

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…

In my experience in the past year, new hires, juniors or mid-level programmers (probably even "seniors") who use AI to contribute quickly have a big issue of now ownership or understanding of the code and of the issues that we might encounter. They contribute very little during meeting because they have trouble understanding the subject matter.

We are a network tooling team, and now we think our next hire will be a young network engineer who probably will generate code that we will have to review carefully, but we have to do that anyway, because we can't really afford having our engineers stuck on a basic knowledge of networking issues.

In any case, thanks to AI everything have a SDK so we won't have to make in-house library to automate everything (thousand of hours making libraries for cisco, forti, zscalers and other lost, but to be honest, good riddance), so the demand for engineers in my situation will decrease.

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

#143

Post by AnimalMuppet »

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?

The models are currently not at a place where you can just "type into a prompt box", any more than you could just "type into the IDE". You have to know what and why to type. The models are not at a place where no skill is needed. It may be a different still, but it's still a skill, and it's still a software engineering skill.

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

#144

Post by AnimalMuppet »

heathrow83829 wrote: post #33

i remember seeing the stats presented on moonshots podcast about 3 months ago. they said every quarter, the percentage of CS fresh grads decreased their placement roughly 10% or so and it was down to about 19% at last count and entry level salaries down from 96K to 61k, if i recall.

That's going to put placement at 0% in two more quarters.

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

#145

Post by HolyLampshade »

morkalork wrote: post #65
HolyLampshade wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

These executives are going to get some short-term performance based payout and move to another company while talking up the "Bold AI transformation" they lead waaaay before any fallout kicks in. Notice how there's less "We moved to Cloud / on-prem" slop on LinkedIn? It's because the same people have a new bandwagon to chase.

Of course! I have the curse of working/having worked in the financial sector, so all of the “Linkedin People” I know moved from crypto horseshit to AI horseshit. Before that it’s just as you said, cloud horseshit.

Can’t wait to see what horseshit is next.

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

#146

Post by HolyLampshade »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #70
HolyLampshade wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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. If everyone's middle bench is a disaster, there's no one that did it right to contrast their poor decision-making. They're hiding the evidence that will help them skip accountability.

I think the sad thing is they don’t even have to hide it. Absolutely no one will be held directly accountable for these decisions, either because they’ll be retired, or the “responsibility” can be whitewashed through organizational decision making.

As another commenter mentioned, they’ll all get their performance bonuses, and by the time the bills come due either they’ll be gone, or no one will know why in the hell they’re in the situation they’re in.

Middle bench decay is like some sort of complex immune deficiency. No one can quite put their finger on what’s wrong, but the org can’t pull its collective head out of its ass.

For many companies this happens naturally as it progresses from the dynamic operating environment of high competition to one of maintenance. Staff levels bloat and after a while no one has a grasp on the big picture and the institution forgets why it’s doing what it’s doing.

What’s amazing to me is that these companies that are lighting their hiring process on fire are willingly accelerating this process.

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

#147

Post by AnimalMuppet »

da_chicken wrote: post #38
bcjdjsndon wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did horse and cart operators ever get their jobs back?

I mean... yes. Blacksmiths, wheelwrights, and wainwrights transitioned to auto mechanic or carpentry work. Not all of them, but for most the skills were portable. Several of the carriage-making businesses transitioned to automobiles. Studebaker and Oakland (which became Pontiac), for example. I'm sure the most experienced people lost big, of course, and we shouldn't minimize the damage done to people's livlihoods. Un…

You're right. And yet, just last week I met a farrier - a guy who shoes horses. He's young, too. Went to a horseshoeing school in Cheyenne.

I mentioned it to my daughter. She said, "Rich people are going to keep having horses." I'm pretty sure she's not wrong.

But there's still a lot fewer farriers than there used to be...

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

#148

Post by dimaaan »

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…

From my experience.

There is a reason why youngest developers are more productive. They accept everything Agent suggests. They don't understand or care. They rely on your review of the Agent output from prompt they copy-pasted from JIRA. So you spent your time reviewing it instead of your own work.

From study titled "The Widening Gap: The Benefits and Harms of Generative AI for Novice Programmers" https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/3632620.3671116

>> Without building this solution, and instead just taking what ChatGPT generated, they had skipped crucial steps in the programming problem solving process, and were now lost

When you skip the problem-solving process and take the LLM's first output, you're not building the cognitive framework needed to debug or maintain that code.

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

#149

Post by JDups »

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.

Yeah I've seen a lot of applications and some interviews where what they are looking for the most, by far, is your "AI skills". Questions like: How are you currently using AI day to day?; Can you describe your current agentic setup?; things like that are the only questions asked in the application.

And I don't understand why you would wave away needing to know anything about the codebase's underlying tech because "The AI can take care of all that, we don't need to look at code anymore" while also not believing that any competent developer could prompt AI to get a good setup within a week or two max.

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

#150

Post by gen220 »

It's challenging to disentangle the effects from AI from the cyclical supply and demand cycle of junior engineers in a post-ZIRP world.

People who are currently junior engineers (i.e. graduating class of 2024+) chose their majors in a ZIRP economy (2021 and earlier) that could not hire enough engineers fast enough, but graduated into an economy that was post-ZIRP and is still actively trimming software engineers from the work force (2024 and beyond).

LLMs only became a factor in hiring in the summer of 2025. But by then there was already a massive oversupply (relative to demand) of fresh CS graduates.

My personal opinion is that the market is not (yet) rough because of AI, it's actually mostly just rough because we're not in ZIRP anymore. AI is maybe making it worse on the margin, and is a convenient excuse, insofar as AI is both easier to scapegoat and reason about.

[1]: Software dev job postings on indeed in the US. Peaked in 2021, before falling off a cliff. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE

[2]: % of CS grads relative to all college enrollments; which peaked in class of 2026 (enrollment as of '22). https://www.reveliolabs.com/news/social/computer-science-has...

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