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

151–160 of 188 posts

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

#151

Post by mk89 »

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 agree because there was always this "well, you don't have experience...".

Wtf of course i don't, otherwise i would not apply for a junior role!

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

#152

Post by mk89 »

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.

Make him do side projects, something he can explain and be proud of. Online communities, some github projects he might be interested, ...anything.

Let him contribute to something, yes for free, so that potential future coworkers can see 1) who he is, 2) what he can do, 3) how he approaches people.

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

#154

Post by esafak »

dimaaan wrote: post #148
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…

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/…

I had a junior happily accept the agent's suggestions, bugs and all. Her productivity ended with her tenure; meat proxies add no value.

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

#155

Post by xboxnolifes »

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.

Sure you can, it's effectively the same contract agreement as a sign-on bonus that requires you to stay for at least 6 months. Instead it's training cost that you get saddled with if you leave before X time. Of course, the exact monetary value would have to be spelled out ahead of time.

Well, I say sure you can, but I'm not a contract lawyer. It just sounds identical to me. You're not forced to stay, but if you end the contract you have to pay.

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

#156

Post by whatshisface »

Marsymars wrote: post #57
vineyardmike wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not seeing the reason why typical engineers can't vibecode. Non-coders can vibecode. I have read hundreds of posts claiming that senior engineers can vibecode but not a single one saying that juniors cannot.

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

#157

Post by Marsymars »

whatshisface wrote: post #156
Marsymars wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I'm not seeing the reason why typical engineers can't vibecode. Non-coders can vibecode. I have read hundreds of posts claiming that senior engineers can vibecode but not a single one saying that juniors cannot.

I'm not saying they can't, but rather that with the time seniors then spend cleaning up their tricky bugs, architectural problems, etc. the seniors could have just done the work themselves.

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

#158

Post by ChiperSoft »

gen220 wrote: post #150

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…

For those who don't know the acronym: ZIRP = Zero Interest Rate Policy

And yes, when I saw the headline my first thought was "it's not AI, nobody is expanding their staff".

When interest rates are high, companies and investors don't take out loans, which means no capital for new projects.

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

#159

Post by FpUser »

pianopatrick wrote: post #129
FpUser wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"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.

>"I won't get in your way."

Smart choice

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

#160

Post by DeluluDon »

dimaaan wrote: post #101
glimshe wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, this is why 60% now prefer being single.
Post reply on HN