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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

#171

Post by johnnyanmac »

8cvor6j844qw_d6 wrote: post #80
dver wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, it's been tough on him. I'm glad we're able to support him through this, others are not as fortunate. He's looking into pivots now and taking flight lessons.

Just curious if there's really no offer at all or offers with lowballs? I know a 2 of senior devs that got laid off from different times and one is approaching nearly a year of unemployment with no offers and another approaching half a year with few offers but elected to continue looking due the offered salary not matching their expectations.

Been a few years for me. I'm technically "employed" (legally speaking), but I've been trying to find full time work on and off for 3 years, now.

Thousands of applications. Dozens of recruiter calls. Maybe 20 or so processes past that first call. 3-4 that seemed to be going somewhere but went nowhere. One was a ghost after 5 rounds of interviews.

The market isn't just rough, it's downright disrespectful at times.

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

#172

Post by johnnyanmac »

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.

>but the entry-level job market has always been tough.

Sure. But it felt like you were able to be hired on merits and potential bore fruit.

It's just gotten tougher to the point where it feels more like you need to be a part time content creator just to get noticed for a junior role. Not hired: noticed.

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

#173

Post by johnnyanmac »

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.

If we're bring frank: We're not in normal times at all. Not globally, especially not so in the US.

Overall jobs are down. If things start to rise again while tech continues to fall, that's when status quo can truly be considered. Until then, Tech simply seems to be following overall national trends, but a bit faster.

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

#174

Post by preg_match »

theredsix wrote: post #86
bpavuk wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you're getting fired in 2 weeks, it's likely not because of a single comment.

If you’re ever gonna get fired for a single comment, it would be at 2 weeks. I have seen people get fired that early on for a single poor-taste comment to the wrong person. It’s wild, but at 2 weeks you’re completely expendable.

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

#175

Post by vanuatu »

boshalfoshal wrote: post #132
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

The only thing here that _maybe_ has a durable long term moat is the first point. Even then, I don't see why stronger models can't also have discernment once more companies close the loop with their AI and their relevant company metrics. The other 3 you literally just get for free as models improve. The "state of the art" of "prompting" changes literally every week. It was loops, then graphs, now its harnesses (and s…

i mean the meta point is having "AI skills" is understanding the jagged frontier and operating accordingly

Given that we can keep making infinite abstractions with software if we actually saturate software demand with AI then I don't see why every other industry is cooked (robotics is downstream of software).

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

#176

Post by citrin_ru »

ChiperSoft wrote: post #158
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.

> When interest rates are high, companies and investors don't take out loans

And yet companies borrowing for AI capex like never before - total amount of debt is staggering. And it’s not only likes of OpenAI/Anthropic, companies which had positive cash flow for many years started to borrow too.

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

#177

Post by Tade0 »

smcg wrote: post #136
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.

Civil engineering will keep shrinking unless pay goes up. I know a very good civil engineer with 10+ years of experience who switched to software development and doubled his salary.

Yeah - three out of four people I know from that field went into IT, to similar effects.

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

#178

Post by vineyardmike »

smcg wrote: post #141
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…

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

It won’t work. I have nothing against taxation and funding education but the issue isn’t that type of education.

If you work in the industry in a well funded company (the ones who’d be paying these taxes), then you probably have more college-grad applicants than can hire. Probably more than you can hire from “good” schools, some with masters degrees, etc. Maybe education should be subsidized, but theres no lack of volume of people with the formal education today. Top schools (Berkeley, MIT, etc) today are reporting growing unemployment rates among their CS grads. We have more than enough students.

But that formal education isn’t the necessary skill missing. It’s understanding how to structure your work. Learning how to understand the complexity of a problem and estimate how long it’ll take. Learning how to spot future issues during code review (not just bugs and not just optimizations, but “one way doors”, future migration headaches etc). Learning architectural patterns and common prior-art. Even learning to show up on time, be polite in meetings, and navigate office politics.

There are just skills you need to see and practice to understand - you can’t teach them in a classroom. That’s why electricians have apprenticeship and doctors have residency, lawyers clerk and programmers had internships. The difference is that before AI, a young grad with an internship learned enough to answer basic bugs and learn on the job. But now that AI can fix bugs and small tasks faster than a person, the minimum skill threshold has exceeded the on-job training standards.

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

#179

Post by unified101 »

We need to give juniors a way in, and in the AI world honestly the only way i can think of is to maek CS a minimum wage job at the 0 yoe level. Let it ramp to full pay in 6 years.

This way students will make the choice for the longer term, and opportunies will be easy to find for them.

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

#180

Post by chessucation »

jdw64 wrote: post #3

I wish there were studies on when this situation will normalize. Will the lost jobs ever come back? Or not?

it seems that the shift is different in kind from previous ones (but then again, perhaps people thought that about previous labor disruptions as well)

take ATMs. they automated the task but the rung above it remained human. someone to handle exceptions, sell the mortgage, etc. running a branch actually became cheaper. cheaper branches meant more branches, so teller headcount went up for two decades.

what seems different now isn't that the models are better at tasks. it's that the rung above is being climbed at the same time. the coordination layer is getting absorbed concurrently rather than a generation later.

that doesn't mean no new work appears but every historical instance seems to have some kind of "escape route" which i'm not sure exists this time around.

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