It is strange to read an article that is not about ageism in tech as it normally has been.
Maybe people will learn to learn from each other and together moving forward.
Generative AI as Seniority-Biased Technological Change
161–170 of 197 posts
Re: Generative AI as Seniority-Biased Technological Change
#162New Harvard's study (62M workers, 285k firms) shows firms adopting generative AI cut junior hiring sharply while continuing to grow senior roles — eroding the bottom rungs of career ladders and reshaping how careers start.
What was the incentive for companies to train juniors into seniors in the past, post job-hopping era? Curious to know if that incentive has warped in the past two decades or so as someone who's starting their career now.
>> What was the incentive for companies to train juniors into seniors in the past, post job-hopping era?
You get a lot in the interim!!! I started at Andersen Consulting (now Accenture.) The annual attrition was ~20%, but they still invested over a year of training into me.
But it worked:
- They needed grunt work in early years (me, working 75hr billable weeks). Not sure how much of this is viable now given LLMs
- They had great margins on the other four years. Not sure how much of this is viable now, as margins have shrunk in the past 25yrs as there is more way competition
- They used me to train the next cohort in years 4/5
- I appreciated the training and give them 60hr billable weeks on average for five years
It was a brutal and exhausing five years but i'm forever thankful to AndersenConsulting/Accenture for the experience.
Re: Generative AI as Seniority-Biased Technological Change
#163It's pretty clear this is happening. The question is... is this based on existing capability of LLMs to do these jobs? Or are companies doing this on the expectation that AI is advanced enough to pick up the slack? I have observed a disconnect in which management is typically far more optimistic about AI being capable of performing a specific task than are the workers who currently perform that task. And to what exte…
I've yet to see any company show actual factual revenue increase from employing AI. So I doubt they have created the internal analysis structures to ensure what exactly they're using AI for.
"Revenue" is the wrong metric to track.
Even if a company has somehow managed to successfully replace all human labor with AI and fire 100% of its human workforce, the revenue wouldn't necessarily spike.
Re: Generative AI as Seniority-Biased Technological Change
#164It's pretty clear this is happening. The question is... is this based on existing capability of LLMs to do these jobs? Or are companies doing this on the expectation that AI is advanced enough to pick up the slack? I have observed a disconnect in which management is typically far more optimistic about AI being capable of performing a specific task than are the workers who currently perform that task. And to what exte…
One issue we're running into at my job: we're struggling to find entry-level candidates who aren't lying about what they know by using an LLM. For the tech side, we've reduced behavioral questions and created an interview that allows people to use cursor, LLMs, etc. in the interview - that way, it's impossible to cheat. We have folks build a feature on a fake code base. Unfortunately, more junior folks now seem to st…
The thing about entry-level candidates is that we expect them to know relatively little, anyway. When I've been delegated to participate in interviewing new candidates, a question I really like is "What's your favorite project you've worked on lately? What was interesting about it? Run into any tricky problems along the way? It can be anything: for work, school, a hobby project. Doesn't even need to software".
It slices through the bullshit fast. Either the person I'm interviewing is a passionate problem solver, and will be tripping over themselves to describe whatever oddball thing they've been working on, or they're either a charlatan or simply not cut out for the work. My sneaking suspicion is that we could achieve similar levels of success in hiring for entry level positions at my current company if we cut out literally the entirety of the rest of the interviews, asked that one question, and hired the first person to answer well.
Re: Generative AI as Seniority-Biased Technological Change
#165We had some marketing folks give us a company-wide demo of Chat GPT and some other Gen AI tools and showed us how cool it is and how quick they can make stylish and sophisticated pitch decks and marketing materials now. And the entire time I'm watching this I'm just thinking that they don't realize that they are only demonstrating the tools that are going to replace their own jobs. Kinda sad, really. Demand for soft…
but i guess to me the question is: if you're management, do you expect your workers to do more/work faster (like a TAS in a way)? or do you expect to replace your workers entirely? I personally think we're still a ways from the latter...
I expect less time spent on boilerplate and documentation, and more time spent on iterating, experimenting, and increasing customer satisfaction. I also wouldn't accept "I don't know how to do that" as an answer. Instead, I'd encourage "I don't know how to do that, but I can use AI to learn faster, and also seek out someone with experience to help review my work".
Re: Generative AI as Seniority-Biased Technological Change
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
The question of reasoning doesn't really matter once you show its happening. When you constrict the market like they have done, you naturally get distortions, and the adversarial nature of the market fails to perform economic calculation potentially leading to grave consequences. Even at this point, whipsaws would be quite destructive. I know people who have abandoned their careers due to lack of job availability for…
How does one concretely prepare for socio-economic collapse, beyond taking a long position in canned goods?
There are a lot of ways one can prepare for such a collapse, the most impactful way is to develop skills and preserve knowledge of history, production, and other important information that is being suppressed or pigeonholed to only industry in foreign countries; to a greater or lesser degree.
Preserve the dependencies that promote critical thinking, rational thought, and measured reason.
Aside from that, figure out what you need for survival beyond the basics in a non-permissive environment without a rule of law; and build a community of people that have these skills. The lone wolf always dies, the pack survives.
Austere Medicine, Food Preservation, Guns/Self Defense, Information Recon, etc... Map dependencies, costs, and yields (information that is largely kept confidential these days).
Learn how to make stuff from scratch, and learn what areas you can leapfrog given knowledge of the development of such the technologies in such industries.
Most of the materials we rely on today would not be available because we rely on knowledge of chemistry which few have.
The actual factors that determine the Wealth of Nations are based in the ability of the individual citizen to be self sufficient and produce necessities from scratch that will last without excessive recurring cost. Through a distribution of labor. The book from Adam Smith covers these factors in great detail, and while LTV is now defunct/refuted, the cost portion implicit in the making of intermediate goods resulting from such valuation/economics is not, and remains valid.
Debt-based money-printing on the otherhand is all about distorting the market allowing nationalized industry to outcompete legitimate companies through slave labor under financial engineering. The debasement stolen from everyone holding the currency is in fact slave labor. A runaway positive feedback system that destroys everything it touches (eventually), tainted by Ahriman.
Re: Generative AI as Seniority-Biased Technological Change
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
From your lips to Blackrock's ears.
I'm sorry, I don't understand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackRock
They are the world’s largest asset manager. So goes the economy, so goes the economic outcome of their clients.
Re: Generative AI as Seniority-Biased Technological Change
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
Birth rates are of course the only thing which matters. If your car runs out of gas, it will still roll for a small stretch, but it is irrelevant.
I don't know what you're saying. >Practically the whole planet is experiencing population decline now. That's objectively false.
It's easy to understand, how can you not understand? Any population increase is just a very short and temporary happening when births are below replacement level. Which they are in almost every country on the globe, with a few exceptions.
Re: Generative AI as Seniority-Biased Technological Change
#169The tragedy of the commons: companies acting in their self interest at the expense of the industry by drying up the workforce pipeline. The next generation will pay, like when America stopped producing hardware. This is cause for government intervention.
Unfortunately, the government intervention will, if anything, probably just be to increase the number of Visas granted. It's the easiest and fastest fix.
Re: Generative AI as Seniority-Biased Technological Change
#170Interestingly, the authors do at least acknowledge the alternative hypotheses that we wonder about (including this thread) in studies like this:
> Some observers have also linked AI to recent labor market trends: since late 2022, unemployment among recent college graduates has risen sharply, even as the unemploy-ment rate for young workers overall has remained steady (Appendix Figure A.1). Others, however, question the importance of AI in these developments, pointing to alternative factors such as economic uncertainty, post-Covid retrenchment, and increased offshoring (e.g., Financial Times, 2025).
(No mention of ZIRP. Also, they used LLMs to classify data, so there's that.)
I only had a quick look, and IANAE, but while the study does not discuss these factors any further, their methodology may implicitly account for them. Briefly, the study looks at employment of junior employees vs senior employees over the last 2 years across a bunch of companies that it categorizes as AI adopters vs non-adopters (based on an admittedly very narrow definition of "adoption".)
It finds that starting in 2023 Q1, the hiring of juniors dropped sharply while that of seniors kept growing in firms that adopted AI compared to non-adopters. Given this approach, maybe those confounding factors cancel out? Like, why would economic uncertainty, offshoring, ZIRP or whatever impact only firms adopting AI and not others within the same sector?
Some other interesting findings:
- Juniors who do get hired, get promoted more quickly, likely due to lower competition. Could be yet another mechanism that increases the gap between the haves and the have-nots.
- The biggest effects are in the wholesale / retail trade sector, which is surprising because offhand, I would not have thought this sector to be much impacted by AI.
I follow some labor economists and these findings align a lot with what they've been saying about the job reports over the years.
Another very interesting finding is that graduates of mid-tier colleges are impacted the most, whereas elite and "less selective" institutions are least affected. Something to consider when evaluating the ROI of tuition for a given college...