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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

#181

Post by eudamoniac »

y-curious wrote: post #41
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.

We hired one junior out of maybe 10 hires. I don’t really know where to slot them in currently, as they lack the background knowledge of what is good or bad from AI. It’s a shame because years ago, I would have hired them and pointed them at a million small projects. Best of luck to your son. I wish I had advice

My opinion is that juniors should be barred from using AI and have a compensation structure heavily based around long-term vesting. This lets you train them properly without wasting a bunch of money if they leave right after getting trained.

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

#182

Post by eudamoniac »

vanuatu wrote: post #104
bogzz wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You'd be surprised, I used to do a first round technical screen where we let the interviewee use any ai tool they want to build a simple api (and they can oneshot the problem if they just pasted it into any capable agent). I quite liked the problem, it was really a system design problem for senior+ but more algorithmic for junior/mid The more senior the candidate the less they took advantage of the tools. Most common…

I had a similar interview and I find it to be a stupid question. Of course I know AI can oneshot it, and of course I know you know it can. But I'm aware this is an interview so you're probably assessing something about my skills. Pasting the prompt doesn't assess anything so surely that isn't what you want me to do, so I don't do that. Instead I have to magically divine what level of involvement you're hoping to see on a scale from vibecode to handmade. The whole thing provides literally no information to the interviewer about real work processes, because the intelligent candidate will behave differently in this situation than they would at work.

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

#183

Post by 33e »

randycupertino wrote: post #98
33e wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is this? Is it partly influenced by the fact that LinkedIn etc suck?

I think it's trust. If you worked with someone and you know they are awesome and you are running a team you want to hire people who are known entities that you know will hit their deliverables, do a great job and won't be weird or cause friction with cross functional teams. Also of course there's always politics to navigate. I had a candidate I loved for my team who made it through 8 rounds and panel interview with s…

I asked that question, expecting this response. I think there's something deeper at play.

E.g. under traditional hiring you only do a background check at the end - this means there are implicit decisions being made that nobody calls out explicitly during the process.

The reality is any person in an org actually has to act in the interest of the shareholders - people who are lower down the totem pole do what their manager says - but the manager of a manager of a manager is held accountable by the shareholders via the board. Shareholders want who is the best person not who is someone's preferred hire (which can be for reasons that have nothing to do with productivity). If there was a way to enforce this - you can bet they would.

Essentially what I'm saying is, because the existing systems suck we fall back on mechanisms like this.

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

#184

Post by bcjdjsndon »

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…

> Blacksmiths, wheelwrights, and wainwrights transitioned to auto mechanic or carpentry work.

Not the same as the horse and cart operator, for various reasons... Maybe the wheelwright? But even that seems like a specialism of carpentry

> It really was the horse people that lost out the most. That's why the idiomatic reference is for buggy whips, not so much for buggies themselves.

.... Had you forgotten what I'd wrote by the time you got to this point?

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

#185

Post by bcjdjsndon »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #147
da_chicken wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Horses as a pet obviously weren't affected by the internal combustion engine lol you can't swap out a two stroke for old long features

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

#186

Post by y-curious »

eudamoniac wrote: post #181
y-curious wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We hired one junior out of maybe 10 hires. I don’t really know where to slot them in currently, as they lack the background knowledge of what is good or bad from AI. It’s a shame because years ago, I would have hired them and pointed them at a million small projects. Best of luck to your son. I wish I had advice

My opinion is that juniors should be barred from using AI and have a compensation structure heavily based around long-term vesting. This lets you train them properly without wasting a bunch of money if they leave right after getting trained.

Theoretically, I’m with you, but that’s not the reality of anything anymore. Kids are barred from using AI for schoolwork yet they crank it all through Claude anyways. At least with children you can blame impulse control and lack of foresight. Juniors just get trained to do it through college

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

#187

Post by bcjdjsndon »

tfrancisl wrote: post #22
bcjdjsndon wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Entry-level jobs are an obvious place to look things that can be cut to create an AI budget. Kitchen potwasher, day labourer, apprentice welder etc none of these entry level jobs are affected by an LLM. But nobody on HN works in those industries.... connection maybe?

It's not what the article or study are about. Theyre about entry level white collar jobs.

Is it? I can't find a list of job titles but I saw it included manufacturing industries...

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

#188

Post by joquarky »

asdfman123 wrote: post #169
SoftTalker wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah that's my feeling about it. I don't code much these days so have not used AI very much in that respect, so for me it's basically a superpowered search agent that can formulate relevant answers based on the details I provide, without the "why do you want to do that" or "tell us what you're really trying to achieve" that you'd so often get on tech forums. But if I had to use AI for coding I don't think that it wou…

Yep, that's been my experience of it. Fun note though, my work these days often involves telling AI to solve a problem and me asking it why it wants to do something a certain way. It often has to patiently explain something like why the bazel rules need to be modified to accomplish my ends goals, and has to reiterate key concepts about a part of the codebase I'm unfamiliar with these days. Really the only reason I'm…

> telling AI to solve a problem and me asking it why it wants to do something a certain way

Just keep your guard up for when the answer to "why" may be just a post-hoc "rationalization".

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