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AI Is Wrecking Young Americans' Job Prospects

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Re: AI Is Wrecking Young Americans' Job Prospects

#81

Post by JumpCrisscross »

codyklimdev wrote: post #78
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> now it's only 52 million? You're moving the goalposts. There is no paradox--the job market is down and so is immigration. [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/08/21/key-findi...

Doesn't change the fact that H1-Bers have turned the US IT job market harmfully hyper-competitive for US citizens.

> Doesn't change the fact that H1-Bers have turned the US IT job market harmfully hyper-competitive for US citizens

Sure, maybe. I don't know. I don't think that explains why "since the widespread adoption of generative AI, early-career workers (ages 22-25) in the most AI-exposed occupations have experienced a 13 percent relative decline in employment even after controlling for firm-level shocks. In contrast, employment for workers in less exposed fields and more experienced workers in the same occupations has remained stable or continued to grow" [1].

Unless the ratio of H1Bs in these fields to recent-college graduates has exploded in the last 5 years, immigration is not a sufficient explanation for the effect.

[1] https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/...

Re: AI Is Wrecking Young Americans' Job Prospects

#82

Post by JumpCrisscross »

frankbreetz wrote: post #69
ecb_penguin wrote: post #10

This could be the next iteration of stealing talent to prevent others from owning the market. An actually intelligent investor could dominate by bucking the trend and hire lots of smart, eager junior candidates. When other tech companies realize GenAI will never produce what they want, there will be a rush to re-hire developers. Top talent all started as junior talent. Grab that pool so nobody else will have it.

The issue with hiring many juniors is, when there is another dev boom, all the juniors that were hired, now mids or seniors, are going to jump ship to whoever is going to pay them the most. So, the company can either grow talent and then pay them market rate or hire at market rates from other companies that grew them. Hiring juniors, while good for the industry in the long run, doesn't really benefit an individual co…

> Hiring juniors, while good for the industry in the long run, doesn't really benefit an individual company

If this is really a concern, require a long-term employment contract from incoming candidates.

Re: AI Is Wrecking Young Americans' Job Prospects

#83

Post by mothballed »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #79
mothballed wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't attempted to explain why new grads are facing a worse market than 10 years ago. I've offered two possible explanations for why more students might move into computer science. A rational actor is going to be more likely to pursue something they think they can actually pass.

> I've offered two possible explanations for why more students might move into computer science If grade inflation is happening to all degrees, that doesn't explain increased enrollment in CS. (I'm generally curious if part of the explanation is a reduction in CS education quality.)

>(I'm generally curious if part of the explanation is a reduction in CS education quality.)

Part of my explanation was a possible increase in quality of CS education for industry, as I mentioned, it is possible they geared it more towards industry than pure CS encouraging more students to go in.

>If grade inflation is happening to all degrees, that doesn't explain increased enrollment in CS.

It does because CS is (was?) a notoriously more difficult program. Since it is one of the highest paying degrees, making that difficulty of passing more accessible would naturally shift money oriented people more into CS.

Re: AI Is Wrecking Young Americans' Job Prospects

#84

Post by mlinhares »

gspencley wrote: post #75
ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you have it backwards, and the future is gloomy because AI is wrecking young american's job prospects. Is it possible to stay better than AI? Maybe for some people. Not for the average person. The results of that are one of the largest contributors to the gloomy future (among other things).

> Is it possible to stay better than AI? Maybe for some people. Not for the average person. I know we're talking broadly across all industries but I can only speak to what I know and am able to observe directly. My opinion of the average software developer with a few years experience is not very high. Yet now that we have non-coders shipping features written with LLMs, and we're starting to observe the fallout from t…

Wait but the job was to churn as many lines of code as possible, wasn’t it?

Re: AI Is Wrecking Young Americans' Job Prospects

#85

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

generic92034 wrote: post #64
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man, I wish I had your optimism. I can see us entering "post-work", but that's only because those who own the means of production no longer require us, and our resulting crises will be much lower on Maslow's Heirarchy of Needs.

Production for whom, though? At least any growth paradigm immediately dies without a mass of consumers. Billionaires can only consume so much.

Well, at the moment both "growth" and "wealth" have been removed from a lot humanity, having been abstracted into a market that most people can barely, if at all, participate in, and that has nearly entirely moved away from "you're worth $x because you make x widgets". I can't image that will disappear.

Re: AI Is Wrecking Young Americans' Job Prospects

#86

Post by JumpCrisscross »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #65
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> immigration up "In January 2025, 53.3 million immigrants lived in the United States – the largest number ever recorded. In the ensuing months, however, more immigrants left the country or were deported than arrived. By June, the country’s foreign-born population had shrunk by more than a million people, marking its first decline since the 1960s" [1]. [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/08/21/key-findi.…

Foreign born went from 4.7% of the population, to an modern high of 15.8% and has slightly backed off to 15.4% in the last year. So we are within .4 of the high point.

I'm not saying we don't have a ton of immigration. But immigration generally booms when the job market is strong. We aren't currently seeing an anomaly; the job market is weak and immigration is down.

The absolute level remains historically, though not unprecedentedly, high. But that's part of a 50-year trend that I am sceptical explains a <5-year change specific to software development.

Re: AI Is Wrecking Young Americans' Job Prospects

#87

Post by mlinhares »

spacephysics wrote: post #33
mlinhares wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, just maybe, the reason is that the economy is moving towards the dumps and nobody is hiring or firing, because they know the future is gloomy. But it makes it much nicer to say its AI that's stealing jobs to create even more hype.

Especially given how the gov stats for unemployment rate and CPI have been changed over the years. Example, if you dig into who we technically consider unemployed in that number, you’ll laugh. Let’s say after 6 months of emails and ghost listings you take a break, you’re now considered “not in the labor force” which is the same category as retirees and full-time students. So that “improves” the unemployment rate Not…

Odd Lots has done a lot of interviews with Fed members these past few days as they were in Jackson Hole and they all said that "now the data looks right" as they were talking to businesses everyone was saying they weren't hiring but the job numbers had remained high. One even said he'd expect to see even worse revisions in the coming months given the anecdotal data he's seeing in the wild.

So yeah, i'd say most of this AI stuff is bullshit, if it was really this good Sam Altman wouldn't be talking about building social networks.

Re: AI Is Wrecking Young Americans' Job Prospects

#88

Post by bwfan123 »

mothballed wrote: post #36
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> companies are just now trending towards running leaner vs hiring every good engineer available during ZIRP This sounds more like overproduction of entry-level computer scientists than anything AI or hiring managers are up to.

I suspect it is also universities realizing that (pure) computer science has low demand so they shifted their program to either focus it on more industry-geared education, or dumb-dumbed the grade-inflation (data backs this up) enough the masses had the confidence to do it.

> focus it on more industry-geared education

I was told that a student can now get a CS degree without courses in OS, Compilers, Programming Languages, theory of computing etc. The argument being that a vast majority of jobs do not ever use the above. That may have caused a flood of grads with a shaky knowledge of the basics. The idea that software engineering is not really a science but more of a trade for which anyone could be trained without a formal degree has some shades of truth.

But in my experience, technology changes so fast that someone with a better grasp of the basics can evolve with the tech since they understand the fundamentals better. LLMs really separate those who can critique and correct its output, and those that blindly follow it, and the former will continue to have jobs.

Re: AI Is Wrecking Young Americans' Job Prospects

#89

Post by WillPostForFood »

mlinhares wrote: post #17
xpe wrote: post #12

How many people are just assuming the study is true or false based on what you already think is the case? Better instead to use our collective brain power for something more productive. Such as digging into the various possible causal factors and understanding if the paper properly addresses and disentangles them.

Maybe, just maybe, the reason is that the economy is moving towards the dumps and nobody is hiring or firing, because they know the future is gloomy. But it makes it much nicer to say its AI that's stealing jobs to create even more hype.

The paper tries to directly address this by showing that job market for young software devs is much worse than other occupations that aren't as affected by AI. If it was broad economic decline or fear, you'd expect to it affect job types more broadly.

Re: AI Is Wrecking Young Americans' Job Prospects

#90

Post by thmsths »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #37
BurningFrog wrote: post #29

This will be very interesting. So far in the Industrial Revolution, automating away jobs has been how we've getting richer and richer for centuries. If AI automates away half of all jobs, and this holds we will - after an adjustment period - double GDP and collectively be twice as wealthy! If that actually happens, it solves many currently "unsolvable" societal problems. I'm pretty sure that it does, but the adjustme…

> If AI automates away half of all jobs This is a big if!

I agree to a degree. I don't see the current crop of AIs doing that. However, this might happen eventually (when is basically impossible to predict) and there is some benefit in pondering what to do if it happens, before it actually happens.
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