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AI Is Wrecking Young Americans' Job Prospects

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Re: AI Is Wrecking Young Americans' Job Prospects

#91

Post by WillPostForFood »

mlinhares wrote: post #87
spacephysics wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

The data in the study shows a strong trend going back to 2022. Whether the more recent data gets revised or not, you can see a strong negative effect on young workers.

Re: AI Is Wrecking Young Americans' Job Prospects

#92

Post by simonsarris »

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.

That is what my company does except we basically hire out of high school. After the founders, 100% of our employees (including myself) were hired directly as high school interns, kept for years during college, and got offers after graduation.

I wrote about this a bit. I wish we could hire more. I am kind of shocked how few companies do it. There are a LOT of smart kids who would love a summer programming job.

https://simonsarris.com/p/growing-software-developers

Re: AI Is Wrecking Young Americans' Job Prospects

#93

Post by taco_emoji »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #82
frankbreetz wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unethical bullshit, but sure

Re: AI Is Wrecking Young Americans' Job Prospects

#94

Post by the_snooze »

bwfan123 wrote: post #88
mothballed wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 any…

>The argument being that a vast majority of jobs do not ever use the above.

Yikes. At that point, it's really not much of a "CS" degree. It's a trade program that teaches you how to use particular programming languages and frameworks.

Someone with that background is in a brittle position. They won't be able to pivot as easily to different technologies when things inevitably change. And they'll be ill-equipped to handle interesting open-ended projects where it's up to them to decide what approaches to use, how to bound problems, how to reason through trade-offs, and what lessons to take from prior work.

Re: AI Is Wrecking Young Americans' Job Prospects

#95

Post by rchaud »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #54
rchaud wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The future is gloomy because the American economy has largely been in a state of "jobless recovery" since thr great recession. Stock prices are up thanks to corporate tax cuts, ZIRP, AI hype etc, but discretionary income is either stagnant in many sectors or are being chipped away from every angle: rent, healthcare, transport, childcare or leisure.

> discretionary income is either stagnant in many sectors or are being chipped away from every angle: rent, healthcare, transport, childcare or leisure This is false. Real disposable personal income is higher today than any time before March 2020 [1]. Covid stimulus first dramatically raised (March '20 to '21) and then lowered (March '21 to June '22) that figure. But we hit a local maximum in April '25, after which r…

Disposable income is income after taxes. Discretionary income, which is what I specified, is income that remains after the necessities of life have been paid for.

Re: AI Is Wrecking Young Americans' Job Prospects

#96

Post by WillPostForFood »

treve wrote: post #46
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.

Absolutely, and this trend didn't start with the current AI boom. It started getting tough for people around ~2017 (with some exceptions in between). Before that you could likely get a job right out of a boot camp. Supply now has far outweighed demand on the junior level.

The data in the paper shows a clear negative turning point for junior workers in late 2022.

Re: AI Is Wrecking Young Americans' Job Prospects

#97

Post by rchaud »

Esophagus4 wrote: post #77
rchaud wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The future is gloomy because the American economy has largely been in a state of "jobless recovery" since thr great recession. Stock prices are up thanks to corporate tax cuts, ZIRP, AI hype etc, but discretionary income is either stagnant in many sectors or are being chipped away from every angle: rent, healthcare, transport, childcare or leisure.

Speaking to your point about a jobless recovery… that’s not accurate. The US had recovered to full pre-recession employment levels by 2017[1]. Unemployment is around 4% right now. I can’t speak to discretionary income or why the market is high, and maybe there is some sort of structural “underemployment” going on, but people are working. [1] https://www.cbpp.org/research/chart-book-the-legacy-of-the-g...

Uber and Doordash count as "jobs" in the employment rolls. That's fine for people like you and me who probably have full time jobs with benefits and look at employment numbers from the angle of "how does this affect the value of my index fund?" But for the people who have these jobs as their sole source of income and rely on forms of public assistance to make ends, the reality feels far more precarious.

Re: AI Is Wrecking Young Americans' Job Prospects

#98

Post by rpdillon »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #82
frankbreetz wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yep, that's how the military solved it. ROTC trains you, but then you're committed for 4 years.

Re: AI Is Wrecking Young Americans' Job Prospects

#99

Post by dizlexic »

babl-yc wrote: post #25

One crazy stat -- In 2024, 21% of all bachelor's degrees awarded were Computer Science from University of Maryland College Park. It was 3% in 2011. I don't agree with the article that AI is wrecking job prospects. I see it is as companies are just now trending towards running leaner vs hiring every good engineer available during ZIRP. Nonetheless, it's gotta be tough out there for new grads. https://www.usmd.edu/IRIS…

100%, I'm shocked how many articles / doom sayers ignore the explosion in CS grads over the last decade.

I really believe it's just for the headlines.

Re: AI Is Wrecking Young Americans' Job Prospects

#100

Post by WillPostForFood »

rchaud wrote: post #95
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> discretionary income is either stagnant in many sectors or are being chipped away from every angle: rent, healthcare, transport, childcare or leisure This is false. Real disposable personal income is higher today than any time before March 2020 [1]. Covid stimulus first dramatically raised (March '20 to '21) and then lowered (March '21 to June '22) that figure. But we hit a local maximum in April '25, after which r…

Disposable income is income after taxes. Discretionary income, which is what I specified, is income that remains after the necessities of life have been paid for.

Discretionary income spiked during Covid giveaways, and declined during the inflation of 2021/2, but the trend line is up from 2015.

https://i.imgur.com/Dbf8yyU.png

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