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 the work force (2024 and beyond).
LLMs only became a factor in hiring in the summer of 2025. But by then there was already a massive oversupply (relative to demand) of fresh CS graduates.
My personal opinion is that the market is not (yet) rough because of AI, it's actually mostly just rough because we're not in ZIRP anymore. AI is maybe making it worse on the margin, and is a convenient excuse, insofar as AI is both easier to scapegoat and reason about.
> 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.
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.
I don’t understand this logic. If I’m being honest, the most productive people with AI on my team are the two youngest. They don’t have product wisdom, yes, but the gap is so noticeable that I pushed my manager to forego the full-time work experience requirement that we have always had so that new hires don’t even know the old way of working and can just reframe the field in terms of AI.
AI is the biggest threat in over a generation to seniors who aren’t investing in keeping up. Managers without an instinct for AI are an endangered species as well.
But the AI transition is different than old technological changes in that you don't really have to learn anything. You don't have to memorize keywords and new concepts like you'd have to for, say, a new JavaScript framework. If you don't know something about AI, you can just ask it and it will tell you.
Basically the only hard part for old people is getting USED to using AI. Some haven't, but it only takes a few weeks to do. After that, experience and taste really comes in handy and that can't be developed overnight.
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 would take me very much time at all to get into the swing of it. I wrote code by hand for decades, so I know how to judge whether it's producing something that looks reasonable.
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 there is to make sure it makes the changes as clean and efficient as possible, without unnecessary complexity that's hard to read.
>If you don't know something about AI, you can just ask it and it will tell you.
If your questions are sharp, probing for detail, and intelligent. Have you seen how people question AIs? It's as if they can't even conceive of the AI being able to supply specific detail.
Point of order: On the one hand I'm not sure people quoting output from software where relevant is entirely what the 'no ai' rule is about. But it's arguable, fine.
For this kind of task, is linking to pastebin etc acceptable instead?
Either way thank you tstrimple for going in and looking!
There are effectively 2 schools of thought on this.
One states that more junior people will excel. Younger people tend to be more hip to new tech trends, more natively immersed in changing times. And the contemporary AI tools eradicate any knowledge & wisdom gap that the seniors may hold over them. Thus, they'll be faster.
The other school states that the most important thing right now is the wisdom of experience. That the AI tools have made everything *but* the wisdom pretty much an afterthought. Thus, there's no point in having someone who doesn't have deep wisdom.
Which is right? Probably a little bit of both, depending on one's exact needs.
Same here. The absolute star in my team is the youngest. But! I think what's happening is that the distribution in this age group has shifted. Essentially the absolute best (high IQ, super ambitious, great communicator, cracked builder types) are now even better positioned than ever before. But the majority of mass in this age category now suffers, i.e. everyone that's "good" or "very good" but not exceptional/brilliant.
In my experience in the past year, new hires, juniors or mid-level programmers (probably even "seniors") who use AI to contribute quickly have a big issue of now ownership or understanding of the code and of the issues that we might encounter. They contribute very little during meeting because they have trouble understanding the subject matter.
We are a network tooling team, and now we think our next hire will be a young network engineer who probably will generate code that we will have to review carefully, but we have to do that anyway, because we can't really afford having our engineers stuck on a basic knowledge of networking issues.
In any case, thanks to AI everything have a SDK so we won't have to make in-house library to automate everything (thousand of hours making libraries for cisco, forti, zscalers and other lost, but to be honest, good riddance), so the demand for engineers in my situation will decrease.
There is a reason why youngest developers are more productive. They accept everything Agent suggests. They don't understand or care. They rely on your review of the Agent output from prompt they copy-pasted from JIRA. So you spent your time reviewing it instead of your own work.
>> Without building this solution, and instead just taking what ChatGPT generated, they had skipped crucial steps in the programming problem solving process, and were now lost
When you skip the problem-solving process and take the LLM's first output, you're not building the cognitive framework needed to debug or maintain that code.
> I don’t understand this logic. If I’m being honest, the most productive people with AI on my team are the two youngest.
It's high variance. A young person can move fast because they lack the accrued assumptions of a senior, but that also means they can quickly move in the wrong direction because they lack the wisdom to identify mistakes before they pile up.
"Use AI" isn't really a skill, getting an implementation is now as easy as google for an answer was for our generation. A senior can trivially learn this. But sniffing out the bullshit and knowing when you're going astray still requires a critical eye that not everybody is going to have.
So it seems reasonable to me that moving more slowly and being more cautious, letting the uncs use their knowledge to keep things from going too far afield, is a really smart idea.
I think the problem is evaluation. They can't tell who the good juniors are with respect to the new skills that they are looking for, so they go for experience instead. It doesn't seem sustainable though for obvious reasons.
> AI is the biggest threat in over a generation to seniors who aren’t investing in keeping up. Managers without an instinct for AI are an endangered species as well.
New tech has always been the biggest threat to seniors who aren't investing in keeping up.
How are the youngest more productive than the seniors? As an aside, I have seen that the newest employees are performing better than those hired during Covid. I think the quality of recent hires are just better because no one is hiring, and so many quality candidates are available.
I didn’t say “most productive”, there was a qualifier attached. A person productive with AI is capable in a different way than the existing folks who are struggling to keep up with their jobs and retool to AI
The juniors I have seen don't even try to understand anymore what they are building. They don't understand the product, they don't understand the technology. So everything AI is building for them is nonsense. "Reviewing" it is impossible. Some of them think they are being extra clever having Claude process review comments for them. Even if you hire one, this way they are out the door within the month.
We can’t find seniors like that yet, even though our pay is nearly top tier, because hiring is so broken right now. Most hires come from referrals so it’s recycling the same people between different companies, and those people don’t have good AI experience.
Right now my company seems to be only hiring people they already know or have worked with before. Every single hire in the last 4 months I've seen get on-boarded has been back-channeled. I've had 4 direct referrals and none of them have gotten in but all made it to the final round just to be surpassed by someone the hiring manager already knew and liked from their previous teams. Even with a strong referral it's hard!
This isn't new. Every job dating back multiple decades was through my network. I had a resume but it was essentially a formality. The last two long-term ones were through very senior folks at the companies.
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 strong hiring recommendations but we got overruled by our skip level who wanted to hire her friend.
The interesting thing is people recommend "networking" and people think it's like... meeting people at industry events or reaching out to linkedin connections but that's not really how I see networking working in real life. The networking that actually gets people jobs is networks from people you've already worked with before, or your professor is on the board of the company or like.. your parents know the exec team really well etc. So new grads truly are disadvantaged.
>The interesting thing is people recommend "networking" and people think it's like... meeting people at industry events or reaching out to linkedin connections but that's not really how I see networking working in real life.
I say the are three levels of "networking", and peeling back the layers helps to understand why the term can become so nebulous
1. "Associative" networking where you reach out to people at your old school and work but people you otherwise never met nor worked alongside. They vouch based on what they see and know about your associations. They might refer, but often can't do much about the process but poke at the machine.
2. "familial" networking where you reach out to friends/colleagues you have worked with and can personally vouch on your behalf. They might be able to help churn a bit, but are ultimately still beholden to the process.
3. "Influential" Networking where you do either #1 or #2 but your network evolves into leadership, management, and founders. People who have the ability to actually hire you. Often cutting through the HR cruft itself.
3) is what you want, but fundamentally isn't different from 1) and 2), except in who you know. You invest in 1) and 2) in hopes that they become 3) farther down the line, but for a new grad that investment will take a very long time to occur. Reaching directly out to 3) is hard for many reasons (some professors being an exception. Hence why certain schools can be so impactful), so it's often not an option at the new grad level, since you lack any real leverage to bring to the table. If you have the ability to contact them at all.
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.
Our field started as a niche for geeks. For a long time, CS paid you the average for engineering work - hardly equivalent to six figures today for most with the exception of seniors. It's still like that on most of the world.
Many people here lived through ridiculous times. It was possible to make 1M in a year without incredible skills/hard work. Big tech was and still is full of these people.
I'm not saying that was a bad thing at all, but it always felt unsustainable. CS salaries will decline and fewer people will want to be software developers, balancing the market. Then it may go back to where it came from with the geeks sticking around. No more coding bros. Maybe that's okay.
When I got my degree, I never expected more than a slightly above average salary. I do this because I love it and can't imagine doing anything else. I was lucky and I'm thankful for the luck I had.
Seconded. The year I graduated from college, the median CS graduate was employed making about $65k/year USD. I got offers for $80k/year and thought that was pretty hot shit.
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
Does he do any side projects? Where you can support him most is feed him some problems he can build a solution for. I think working through the pain points of building an end to end product and putting that on his resume will go far. I also would recommend he finds non-SWE jobs at companies for the time being too. I mentioned in another comment but I was a “solutions engineer” aka customer support. It was minimally technical and boring but it had plenty of time to upskill and move laterally.
I am a new father to a 3 month old son. I will be nudging him to be an electrician if he has no obvious career interests. Union, good pay, endless work and lots of opportunities to do your own thing. It’s scary to even consider what the job market will look like in 22 years.
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.
It took me about 2 years out of college to get a job in my field. This was back in 2014-2015. This is just kind of how it goes nowadays. The trick is to make sure you don't stop learning while you are job hunting. I pretended that I would never get a job and my only hope was to build my own products so I spent my time learning how to build my own stuff and maybe sell it. Meanwhile, my resume started having more and more skills.
Things are changing, so I can't make any guarantees. But don't get too discouraged. Pay attention to what is in demand like Python, PySpark, and PyTorch. Make sure that the next time it rains soup your son has a bucket.
I'd side-eye that list as senior .NET dev full stack.
You're asking one person to do frontend/js/css, backend/databases/Redis/MQ, and Python with all that math behind data-science, but i doubt he can understand and review all of this
Make him do side projects, something he can explain and be proud of. Online communities, some github projects he might be interested, ...anything.
Let him contribute to something, yes for free, so that potential future coworkers can see 1) who he is, 2) what he can do, 3) how he approaches people.
The article assumes that jobs that can be automated are vulnerable. But in the postmortem of the AI driven layoffs so far, it's more that expectations about AI and productivity are driving the job cuts.
In other words shareholders and senior management are being shown the appearance of expectations about AI being met, whether or not it's working. Entry-level jobs are an obvious place to look things that can be cut to create an AI budget.
Yep if a hiring manager wants to open a req for a junior, before AI he'd get praise for being tight with budget and hiring someone cheap and trainable.
Now he gets asked: if a junior can do the work why aren't you using AI? So instead of opening the req he says to the team "we need to figure out how to make AI do more."
All of these executives are operating under the pretense that they won’t be held accountable when in 10-15yr their middle bench is a disaster, and they’re probably right.
These executives are going to get some short-term performance based payout and move to another company while talking up the "Bold AI transformation" they lead waaaay before any fallout kicks in. Notice how there's less "We moved to Cloud / on-prem" slop on LinkedIn? It's because the same people have a new bandwagon to chase.
Of course! I have the curse of working/having worked in the financial sector, so all of the “Linkedin People” I know moved from crypto horseshit to AI horseshit. Before that it’s just as you said, cloud horseshit.
>All of these executives are operating under the pretense that they won’t be held accountable when in 10-15yr their middle bench is a disaster, and they’re probably right.
If everyone's middle bench is a disaster, there's no one that did it right to contrast their poor decision-making. They're hiding the evidence that will help them skip accountability.
I think the sad thing is they don’t even have to hide it. Absolutely no one will be held directly accountable for these decisions, either because they’ll be retired, or the “responsibility” can be whitewashed through organizational decision making.
As another commenter mentioned, they’ll all get their performance bonuses, and by the time the bills come due either they’ll be gone, or no one will know why in the hell they’re in the situation they’re in.
Middle bench decay is like some sort of complex immune deficiency. No one can quite put their finger on what’s wrong, but the org can’t pull its collective head out of its ass.
For many companies this happens naturally as it progresses from the dynamic operating environment of high competition to one of maintenance. Staff levels bloat and after a while no one has a grasp on the big picture and the institution forgets why it’s doing what it’s doing.
What’s amazing to me is that these companies that are lighting their hiring process on fire are willingly accelerating this process.
> 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 interesting because a study here in Sweden [1] produces identical results. To quote from the study:
"An event study documents an accelerating decline in employment
of 22–25-year-olds in high-AI-exposure occupations, reaching 5.5 per cent by
early 2025 relative to less exposed occupations within the same employers"
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.
From personal experience, back in the 2010s it was particularly harsh for those with a non-standard background. What few "opportunities" that existed were a handful of unpaid or grossly underpaid internships which were closed off to those who weren't students or recent graduates. Everybody wanted employees who were ready to start pumping out code with little or no training.
That's not to diminish how much more difficult it's become since then but breaking into the industry has never been easy.
That sounds about right. There was a well-established funnel from schools directly into entry-level positions. Absent that funnel, it's not clear how getting those entry-level positions was ever especially straightforward outside of a very robust tech hiring environment over the past decade.
I got my first dev job by moving laterally within a company from customer support. Helpdesk aka “Helldesk” was a common pipeline for people. I don’t think those jobs are easy to get either now.
I feel like I never see anyone else say this. That was about when I got my career started and it was always difficult for me. And now it seems over despite all that work in the begining.
I've been telling people the same thing. The tech industry has been cargo-culting "scaling the organization" where people are rewarded for org size. That zeitgeist has ended, and we've not even overcorrected much the other way.
I (and everyone else) had to take an ethics course in college to get my engineering degree, I think the course should include the value of coaching and passing on knowledge to the next generation.
Even from a profit stand point, we need to invest in the entry levels to get mid- senior levels
The United States corporate culture has reached a failure mode of game theory. The average corporation is allergic to spending any money on training and has pushed all of the costs onto labor.
They hope that some other moron will take up the costs and then they can poach the trained employee for cheap, while any corporation that does actually train feels like they should get the employee for cheap afterwards instead of compensating the employee at market rate.
Simultaneously the average corporation refuses to do something like have a contract with the employee for X years of labor at a set rate in the exchange for the training because they are also allergic to not being able to change their minds and lay off half their staff the next year.
This would be a place for the government to come in and force everyone to pick the good square on the prisoner’s dilemma, but yet again, our corporate culture is allergic to regulation or cooperation.
You can still get through a winter or two by eating your seed corn so I guess we’ll just continue barreling down this path.
You can't really force someone to work for X years at a place they don't want to. I don't know if what you're describing is an enforceable contract term.
Sure you can, it's effectively the same contract agreement as a sign-on bonus that requires you to stay for at least 6 months. Instead it's training cost that you get saddled with if you leave before X time. Of course, the exact monetary value would have to be spelled out ahead of time.
Well, I say sure you can, but I'm not a contract lawyer. It just sounds identical to me. You're not forced to stay, but if you end the contract you have to pay.
The terms involve the person paying back the training costs or some penalty if they quit before X years.
I saw it once at the beginning of my career but that was nearly 15 years ago.
US companies are usually unwilling to enter into any contract with labor because they want the ability to renege on the deal at will, hence the at will states.
You see companies making contracts like this with other companies all the time, so I can only assume it’s a cultural value to never make a deal with labor.
>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.
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 absolutely nothing but a basement (where I can't move my desktop to) to cool off.
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.
this was literally the reason pointed out in chat. devs liked how I worked, had zero questions on review, and that's despite me seeing their tech stack second time in my entire life
Some percentage of engineering is actually people and politics. The more power (or alternative options) you have, the more you can speak your mind. But if you need the job then argue your case just to the boss, discreetly.
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.
Partly this is because the big companies are diverting vast amounts of money towards building data centers, instead of hiring new grads. I expect young people who learn AI skills will be fine, once the data center spending binge is over.
What does "learning AI skills" even mean? You're typing into a prompt box. You are not applying any skill, the model is. At best, the skill you need is discernment about _what_ to type in this magical box. But if that gets cheaper and the output of your company doesn't necessarily scale horizontally that well. Why would I need as many people as before?
- 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 self automating harnesses)? Why are these not just obviated by better models? These are barely skills, and are imo, just the tech equivalent of tabloids advertising 5 minute exercises or pills to get rid of stubborn belly fat. No amount of prompt engineering or graphs or loops could get your previous version of GPT to perform like Fable, and yet somehow Fable can do all of that and more without any random built in "ai engineering skills."
The labor chart for SWEs will look like a slope up as productivity with AI increases, and then past a certain point where AI is like 99% good enough, employment will fall off a cliff. We are already seeing this with junior hiring, and who is to say that AI will magically only ever be as capable as a junior engineer?
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).
I noticed the newer batch of interns tends to have less mechanical coding skills but does well on understanding and planning on the design, DB design, etc.
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 commonly they would manually copy/paste error or syntax errors and then run out of time. One candidate only copy pasted his questions into google and used the AI overview
Junior candidates tended to be overly ai eager, a lot of them oneshotted the problem but were unable to explain any of the details
That being said I think 80% of the skills should come easily to a capable dev that is willing to put in the effort to learn and get used to managing agents. Building agents that perform work themselves is a lot harder (and still pretty unsolved)
But I don't believe what you've said disproves my point. To me, it boils down to attitude, not so much aptitude when it comes to "AI skills" in this context. You even admitted that some of the solutions could be one-shotted by copying and pasting the problem.
As for building agents that perform work themselves, in my opinion it boils down to understanding the problem space, isolating the key business logic, and determining what the pertinent requirements are. Kinda sounds like looping back around to software engineering skills IMO.
To be clear, I think young people need to learn traditional software engineering skills too (.. maybe having the wrong attitude towards it is even worse than the aptitude!) A junior with no foundational SWE skills will just become a meat wrapper. But thinking more about it I wouldn't discredit these "AI skills" so much. A lot of it is either using AI as a force multiplier or learning the specific skills around deploying it which I'd still categorize as 'AI skills'
building agents is just a completely different ballgame, theres a lot of infra and harness engineering around handling the nondeterministic behaviors that are nonobvious unless you've shipped agents at scale
I'm not discrediting them as being of no value, I am just discrediting the notion that devs who are unable to find work now should be beefing up their AI skills so that they can get a job in the future. "AI skills" as they are talked about are easier and quicker to pick up than working with a library, e.g. React. And if they are not difficult to learn, then they are not a differentiator nor should they be treated as such.
Yeah I've seen a lot of applications and some interviews where what they are looking for the most, by far, is your "AI skills". Questions like: How are you currently using AI day to day?; Can you describe your current agentic setup?; things like that are the only questions asked in the application.
And I don't understand why you would wave away needing to know anything about the codebase's underlying tech because "The AI can take care of all that, we don't need to look at code anymore" while also not believing that any competent developer could prompt AI to get a good setup within a week or two max.
Upvoting this for asking the candid question that so many commenters dance around. I can't imagine a 22-year-old confidently walking into an interview (or getting introduced to a team) and assuring everyone that they have the "harness" or "guardrails" to confidently contribute at the level of a 10x engineer.
If we apply the Gartner Hype Cycle to this disruptive technology, I do believe AI will hit a "slope of enlightenment" where an AI-assisted Analyst is properly understood in industries and can take productive roles. Conveniently, this will probably coincide with a lower interest rate where companies have funds for a talent acquisition spree/rapid growth.
With that being said, today's graduates are stuck in an awful market with a lot of charlatans selling crappy online courses and bad ideas.
I imagine the meta will be “build a micro saas product that’s marginally successful” for younger folks. It’s trivial to make a product but you learn a lot seeing what the AI does wrong.
The models are currently not at a place where you can just "type into a prompt box", any more than you could just "type into the IDE". You have to know what and why to type. The models are not at a place where no skill is needed. It may be a different still, but it's still a skill, and it's still a software engineering skill.
1. The papers author's never claim causality.
2. There are other large macro forces at play, like firm consolidation, proliferation of NDAs, interest rates*, lack of growth (without Nvidia, the US economy would basically be in a recession?) and probably many more that are putting the job market into a low hire/low fire state.
Consider how we're actually not seeing much layoffs (some, but not much). So what were seeing in tech specifically is more like hiring freeze, so people with experience or in jobs aren't feeling much of the pressure, but new grads are hitting a wall.
Im posting this to resist the "ai is taking away people's jobs" narrative. It's definitely a factor but it's probably one of many and it's sloppy thinking to point fingers at ai and not other probably bigger factors.
* To their credit, the papers author's try to factor for zirp.
> 1. The papers author's never claim causality. 2. There are other large macro forces at play, like firm consolidation, proliferation of NDAs, interest rates*, lack of growth (without Nvidia, the US economy would basically be in a recession?) and probably many more that are putting the job market into a low hire/low fire state.
And the backdrop of an aging population that needs asset prices to keep rising to meet benefit and retirement obligations, so stagflation it is.
I built a digital internship for this very reason, to help the pre-entry level interns get work experience. Given ai has mostly replaced their admin work load.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48914589
Sadly, this is just the beginning.. As AI models improve in performance and cost, each technical job level will be replaced until it's just C-suites managing a bunch of ai agents.
i remember seeing the stats presented on moonshots podcast about 3 months ago. they said every quarter, the percentage of CS fresh grads decreased their placement roughly 10% or so and it was down to about 19% at last count and entry level salaries down from 96K to 61k, if i recall.
Robots will be the real status-quo changer. Information/office jobs have never really felt real to society, we are all living in a bubble of corporate daycare. Half the jobs being replaced are jobs that didn't exist a decade or two ago that the average person on the street doesn't even know exist.
The rest of society unfortunately have to work "real" jobs where they have to turn up early to do things like stocking, cleaning, cooking, harvesting, assembling.
When a robot can be a drop-in replacement hire for these roles it's apocalypse time. It is coming.
I remember when I was in 2nd grade or so (so, around 1982 or so), our teacher read us a passage from a book predicting the future: "and in the future, robots will do all the work so that people don't have to!" Even at 8 years old, I could see the problem with that: who decides who gets to live in the big house at the top of the hill and who has to live where I live?
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.
Another impact that doesn't get discussed as much when the primary discussion is around job elimination is the downward pressure on software engineering salaries. Of course it's a different scenario if you are working at a frontier AI company, but outside of that, software engineers are becoming cheaper (relative to inflation) while they simultaneously get more productive due to LLMS.
It’s not just juniors in CS. If you lose your job, you’re not getting another one. You better not quit your job without having a new one lined up. Many have had to retire early.
My really big worry is that the people making these choices just do not care about a single thing beyond this single generation
Not a psychologist but my take on most of the wealthy people in the world is they are essentially narcissistic hedonists. They only care about growing wealth as a means to the end of maximizing the amount of fun they can have and to keep their egos happy that they have the most.
You’re probably not wrong. I’ve gone from being essentially destitute as a child to what people would call “well-off” and having the context of both experiences is…eye opening.
I have moneyed acquaintances now that I never would have had before. For some of them the mere hint of their income being reduced in any way is enough to send them into spasms. These are people with enough money for their next 3 generations to live off of. Luxuriously.
Most of these jobs were already essentially taken away by outsourcing. It is so disturbing that countries like Australia only offer work visas for jobs that are difficult to fill, and only in certain locations as needed, but America actually encourages the ouster of skilled local talent for immigrants.
Australia's bar for skilled employment is pretty low and deflates wages as well. That's before we get into the prevalence of exploiting working holiday visas for practically slave wages.
I feel like we need to take a page from the past. Apprenticeships with lock-in. Sponsorships. And so on.
Imagine if even one billionaire dedicated themselves to be a modern “patron of the arts” on a more down-to-earth level. Imagine if people started to run “adopt-a-student” type frameworks for individuals. If fresh grads found it easy to get “grants” for things. And so on.
The first job is often a bit “take a chance on me” in its paradigm, but companies these days don’t want bets, they want sure things. Unfortunately this is to some extent unrealistic, but also it’s true that cutting out entry level roles entirely does cut down on uncertainty. It cuts down on upside too, but that’s more invisible.
You have market theory saying that at some point, you will not have enough seniors because no juniors were trained. So seniors will become more and more expensive due to lack of supply. At some point, it will be cheaper to take the risk and train the junior entry person again, and things will stabilize out. The sad part is that there will be a generation of 10 years or so of lost juniors while seniors are abundant.
Sure but we can't work on hypotheticals. Otherwise we can also say that information work is 90% automated, society has 50% unemployment of white-collar workers and capitalism is over because there is no purchasing power. There is enough incentives from people in power to keep status quo(bread and circuses) that if we are trying to answer the question using another framework than the current one we are just speculating
2022-30 will be known as the lost generation in tech. I think the situation will improve in 2030s and AI/coding will become hot again. Or may be perhaps as soon as Feds start to open their purse to print money again aka QE.
What kind of study could predict the future like this? Every technological change is different each time, I think.
For example - at first ATMs created more jobs in banking because employees could move to more complex services. But banks are back to downsizing after further advancements streamlined those services too, aiui.
I would plan based on the lost jobs not coming back. I would also plan that the trend of AI getting better and taking more jobs will continue. Plan for the worst, hope for the best.
A lot of people may have to transition to careers that people do not want to have AI do, like nursing. The earlier you start such a transition the easier it is because you still have resources to make moves.
>"A lot of people may have to transition to careers that people do not want to have AI do, like nursing."
Becoming bum or going off the grid would be way more attractive to me than working my ass of in stressful conditions for meager pay so some motherfuckers can buy yet another yacht
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.
Unless you mean taxicab drivers, which was the term for them before the automobile. Taxicab = taximeter cabriolet, and a cabriolet is a style of horse-drawn carriage.
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.
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. But individual companies don’t have aligned incentives.
> 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.
A high-potential junior you can at least justify as an investment in the future.
The other people who are going to get squeezed are the later-career developers who are below-average in ability. (I'm not using "below average" here pejoratively - just noting that by definition, half of developers are below-average.) Outside of big tech, there are piles of organizations with devs who don't make big-tech salary and who are only marginally productive for what they're getting paid.
If you're an organization that only has the budget to pay non-junior devs $80k... you can see the implications of having the option to spend your dev budget on seniors + tokens instead.
I'm not seeing the reason why typical engineers can't vibecode. Non-coders can vibecode. I have read hundreds of posts claiming that senior engineers can vibecode but not a single one saying that juniors cannot.
I'm not saying they can't, but rather that with the time seniors then spend cleaning up their tricky bugs, architectural problems, etc. the seniors could have just done the work themselves.
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.
And if they don't, what then? What does a post-job society look like? I'm skeptical of communism, but I'm skeptical because it doesn't work in a society where some people need to do something (like raise crops) but aren't incentivized to do so. But if there's actually nothing humans need to do? The question is, will we reach logical conclusions peacefully or violently?
The plus side of all this is that entry level software development jobs are typically pursued by recent college graduates. They are young.
While it sucks to have blown a lot of money and accept they've been duped to get a degree in something that is now "worth" a small fraction of what it once was, time is on their side. There is plenty of time to go back to school, or apprentice, or learn a trade or go to trade school in something else with better long term career prospects.
On the opposite side of this, senior level devs should (hopefully) be on target financially and theoretically should be fine, especially if they make adjustments now (lower COL, layoff preparation, prepare for accelerated retirement timeline).
The folks who are really going to suffer are those early to mid level developers. Not as much of a network, not enough traditional expertise, not enough savings, not as much time to invest and pull the trigger on a career change.
To the surprise of who, exactly? Sometimes it feels like HN has never used an AI model past ChatGPT in 2022. Modern AI is so capable nowadays that it _does_ obviate most of the work you'd normally give an entry level person.
Im mostly speaking about software engineering, but the "juniors" I've seen be hired now are basically the equivalent of mid (maybe even low senior) levels of yesteryear. AI is most certainly raising the bar.
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 the work force (2024 and beyond).
LLMs only became a factor in hiring in the summer of 2025. But by then there was already a massive oversupply (relative to demand) of fresh CS graduates.
My personal opinion is that the market is not (yet) rough because of AI, it's actually mostly just rough because we're not in ZIRP anymore. AI is maybe making it worse on the margin, and is a convenient excuse, insofar as AI is both easier to scapegoat and reason about.
[1]: Software dev job postings on indeed in the US. Peaked in 2021, before falling off a cliff. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE
[2]: % of CS grads relative to all college enrollments; which peaked in class of 2026 (enrollment as of '22). https://www.reveliolabs.com/news/social/computer-science-has...
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.
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.
I don’t understand this logic. If I’m being honest, the most productive people with AI on my team are the two youngest. They don’t have product wisdom, yes, but the gap is so noticeable that I pushed my manager to forego the full-time work experience requirement that we have always had so that new hires don’t even know the old way of working and can just reframe the field in terms of AI.
AI is the biggest threat in over a generation to seniors who aren’t investing in keeping up. Managers without an instinct for AI are an endangered species as well.
But the AI transition is different than old technological changes in that you don't really have to learn anything. You don't have to memorize keywords and new concepts like you'd have to for, say, a new JavaScript framework. If you don't know something about AI, you can just ask it and it will tell you.
Basically the only hard part for old people is getting USED to using AI. Some haven't, but it only takes a few weeks to do. After that, experience and taste really comes in handy and that can't be developed overnight.
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 would take me very much time at all to get into the swing of it. I wrote code by hand for decades, so I know how to judge whether it's producing something that looks reasonable.
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 there is to make sure it makes the changes as clean and efficient as possible, without unnecessary complexity that's hard to read.
>If you don't know something about AI, you can just ask it and it will tell you.
If your questions are sharp, probing for detail, and intelligent. Have you seen how people question AIs? It's as if they can't even conceive of the AI being able to supply specific detail.
I'd love to see examples of that! Just from debates on HN alone, I get the idea that there's huge deltas, and I'm getting really really curious.
Point of order: On the one hand I'm not sure people quoting output from software where relevant is entirely what the 'no ai' rule is about. But it's arguable, fine.
For this kind of task, is linking to pastebin etc acceptable instead?
Either way thank you tstrimple for going in and looking!
There are effectively 2 schools of thought on this.
One states that more junior people will excel. Younger people tend to be more hip to new tech trends, more natively immersed in changing times. And the contemporary AI tools eradicate any knowledge & wisdom gap that the seniors may hold over them. Thus, they'll be faster.
The other school states that the most important thing right now is the wisdom of experience. That the AI tools have made everything *but* the wisdom pretty much an afterthought. Thus, there's no point in having someone who doesn't have deep wisdom.
Which is right? Probably a little bit of both, depending on one's exact needs.
Same here. The absolute star in my team is the youngest. But! I think what's happening is that the distribution in this age group has shifted. Essentially the absolute best (high IQ, super ambitious, great communicator, cracked builder types) are now even better positioned than ever before. But the majority of mass in this age category now suffers, i.e. everyone that's "good" or "very good" but not exceptional/brilliant.
In my experience in the past year, new hires, juniors or mid-level programmers (probably even "seniors") who use AI to contribute quickly have a big issue of now ownership or understanding of the code and of the issues that we might encounter. They contribute very little during meeting because they have trouble understanding the subject matter.
We are a network tooling team, and now we think our next hire will be a young network engineer who probably will generate code that we will have to review carefully, but we have to do that anyway, because we can't really afford having our engineers stuck on a basic knowledge of networking issues.
In any case, thanks to AI everything have a SDK so we won't have to make in-house library to automate everything (thousand of hours making libraries for cisco, forti, zscalers and other lost, but to be honest, good riddance), so the demand for engineers in my situation will decrease.
From my experience.
There is a reason why youngest developers are more productive. They accept everything Agent suggests. They don't understand or care. They rely on your review of the Agent output from prompt they copy-pasted from JIRA. So you spent your time reviewing it instead of your own work.
From study titled "The Widening Gap: The Benefits and Harms of Generative AI for Novice Programmers" https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/3632620.3671116
>> Without building this solution, and instead just taking what ChatGPT generated, they had skipped crucial steps in the programming problem solving process, and were now lost
When you skip the problem-solving process and take the LLM's first output, you're not building the cognitive framework needed to debug or maintain that code.
I had a junior happily accept the agent's suggestions, bugs and all. Her productivity ended with her tenure; meat proxies add no value.
> I don’t understand this logic. If I’m being honest, the most productive people with AI on my team are the two youngest.
It's high variance. A young person can move fast because they lack the accrued assumptions of a senior, but that also means they can quickly move in the wrong direction because they lack the wisdom to identify mistakes before they pile up.
"Use AI" isn't really a skill, getting an implementation is now as easy as google for an answer was for our generation. A senior can trivially learn this. But sniffing out the bullshit and knowing when you're going astray still requires a critical eye that not everybody is going to have.
So it seems reasonable to me that moving more slowly and being more cautious, letting the uncs use their knowledge to keep things from going too far afield, is a really smart idea.
I think the problem is evaluation. They can't tell who the good juniors are with respect to the new skills that they are looking for, so they go for experience instead. It doesn't seem sustainable though for obvious reasons.
> AI is the biggest threat in over a generation to seniors who aren’t investing in keeping up. Managers without an instinct for AI are an endangered species as well.
New tech has always been the biggest threat to seniors who aren't investing in keeping up.
Depends on the nature of the work. In highly specialised work the junior would train with a senior while the senior can offload the easier work.
Now the senior can use the AI instead of dealing with a junior.
Plus the biggest danger I’ve seen numerous times is the junior engineer can’t easily tell if the AI is wrong.
They either accept it as correct or spend more time trying to fix AI output with an AI in an area they don’t have the skills for.
How are the youngest more productive than the seniors? As an aside, I have seen that the newest employees are performing better than those hired during Covid. I think the quality of recent hires are just better because no one is hiring, and so many quality candidates are available.
I didn’t say “most productive”, there was a qualifier attached. A person productive with AI is capable in a different way than the existing folks who are struggling to keep up with their jobs and retool to AI
On the contrary, new generations are skipping the fundamentals and using AI instead.
Seniors will become more valuable as that knowledge is lost and AI isn't capable of full replacenent.
I use AI daily and it takes almost no extra brain power to use.
> the most productive people with AI on my team are the two youngest. They don’t have product wisdom, yes, but the gap is so noticeable
Is it Software or another problem domain? What problem are they attacking, what stack/method are they using?
The juniors I have seen don't even try to understand anymore what they are building. They don't understand the product, they don't understand the technology. So everything AI is building for them is nonsense. "Reviewing" it is impossible. Some of them think they are being extra clever having Claude process review comments for them. Even if you hire one, this way they are out the door within the month.
If you find a proper senior dev - it will be like 10 or more of that junior you described.
Because you can’t shortcut experience. And AI multiplies that.
I’ve seen what ai-focused good senior dev can do and it is scary.
We can’t find seniors like that yet, even though our pay is nearly top tier, because hiring is so broken right now. Most hires come from referrals so it’s recycling the same people between different companies, and those people don’t have good AI experience.
Right now my company seems to be only hiring people they already know or have worked with before. Every single hire in the last 4 months I've seen get on-boarded has been back-channeled. I've had 4 direct referrals and none of them have gotten in but all made it to the final round just to be surpassed by someone the hiring manager already knew and liked from their previous teams. Even with a strong referral it's hard!
I had a job search as well and same. Previous slam dunks that stalled at final interviews with someone who had a higher recommendation.
Fortunately I have some unique skills that allowed me to land a gig.
This isn't new. Every job dating back multiple decades was through my network. I had a resume but it was essentially a formality. The last two long-term ones were through very senior folks at the companies.
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 strong hiring recommendations but we got overruled by our skip level who wanted to hire her friend.
The interesting thing is people recommend "networking" and people think it's like... meeting people at industry events or reaching out to linkedin connections but that's not really how I see networking working in real life. The networking that actually gets people jobs is networks from people you've already worked with before, or your professor is on the board of the company or like.. your parents know the exec team really well etc. So new grads truly are disadvantaged.
>The interesting thing is people recommend "networking" and people think it's like... meeting people at industry events or reaching out to linkedin connections but that's not really how I see networking working in real life.
I say the are three levels of "networking", and peeling back the layers helps to understand why the term can become so nebulous
1. "Associative" networking where you reach out to people at your old school and work but people you otherwise never met nor worked alongside. They vouch based on what they see and know about your associations. They might refer, but often can't do much about the process but poke at the machine.
2. "familial" networking where you reach out to friends/colleagues you have worked with and can personally vouch on your behalf. They might be able to help churn a bit, but are ultimately still beholden to the process.
3. "Influential" Networking where you do either #1 or #2 but your network evolves into leadership, management, and founders. People who have the ability to actually hire you. Often cutting through the HR cruft itself.
3) is what you want, but fundamentally isn't different from 1) and 2), except in who you know. You invest in 1) and 2) in hopes that they become 3) farther down the line, but for a new grad that investment will take a very long time to occur. Reaching directly out to 3) is hard for many reasons (some professors being an exception. Hence why certain schools can be so impactful), so it's often not an option at the new grad level, since you lack any real leverage to bring to the table. If you have the ability to contact them at all.
A known value is worth a lot.
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.
Our field started as a niche for geeks. For a long time, CS paid you the average for engineering work - hardly equivalent to six figures today for most with the exception of seniors. It's still like that on most of the world.
Many people here lived through ridiculous times. It was possible to make 1M in a year without incredible skills/hard work. Big tech was and still is full of these people.
I'm not saying that was a bad thing at all, but it always felt unsustainable. CS salaries will decline and fewer people will want to be software developers, balancing the market. Then it may go back to where it came from with the geeks sticking around. No more coding bros. Maybe that's okay.
When I got my degree, I never expected more than a slightly above average salary. I do this because I love it and can't imagine doing anything else. I was lucky and I'm thankful for the luck I had.
That resonates me.
When I was in high school, I lied to girls about what I was planning to major in just so I wouldn't sound like some antisocial nerd.
Nobody back then thought coding was cool. It was just the thing the weird kids did in the computer lab.
Yes, this is why 60% now prefer being single.
Seconded. The year I graduated from college, the median CS graduate was employed making about $65k/year USD. I got offers for $80k/year and thought that was pretty hot shit.
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
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.
Does he do any side projects? Where you can support him most is feed him some problems he can build a solution for. I think working through the pain points of building an end to end product and putting that on his resume will go far. I also would recommend he finds non-SWE jobs at companies for the time being too. I mentioned in another comment but I was a “solutions engineer” aka customer support. It was minimally technical and boring but it had plenty of time to upskill and move laterally.
I am a new father to a 3 month old son. I will be nudging him to be an electrician if he has no obvious career interests. Union, good pay, endless work and lots of opportunities to do your own thing. It’s scary to even consider what the job market will look like in 22 years.
He just did something that was game related and has been playing with some graphics stuff. His degree game related CS.
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.
He hasn't gotten to an in person interview stage yet.
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.
It took me about 2 years out of college to get a job in my field. This was back in 2014-2015. This is just kind of how it goes nowadays. The trick is to make sure you don't stop learning while you are job hunting. I pretended that I would never get a job and my only hope was to build my own products so I spent my time learning how to build my own stuff and maybe sell it. Meanwhile, my resume started having more and more skills.
Things are changing, so I can't make any guarantees. But don't get too discouraged. Pay attention to what is in demand like Python, PySpark, and PyTorch. Make sure that the next time it rains soup your son has a bucket.
Can you give me an email to reach out to you at? My company may need an intern/Junior here soon. I'd be happy to take a look at his resume.
Fully remote, Full stack .NET in addition to AI/Python/data-science work
Honestly, that is way too much for a junior.
I'd side-eye that list as senior .NET dev full stack.
You're asking one person to do frontend/js/css, backend/databases/Redis/MQ, and Python with all that math behind data-science, but i doubt he can understand and review all of this
Of course I wouldn't give all that to a Junior! It's just what they could expect to work with if they stayed long term.
dverespey@gmail.com is mine. In my profile as well.
Make him do side projects, something he can explain and be proud of. Online communities, some github projects he might be interested, ...anything.
Let him contribute to something, yes for free, so that potential future coworkers can see 1) who he is, 2) what he can do, 3) how he approaches people.
There's no mercy for people learning the ropes now. The lower latency of LLMs make people impatient to deal with growing pains.
Agreed. My daughter with a degree in math from Berkeley served coffee and tutored for a year before being accepted into a math PhD program. Amazing
The article assumes that jobs that can be automated are vulnerable. But in the postmortem of the AI driven layoffs so far, it's more that expectations about AI and productivity are driving the job cuts.
In other words shareholders and senior management are being shown the appearance of expectations about AI being met, whether or not it's working. Entry-level jobs are an obvious place to look things that can be cut to create an AI budget.
Yep if a hiring manager wants to open a req for a junior, before AI he'd get praise for being tight with budget and hiring someone cheap and trainable.
Now he gets asked: if a junior can do the work why aren't you using AI? So instead of opening the req he says to the team "we need to figure out how to make AI do more."
Mortgaging the future to pay for the present.
All of these executives are operating under the pretense that they won’t be held accountable when in 10-15yr their middle bench is a disaster, and they’re probably right.
These executives are going to get some short-term performance based payout and move to another company while talking up the "Bold AI transformation" they lead waaaay before any fallout kicks in. Notice how there's less "We moved to Cloud / on-prem" slop on LinkedIn? It's because the same people have a new bandwagon to chase.
Of course! I have the curse of working/having worked in the financial sector, so all of the “Linkedin People” I know moved from crypto horseshit to AI horseshit. Before that it’s just as you said, cloud horseshit.
Can’t wait to see what horseshit is next.
>All of these executives are operating under the pretense that they won’t be held accountable when in 10-15yr their middle bench is a disaster, and they’re probably right.
If everyone's middle bench is a disaster, there's no one that did it right to contrast their poor decision-making. They're hiding the evidence that will help them skip accountability.
I think the sad thing is they don’t even have to hide it. Absolutely no one will be held directly accountable for these decisions, either because they’ll be retired, or the “responsibility” can be whitewashed through organizational decision making.
As another commenter mentioned, they’ll all get their performance bonuses, and by the time the bills come due either they’ll be gone, or no one will know why in the hell they’re in the situation they’re in.
Middle bench decay is like some sort of complex immune deficiency. No one can quite put their finger on what’s wrong, but the org can’t pull its collective head out of its ass.
For many companies this happens naturally as it progresses from the dynamic operating environment of high competition to one of maintenance. Staff levels bloat and after a while no one has a grasp on the big picture and the institution forgets why it’s doing what it’s doing.
What’s amazing to me is that these companies that are lighting their hiring process on fire are willingly accelerating this process.
> 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.
I think "junior software engineer" is more like the entry level job that people on HN care about
It's interesting because a study here in Sweden [1] produces identical results. To quote from the study:
"An event study documents an accelerating decline in employment of 22–25-year-olds in high-AI-exposure occupations, reaching 5.5 per cent by early 2025 relative to less exposed occupations within the same employers"
[1] Same Storm, Different Boats: Generative AI and the Age Gradient in Hiring, Lodefalk et al, https://www.oru.se/globalassets/oru-sv/institutioner/hh/work...
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.
From personal experience, back in the 2010s it was particularly harsh for those with a non-standard background. What few "opportunities" that existed were a handful of unpaid or grossly underpaid internships which were closed off to those who weren't students or recent graduates. Everybody wanted employees who were ready to start pumping out code with little or no training.
That's not to diminish how much more difficult it's become since then but breaking into the industry has never been easy.
That sounds about right. There was a well-established funnel from schools directly into entry-level positions. Absent that funnel, it's not clear how getting those entry-level positions was ever especially straightforward outside of a very robust tech hiring environment over the past decade.
I got my first dev job by moving laterally within a company from customer support. Helpdesk aka “Helldesk” was a common pipeline for people. I don’t think those jobs are easy to get either now.
I agree because there was always this "well, you don't have experience...".
Wtf of course i don't, otherwise i would not apply for a junior role!
I feel like I never see anyone else say this. That was about when I got my career started and it was always difficult for me. And now it seems over despite all that work in the begining.
I've been telling people the same thing. The tech industry has been cargo-culting "scaling the organization" where people are rewarded for org size. That zeitgeist has ended, and we've not even overcorrected much the other way.
I (and everyone else) had to take an ethics course in college to get my engineering degree, I think the course should include the value of coaching and passing on knowledge to the next generation.
Even from a profit stand point, we need to invest in the entry levels to get mid- senior levels
a course cannot align wrongly incentivized entities.
The United States corporate culture has reached a failure mode of game theory. The average corporation is allergic to spending any money on training and has pushed all of the costs onto labor.
They hope that some other moron will take up the costs and then they can poach the trained employee for cheap, while any corporation that does actually train feels like they should get the employee for cheap afterwards instead of compensating the employee at market rate.
Simultaneously the average corporation refuses to do something like have a contract with the employee for X years of labor at a set rate in the exchange for the training because they are also allergic to not being able to change their minds and lay off half their staff the next year.
This would be a place for the government to come in and force everyone to pick the good square on the prisoner’s dilemma, but yet again, our corporate culture is allergic to regulation or cooperation.
You can still get through a winter or two by eating your seed corn so I guess we’ll just continue barreling down this path.
You can't really force someone to work for X years at a place they don't want to. I don't know if what you're describing is an enforceable contract term.
Sure you can, it's effectively the same contract agreement as a sign-on bonus that requires you to stay for at least 6 months. Instead it's training cost that you get saddled with if you leave before X time. Of course, the exact monetary value would have to be spelled out ahead of time.
Well, I say sure you can, but I'm not a contract lawyer. It just sounds identical to me. You're not forced to stay, but if you end the contract you have to pay.
The terms involve the person paying back the training costs or some penalty if they quit before X years.
I saw it once at the beginning of my career but that was nearly 15 years ago.
US companies are usually unwilling to enter into any contract with labor because they want the ability to renege on the deal at will, hence the at will states.
You see companies making contracts like this with other companies all the time, so I can only assume it’s a cultural value to never make a deal with labor.
>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.
The implosion in junior quality exacerbates this.
The cohort that started during COVID were first knee-capped by remote classes and exams, and then they lobotomized themselves with ChatGPT.
I have no sympathy for those that relied on ChatGPT to get through their entire education
It’s almost impossible to prove that you aren’t one of these people though. People like me get hurt by this, collateral damage.
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 absolutely nothing but a basement (where I can't move my desktop to) to cool off.
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.
this was literally the reason pointed out in chat. devs liked how I worked, had zero questions on review, and that's despite me seeing their tech stack second time in my entire life
Some percentage of engineering is actually people and politics. The more power (or alternative options) you have, the more you can speak your mind. But if you need the job then argue your case just to the boss, discreetly.
well, yeah, now I understand that. whoever has the money dictates the kind of 1984 you are going to have
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.
Partly this is because the big companies are diverting vast amounts of money towards building data centers, instead of hiring new grads. I expect young people who learn AI skills will be fine, once the data center spending binge is over.
What does "learning AI skills" even mean? You're typing into a prompt box. You are not applying any skill, the model is. At best, the skill you need is discernment about _what_ to type in this magical box. But if that gets cheaper and the output of your company doesn't necessarily scale horizontally that well. Why would I need as many people as before?
- 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 self automating harnesses)? Why are these not just obviated by better models? These are barely skills, and are imo, just the tech equivalent of tabloids advertising 5 minute exercises or pills to get rid of stubborn belly fat. No amount of prompt engineering or graphs or loops could get your previous version of GPT to perform like Fable, and yet somehow Fable can do all of that and more without any random built in "ai engineering skills."
The labor chart for SWEs will look like a slope up as productivity with AI increases, and then past a certain point where AI is like 99% good enough, employment will fall off a cliff. We are already seeing this with junior hiring, and who is to say that AI will magically only ever be as capable as a junior engineer?
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).
Could agree with some of the points.
I noticed the newer batch of interns tends to have less mechanical coding skills but does well on understanding and planning on the design, DB design, etc.
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 commonly they would manually copy/paste error or syntax errors and then run out of time. One candidate only copy pasted his questions into google and used the AI overview
Junior candidates tended to be overly ai eager, a lot of them oneshotted the problem but were unable to explain any of the details
That being said I think 80% of the skills should come easily to a capable dev that is willing to put in the effort to learn and get used to managing agents. Building agents that perform work themselves is a lot harder (and still pretty unsolved)
But I don't believe what you've said disproves my point. To me, it boils down to attitude, not so much aptitude when it comes to "AI skills" in this context. You even admitted that some of the solutions could be one-shotted by copying and pasting the problem.
As for building agents that perform work themselves, in my opinion it boils down to understanding the problem space, isolating the key business logic, and determining what the pertinent requirements are. Kinda sounds like looping back around to software engineering skills IMO.
To be clear, I think young people need to learn traditional software engineering skills too (.. maybe having the wrong attitude towards it is even worse than the aptitude!) A junior with no foundational SWE skills will just become a meat wrapper. But thinking more about it I wouldn't discredit these "AI skills" so much. A lot of it is either using AI as a force multiplier or learning the specific skills around deploying it which I'd still categorize as 'AI skills'
building agents is just a completely different ballgame, theres a lot of infra and harness engineering around handling the nondeterministic behaviors that are nonobvious unless you've shipped agents at scale
I'm not discrediting them as being of no value, I am just discrediting the notion that devs who are unable to find work now should be beefing up their AI skills so that they can get a job in the future. "AI skills" as they are talked about are easier and quicker to pick up than working with a library, e.g. React. And if they are not difficult to learn, then they are not a differentiator nor should they be treated as such.
Yeah I've seen a lot of applications and some interviews where what they are looking for the most, by far, is your "AI skills". Questions like: How are you currently using AI day to day?; Can you describe your current agentic setup?; things like that are the only questions asked in the application.
And I don't understand why you would wave away needing to know anything about the codebase's underlying tech because "The AI can take care of all that, we don't need to look at code anymore" while also not believing that any competent developer could prompt AI to get a good setup within a week or two max.
Upvoting this for asking the candid question that so many commenters dance around. I can't imagine a 22-year-old confidently walking into an interview (or getting introduced to a team) and assuring everyone that they have the "harness" or "guardrails" to confidently contribute at the level of a 10x engineer.
If we apply the Gartner Hype Cycle to this disruptive technology, I do believe AI will hit a "slope of enlightenment" where an AI-assisted Analyst is properly understood in industries and can take productive roles. Conveniently, this will probably coincide with a lower interest rate where companies have funds for a talent acquisition spree/rapid growth.
With that being said, today's graduates are stuck in an awful market with a lot of charlatans selling crappy online courses and bad ideas.
I imagine the meta will be “build a micro saas product that’s marginally successful” for younger folks. It’s trivial to make a product but you learn a lot seeing what the AI does wrong.
The models are currently not at a place where you can just "type into a prompt box", any more than you could just "type into the IDE". You have to know what and why to type. The models are not at a place where no skill is needed. It may be a different still, but it's still a skill, and it's still a software engineering skill.
they really dont need to divert. They are sitting on historical unfathomable amounts of money.
1. The papers author's never claim causality. 2. There are other large macro forces at play, like firm consolidation, proliferation of NDAs, interest rates*, lack of growth (without Nvidia, the US economy would basically be in a recession?) and probably many more that are putting the job market into a low hire/low fire state.
Consider how we're actually not seeing much layoffs (some, but not much). So what were seeing in tech specifically is more like hiring freeze, so people with experience or in jobs aren't feeling much of the pressure, but new grads are hitting a wall.
Im posting this to resist the "ai is taking away people's jobs" narrative. It's definitely a factor but it's probably one of many and it's sloppy thinking to point fingers at ai and not other probably bigger factors.
* To their credit, the papers author's try to factor for zirp.
> 1. The papers author's never claim causality. 2. There are other large macro forces at play, like firm consolidation, proliferation of NDAs, interest rates*, lack of growth (without Nvidia, the US economy would basically be in a recession?) and probably many more that are putting the job market into a low hire/low fire state.
And the backdrop of an aging population that needs asset prices to keep rising to meet benefit and retirement obligations, so stagflation it is.
I built a digital internship for this very reason, to help the pre-entry level interns get work experience. Given ai has mostly replaced their admin work load. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48914589
Sadly, this is just the beginning.. As AI models improve in performance and cost, each technical job level will be replaced until it's just C-suites managing a bunch of ai agents.
Who needs C-suites?
hmm, I wonder what happens if we reach mass unemployment and homelessness...
i remember seeing the stats presented on moonshots podcast about 3 months ago. they said every quarter, the percentage of CS fresh grads decreased their placement roughly 10% or so and it was down to about 19% at last count and entry level salaries down from 96K to 61k, if i recall.
So revert to more of a mean for white collar work in other words.
That's going to put placement at 0% in two more quarters.
Direct link: https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/publication/canaries-in-...
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.
Robots will be the real status-quo changer. Information/office jobs have never really felt real to society, we are all living in a bubble of corporate daycare. Half the jobs being replaced are jobs that didn't exist a decade or two ago that the average person on the street doesn't even know exist.
The rest of society unfortunately have to work "real" jobs where they have to turn up early to do things like stocking, cleaning, cooking, harvesting, assembling.
When a robot can be a drop-in replacement hire for these roles it's apocalypse time. It is coming.
I remember when I was in 2nd grade or so (so, around 1982 or so), our teacher read us a passage from a book predicting the future: "and in the future, robots will do all the work so that people don't have to!" Even at 8 years old, I could see the problem with that: who decides who gets to live in the big house at the top of the hill and who has to live where I live?
Full self driving is next. Gig delivery jobs such as Doordasher and Lyft have single digit years remaining.
saw an article about former Lyft drivers now cleaning Waymos
it really is something
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.
AI VENDOR HYPE
Another impact that doesn't get discussed as much when the primary discussion is around job elimination is the downward pressure on software engineering salaries. Of course it's a different scenario if you are working at a frontier AI company, but outside of that, software engineers are becoming cheaper (relative to inflation) while they simultaneously get more productive due to LLMS.
It’s not just juniors in CS. If you lose your job, you’re not getting another one. You better not quit your job without having a new one lined up. Many have had to retire early.
So we have a crunch of expiring/retiring workers on the senior end and a cutoff of the flow of new talent from the junior end.
They’d better pray that we see automation gains above and beyond what we’ve seen so far or else we’ll be paying the price in a single generation.
My really big worry is that the people making these choices just do not care about a single thing beyond this single generation
Not a psychologist but my take on most of the wealthy people in the world is they are essentially narcissistic hedonists. They only care about growing wealth as a means to the end of maximizing the amount of fun they can have and to keep their egos happy that they have the most.
They don't seem to care about the future at all
You’re probably not wrong. I’ve gone from being essentially destitute as a child to what people would call “well-off” and having the context of both experiences is…eye opening.
I have moneyed acquaintances now that I never would have had before. For some of them the mere hint of their income being reduced in any way is enough to send them into spasms. These are people with enough money for their next 3 generations to live off of. Luxuriously.
I just don’t get it.
I had a similar trajectory to you. Not destitute as a child but my family was lower class. Pretty well off now though
I have a rough idea of how much it would cost me to retire immediately and maintain my life in a way I'm happy until I am 100 if I lived that long
I see executives get bonus packages yearly that are more than that number would be for me. Their bonus nevermind their actual salaries.
And yet they act like their lives are hard and their jobs are hard.
I don't get it either
I'm advising my kids not to major in CS.
Most of these jobs were already essentially taken away by outsourcing. It is so disturbing that countries like Australia only offer work visas for jobs that are difficult to fill, and only in certain locations as needed, but America actually encourages the ouster of skilled local talent for immigrants.
Australia's bar for skilled employment is pretty low and deflates wages as well. That's before we get into the prevalence of exploiting working holiday visas for practically slave wages.
I feel like we need to take a page from the past. Apprenticeships with lock-in. Sponsorships. And so on.
Imagine if even one billionaire dedicated themselves to be a modern “patron of the arts” on a more down-to-earth level. Imagine if people started to run “adopt-a-student” type frameworks for individuals. If fresh grads found it easy to get “grants” for things. And so on.
The first job is often a bit “take a chance on me” in its paradigm, but companies these days don’t want bets, they want sure things. Unfortunately this is to some extent unrealistic, but also it’s true that cutting out entry level roles entirely does cut down on uncertainty. It cuts down on upside too, but that’s more invisible.
I wish there were studies on when this situation will normalize. Will the lost jobs ever come back? Or not?
You have market theory saying that at some point, you will not have enough seniors because no juniors were trained. So seniors will become more and more expensive due to lack of supply. At some point, it will be cheaper to take the risk and train the junior entry person again, and things will stabilize out. The sad part is that there will be a generation of 10 years or so of lost juniors while seniors are abundant.
At that point AI will be significantly more advanced than today.
Sure but we can't work on hypotheticals. Otherwise we can also say that information work is 90% automated, society has 50% unemployment of white-collar workers and capitalism is over because there is no purchasing power. There is enough incentives from people in power to keep status quo(bread and circuses) that if we are trying to answer the question using another framework than the current one we are just speculating
>"At some point, it will be cheaper to take the risk and train the junior entry person again"
I think they will have big problem finding people who will actually train those juniors by then.
2022-30 will be known as the lost generation in tech. I think the situation will improve in 2030s and AI/coding will become hot again. Or may be perhaps as soon as Feds start to open their purse to print money again aka QE.
What kind of study could predict the future like this? Every technological change is different each time, I think.
For example - at first ATMs created more jobs in banking because employees could move to more complex services. But banks are back to downsizing after further advancements streamlined those services too, aiui.
I would plan based on the lost jobs not coming back. I would also plan that the trend of AI getting better and taking more jobs will continue. Plan for the worst, hope for the best.
A lot of people may have to transition to careers that people do not want to have AI do, like nursing. The earlier you start such a transition the easier it is because you still have resources to make moves.
>"A lot of people may have to transition to careers that people do not want to have AI do, like nursing."
Becoming bum or going off the grid would be way more attractive to me than working my ass of in stressful conditions for meager pay so some motherfuckers can buy yet another yacht
Suit yourself, I won't get in your way.
>"I won't get in your way."
Smart choice
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.
Unless you mean taxicab drivers, which was the term for them before the automobile. Taxicab = taximeter cabriolet, and a cabriolet is a style of horse-drawn carriage.
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.
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...
This is unironically the best comparison.
maybe they became taxi drivers. But that too will be gone soon.
Can't beat capitalism + technological innovation.
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. But individual companies don’t have aligned incentives.
> 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.
A high-potential junior you can at least justify as an investment in the future.
The other people who are going to get squeezed are the later-career developers who are below-average in ability. (I'm not using "below average" here pejoratively - just noting that by definition, half of developers are below-average.) Outside of big tech, there are piles of organizations with devs who don't make big-tech salary and who are only marginally productive for what they're getting paid.
If you're an organization that only has the budget to pay non-junior devs $80k... you can see the implications of having the option to spend your dev budget on seniors + tokens instead.
I'm not seeing the reason why typical engineers can't vibecode. Non-coders can vibecode. I have read hundreds of posts claiming that senior engineers can vibecode but not a single one saying that juniors cannot.
I'm not saying they can't, but rather that with the time seniors then spend cleaning up their tricky bugs, architectural problems, etc. the seniors could have just done the work themselves.
In a cost sensitive business, nobody cleans up the architectural problems today - no change for vibe coders except upward.
Masters degrees are a way for people to spend longer in the education-costs-more-than-the-value-to-the-educator phase of their career.
> But individual companies don’t have aligned incentives.
Be realistic. Would you start a business and risk it's viability giving away free training to the public? No, and neither would anyone else.
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.
are you incharge of making those decisions at work?
maybe govt can tax ai companies and use that money to prearm juniors with tokens that only they can use.
And if they don't, what then? What does a post-job society look like? I'm skeptical of communism, but I'm skeptical because it doesn't work in a society where some people need to do something (like raise crops) but aren't incentivized to do so. But if there's actually nothing humans need to do? The question is, will we reach logical conclusions peacefully or violently?
Ask the people that worked on printing presses
Soft people learn that the world is harsh and you either adapt or die.
*Bane voice*
No, not AI. AI isn't hitting entry level jobs hardest. People and Businesses are by having "AI substituting for labor".
If we do not pursue the common good of humanity with AI, we will destroy humanity with AI.
The plus side of all this is that entry level software development jobs are typically pursued by recent college graduates. They are young.
While it sucks to have blown a lot of money and accept they've been duped to get a degree in something that is now "worth" a small fraction of what it once was, time is on their side. There is plenty of time to go back to school, or apprentice, or learn a trade or go to trade school in something else with better long term career prospects.
On the opposite side of this, senior level devs should (hopefully) be on target financially and theoretically should be fine, especially if they make adjustments now (lower COL, layoff preparation, prepare for accelerated retirement timeline).
The folks who are really going to suffer are those early to mid level developers. Not as much of a network, not enough traditional expertise, not enough savings, not as much time to invest and pull the trigger on a career change.
To the surprise of who, exactly? Sometimes it feels like HN has never used an AI model past ChatGPT in 2022. Modern AI is so capable nowadays that it _does_ obviate most of the work you'd normally give an entry level person.
Im mostly speaking about software engineering, but the "juniors" I've seen be hired now are basically the equivalent of mid (maybe even low senior) levels of yesteryear. AI is most certainly raising the bar.