5 ms·

A new sign that AI is competing with college grads?

74 points by Bluestein 2y ago

dboreham 2y ago
It's tempting to connect "AI is kind of like having an always-awake intern" with "nobody is hiring interns" but I'm skeptical. I think this is more about the decline of the corporate enterprise model in general. Exponential growth can't continue forever. Management is trying to force the curve to be exponential by no longer hiring anyone who isn't clearly going to improve profits in the short term.
- mmooss 2y ago
  > the decline of the corporate enterprise model in general. Exponential growth can't continue forever. People have been saying things like that probably since the creating of the corporate model. (Exponential is too much, but I'll take that as exaggeration to make the point.)
- Nevermark 2y ago
  Corporate models seek to grow exponentially, with hit and miss results. Not sure where there are any signs of that stopping. More widely: Businesses, economies, and natural ecosystems, are all full of both exponential drivers and limitations. Since the first life form. It isn’t a model that is going away. Or that can go away. Unless there are no new opportunities for new things, which seems unlikely anytime soon, there will always be new pockets of exponential growth.
franktankbank 2y ago
It's the economy and outsourcing. Why is everyone hell bent to say AI is killing jobs? I think its a because its a great scapegoat to blame a machine rather than foreigners and shithead management. Its crazy too because not only are you out a job you wind up getting shittier products and services at unreasonable prices, a double whammy!
- rco8786 2y ago
  Do you have some data to show that outsourcing is the culprit? It seems just as easy to blame "foreigners" as it is to blame "AI", especially considering your blanket followup statement about those foreigners always making "shittier" products.
  - horns4lyfe 2y ago
    It’s obvious, you just have to look around. Please don’t tell us not to believe our eyes because we don’t have a double blind study.
    - rco8786 2y ago
      It's not obvious to me. I look around and nobody I know is outsourcing anything anymore than they were 5, 10, 20 years ago. Nor is it obvious that outsourced products are inherently shittier than something made domestically. You can't just make a blanket statement about the entire economy and say "it's obvious". We live in a big world. Your perception is not my perception. That's why data is so important.
      - smileson2 2y ago
        Most mid sized companies I’ve worked with are nearshoring almost everything or in the process of doing so It doesn’t bite me as much due to seniority but it’s still happening Tbh if I was younger I’d just try to relocate myself seems fun
        antisthenes 2y ago
        What exactly is nearshoring? Canada/Mexico? SLatAM? What is "mid-sized" ? There's so much vague descriptors in your post as to be almost entirely meaningless.
      - fzeroracer 2y ago
        Do you work in the tech industry? In what part? Because from personal experience I've seen loads of companies wind down and remove internal teams like internal QA in favor of outsourcing to other regions, for example. It's made my job extremely annoying because I can't just tap the shoulder of my nearby QA engineer and see what's up, I have to wait an entire day for them to get the next build and then deal with the wrong stuff they've reported.
bawolff 2y ago
I feel like the more obvious explanation is that we live in a time of economic uncertainty (cough tarrifs) so companies are cutting back hiring until things become more certain.
- drivebyhooting 2y ago
  Was happening last year too for SWE.
- deepsun 2y ago
  Job market got issues way before tariffs, somewhere in the pandemic times. I believe it's WFH. It taught companies remote work, and it's a small next step to offshore work.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    The job market crash didn't correlate at all with WFH, it correlated with the end of WFH and (more importantly) exactly lined up with the end of ZIRP. Money was free, so a lot of people were paid out of thin air. When money stopped being free salaries actually had to come from somewhere, and there weren't enough somewheres to go around.
    - dgfitz 2y ago
      This is the correct answer. Tariffs are not why the job market is so awful. Maybe that will be true in the future, but the past two years of horrible terrible miserable state of the job market is not because of tariffs imposed a month ago. I'm sure I'm not the only one who remembers all those posts on hn 2-3 years ago about how bad the job market is, right? It has only become worse. I know a kid who interned at a job last summer. Graduated, applied to a full-time job at the company. He happened to know someone in HR who told him "we got over a thousand applications for this job req in one day." How tariffs can be blamed for that kind of situation, which is happening all over the US and has been for literal _years_, defies logic.
    - deepsun 2y ago
      I don't understand "money was free". I'm an employer. I need to pay salary, and those money are not free for me regardless of interest rates. Maybe on a scale of national economies you can say that, but it doesn't affect my situation at all. It would be true if I could say "hire a person for $X, it will increase our net income by $X+$x", but it doesn't work like that at all. And for me it makes sense to skip candidates from SF Bay Area altogether, there are a lot of good candidates somewhere deep in Utah-s.
sleepyguy 2y ago
http://archive.today/AUizz http://archive.today/AUizz
lolinder 2y ago
Every one of these posts wants to blame AI because that's the vogue explanation, but every time we see a shift like this there are better explanations. The wave of tech layoffs a few years ago were blamed on AI but were so obviously attributable to interest rates and changing tax policies that the idea that the proto-AI tools we had at the time were responsible was laughable. This shift we at least have better AI tools to blame (though I'd argue they're still not good enough), but we also have a US President who has straight up said that he wants to cause a global recession and has been doing everything in his power to make that happen. Given that the impact of someone running a bulldozer through the economy like this is well-studied and that we'd predict exactly what were seeing here, attributing the damage to AI is silly verging on responsible. Place the blame where it belongs!
- mistrial9 2y ago
  AI are lying machines, and also enable the lying that is convenient to executive management?
- area51org 2y ago
  "Journalism" is now often just a euphemism for shock porn and clickbait. At the end of this Atlantic article, the author admits: > Luckily for humans, though, skepticism of the strong interpretation is warranted. For one thing, supercharged productivity growth, which an intelligence explosion would likely produce, is hard to find in the data. For another, a New York Fed survey of firms released last year found that AI was having a negligible effect on hiring. In other words: did we scare ya? Good, because it got you to read this far. Nothing to actually see here.
mark_l_watson 2y ago
Sure we have seen fantastic gains in AI capability, but until we have more AI tech diffusion into products, industrial processes, etc., AI’s effect on the economy may be much smaller that what people anticipate.
incomingpain 2y ago
There has been a longterm negative trend for recent grad employment. Even those who do get employed, they tend to be underemployed with low wages. The old excuse was 'automation' was killing jobs. The lesser old excuse was offshoring. Now it's AI? How about we stop inventing excuses and perhaps look at root cause of the 'recent grad' factor. That perhaps requiring university degrees that arent worth anything for jobs that dont need them is the problem?
- bilbo0s 2y ago
  perhaps requiring university degrees that arent worth anything for jobs that dont need them is the problem? I don't know? Kind of sounds like the problem is more fundamental than that. It sounds like the job is not actually there in the first place. Doesn't matter how qualified you are if there's no money to pay you.
kelsey978126 2y ago
I would rather have somebody with life experience than somebody with an education right now. It's just like how we complain that the AI leaderboards are not representative of real AI skill, it's the exact same for academic benchmarks of whatever institution minted you a diploma. I don't need an overfitted worker just like i don't need an overfitted AI agent.
mmaunder 2y ago
AI isn't replacing many jobs yet. But it is causing customers to hold off on certain purchases, like dev services, due to uncertainty. And the shills are amplifying the effect. I'm seeing layoffs caused by this.
- causal 2y ago
  Yeah I can only think of 3 ways AI is causing unemployment- 1) Hype, as you said, leading to delayed hiring. 2) Offshore workers using AI becoming more competitive. 3) Reallocation of capital to AI projects, which skews demand towards data scientists at the expense of, say, front-end devs (who ironically might have provided better return). None of these are actually reducing the amount of human workers needed, but the social and economic impact is real.
ohgr 2y ago
AI is only killing jobs because people are killing jobs and blaming it on AI.
gitroom 2y ago
Been chewing on versions of this debate for years - blame keeps shifting but not much really changes. Honestly, everyone points fingers but the fixes always seem out of reach. Kinda sucks, but that's how it goes.
UncleOxidant 2y ago
Isn't the simplest explanation that the economy is slowing and new college grads generally tend to have trouble getting hired during recessions?
dtnewman 2y ago
The article is talking about new grads generally, but I think there's an issue with AI that isn't talked about enough. It's not that it's taking away jobs [1], it's that it is taking away skills. Even if you are the biggest critic of AI, it's hard to deny that the frontier models are quite good at the sort of stuff that you learn in school. Write a binary tree in C? Check. Implement radix sort in Python? check. An A* implementation? check. Once upon a time, I had to struggle through these. My code wouldn't run properly because I forgot to release a variable from memory or I was off-by-one on a recursive algorithm. But the struggling is what ultimately helped me actually learn the material [2]. If I could just type out "build a hash table in C" and then shuffle a few things around to make it look like my own, I'd have never really understood the underlying work. At the same time, LLMs are often useful, but still fail quite frequently in real world work. I'm not trusting cursor to do a database migration in production unless I myself understand and check each line of code that it writes. Now, as a hiring manager, what am I supposed to do with new grads? [1] which I think it might be to some extent in some companies, by making existing engineers more productive, but that's a different point [2] to the inevitable responses that say "well I actually learn things better now because the LLM explains it to me", that's great, but what's relevant here is that a large chunk of people learn by struggling
- bumby 2y ago
  I'm seeing something similar. LLMs have helped me tremendously, especially in tasks like translating from one language to another. But I've also witnessed interns using them as a crutch. They can churn out code faster that I did at an equivalent stage in my career but they really struggle debugging. Often, it seems like they just throw up their hands and pivot to something else (language, task, model) instead of troubleshooting. It almost seems like they are being conditioned to think implementation should always be easy. I often wonder if this is just "old curmudgeons" attitude or if it belies something more systemic about the craft.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- hcarvalhoalves 2y ago
robofanatic 2y ago
Isn't outsourcing has been happening for decades?
- BergAndCo 2y ago
  [dead]
StefanBatory 2y ago
For me as a fresh graduate in Poland, the job market doesn't even exist for juniors rn. And I live in a big city. Even internships are but a dream.
paleotrope 2y ago
"Even newly minted M.B.A.s from elite programs are struggling to find work." I was worried at first but this is an elite journalism product for elites who are facing economic insecurity and not AI
philsquared_ 2y ago
I don’t think it’s any of the reasons listed in the article or the ones mentioned here either. I’ll be blunt, people don’t want to hire Gen Z because of bad past experiences with that generation. When 1 in 6 companies are "hesitant to hire Gen Z workers," then yeah, obviously unemployment is going to be higher for them. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/1-6-us-companies-reluctant-103100857.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/1-6-us-companies-reluctant-10... That’s just one article, but there are plenty more. Do a basic search for "not hiring Gen Z" or something similar and you’ll find tons of examples. It’s easier for people to believe AI is to blame rather than take the answer straight from the hiring managers mouths. They don’t want to hire Gen Z because they see them as more hassle than they’re worth. I’m not saying whether that’s true or not, but that’s how a lot of managers and business owners feel right now, and you don’t have to look very hard to figure that out.
mediumsmart 2y ago
> it's that it is taking away skills. And for some it is giving away skills. a give and take tool on a need to know basis

74 points by Bluestein 2y ago

It's tempting to connect "AI is kind of like having an always-awake intern" with "nobody is hiring interns" but I'm skeptical. I think this is more about the decline of the corporate enterprise model in general. Exponential growth can't continue forever. Management is trying to force the curve to be exponential by no longer hiring anyone who isn't clearly going to improve profits in the short term.

mmooss 2y ago
> the decline of the corporate enterprise model in general. Exponential growth can't continue forever. People have been saying things like that probably since the creating of the corporate model. (Exponential is too much, but I'll take that as exaggeration to make the point.)
Nevermark 2y ago
Corporate models seek to grow exponentially, with hit and miss results. Not sure where there are any signs of that stopping. More widely: Businesses, economies, and natural ecosystems, are all full of both exponential drivers and limitations. Since the first life form. It isn’t a model that is going away. Or that can go away. Unless there are no new opportunities for new things, which seems unlikely anytime soon, there will always be new pockets of exponential growth.

franktankbank 2y ago

It's the economy and outsourcing. Why is everyone hell bent to say AI is killing jobs? I think its a because its a great scapegoat to blame a machine rather than foreigners and shithead management. Its crazy too because not only are you out a job you wind up getting shittier products and services at unreasonable prices, a double whammy!

rco8786 2y ago
Do you have some data to show that outsourcing is the culprit? It seems just as easy to blame "foreigners" as it is to blame "AI", especially considering your blanket followup statement about those foreigners always making "shittier" products.
- horns4lyfe 2y ago
  It’s obvious, you just have to look around. Please don’t tell us not to believe our eyes because we don’t have a double blind study.
  - rco8786 2y ago
    It's not obvious to me. I look around and nobody I know is outsourcing anything anymore than they were 5, 10, 20 years ago. Nor is it obvious that outsourced products are inherently shittier than something made domestically. You can't just make a blanket statement about the entire economy and say "it's obvious". We live in a big world. Your perception is not my perception. That's why data is so important.
    - smileson2 2y ago
      Most mid sized companies I’ve worked with are nearshoring almost everything or in the process of doing so It doesn’t bite me as much due to seniority but it’s still happening Tbh if I was younger I’d just try to relocate myself seems fun
      - antisthenes 2y ago
        What exactly is nearshoring? Canada/Mexico? SLatAM? What is "mid-sized" ? There's so much vague descriptors in your post as to be almost entirely meaningless.
    - fzeroracer 2y ago
      Do you work in the tech industry? In what part? Because from personal experience I've seen loads of companies wind down and remove internal teams like internal QA in favor of outsourcing to other regions, for example. It's made my job extremely annoying because I can't just tap the shoulder of my nearby QA engineer and see what's up, I have to wait an entire day for them to get the next build and then deal with the wrong stuff they've reported.

bawolff 2y ago

I feel like the more obvious explanation is that we live in a time of economic uncertainty (cough tarrifs) so companies are cutting back hiring until things become more certain.

drivebyhooting 2y ago
Was happening last year too for SWE.
deepsun 2y ago
Job market got issues way before tariffs, somewhere in the pandemic times. I believe it's WFH. It taught companies remote work, and it's a small next step to offshore work.
- lolinder 2y ago
  The job market crash didn't correlate at all with WFH, it correlated with the end of WFH and (more importantly) exactly lined up with the end of ZIRP. Money was free, so a lot of people were paid out of thin air. When money stopped being free salaries actually had to come from somewhere, and there weren't enough somewheres to go around.
  - dgfitz 2y ago
    This is the correct answer. Tariffs are not why the job market is so awful. Maybe that will be true in the future, but the past two years of horrible terrible miserable state of the job market is not because of tariffs imposed a month ago. I'm sure I'm not the only one who remembers all those posts on hn 2-3 years ago about how bad the job market is, right? It has only become worse. I know a kid who interned at a job last summer. Graduated, applied to a full-time job at the company. He happened to know someone in HR who told him "we got over a thousand applications for this job req in one day." How tariffs can be blamed for that kind of situation, which is happening all over the US and has been for literal _years_, defies logic.
  - deepsun 2y ago
    I don't understand "money was free". I'm an employer. I need to pay salary, and those money are not free for me regardless of interest rates. Maybe on a scale of national economies you can say that, but it doesn't affect my situation at all. It would be true if I could say "hire a person for $X, it will increase our net income by $X+$x", but it doesn't work like that at all. And for me it makes sense to skip candidates from SF Bay Area altogether, there are a lot of good candidates somewhere deep in Utah-s.

sleepyguy 2y ago

http://archive.today/AUizz http://archive.today/AUizz

lolinder 2y ago

Every one of these posts wants to blame AI because that's the vogue explanation, but every time we see a shift like this there are better explanations. The wave of tech layoffs a few years ago were blamed on AI but were so obviously attributable to interest rates and changing tax policies that the idea that the proto-AI tools we had at the time were responsible was laughable. This shift we at least have better AI tools to blame (though I'd argue they're still not good enough), but we also have a US President who has straight up said that he wants to cause a global recession and has been doing everything in his power to make that happen. Given that the impact of someone running a bulldozer through the economy like this is well-studied and that we'd predict exactly what were seeing here, attributing the damage to AI is silly verging on responsible. Place the blame where it belongs!

mistrial9 2y ago
AI are lying machines, and also enable the lying that is convenient to executive management?
area51org 2y ago
"Journalism" is now often just a euphemism for shock porn and clickbait. At the end of this Atlantic article, the author admits: > Luckily for humans, though, skepticism of the strong interpretation is warranted. For one thing, supercharged productivity growth, which an intelligence explosion would likely produce, is hard to find in the data. For another, a New York Fed survey of firms released last year found that AI was having a negligible effect on hiring. In other words: did we scare ya? Good, because it got you to read this far. Nothing to actually see here.

mark_l_watson 2y ago

Sure we have seen fantastic gains in AI capability, but until we have more AI tech diffusion into products, industrial processes, etc., AI’s effect on the economy may be much smaller that what people anticipate.

incomingpain 2y ago

There has been a longterm negative trend for recent grad employment. Even those who do get employed, they tend to be underemployed with low wages. The old excuse was 'automation' was killing jobs. The lesser old excuse was offshoring. Now it's AI? How about we stop inventing excuses and perhaps look at root cause of the 'recent grad' factor. That perhaps requiring university degrees that arent worth anything for jobs that dont need them is the problem?

bilbo0s 2y ago
perhaps requiring university degrees that arent worth anything for jobs that dont need them is the problem? I don't know? Kind of sounds like the problem is more fundamental than that. It sounds like the job is not actually there in the first place. Doesn't matter how qualified you are if there's no money to pay you.

kelsey978126 2y ago

I would rather have somebody with life experience than somebody with an education right now. It's just like how we complain that the AI leaderboards are not representative of real AI skill, it's the exact same for academic benchmarks of whatever institution minted you a diploma. I don't need an overfitted worker just like i don't need an overfitted AI agent.

mmaunder 2y ago

AI isn't replacing many jobs yet. But it is causing customers to hold off on certain purchases, like dev services, due to uncertainty. And the shills are amplifying the effect. I'm seeing layoffs caused by this.

causal 2y ago
Yeah I can only think of 3 ways AI is causing unemployment- 1) Hype, as you said, leading to delayed hiring. 2) Offshore workers using AI becoming more competitive. 3) Reallocation of capital to AI projects, which skews demand towards data scientists at the expense of, say, front-end devs (who ironically might have provided better return). None of these are actually reducing the amount of human workers needed, but the social and economic impact is real.

ohgr 2y ago

AI is only killing jobs because people are killing jobs and blaming it on AI.

gitroom 2y ago

Been chewing on versions of this debate for years - blame keeps shifting but not much really changes. Honestly, everyone points fingers but the fixes always seem out of reach. Kinda sucks, but that's how it goes.

UncleOxidant 2y ago

Isn't the simplest explanation that the economy is slowing and new college grads generally tend to have trouble getting hired during recessions?

dtnewman 2y ago

The article is talking about new grads generally, but I think there's an issue with AI that isn't talked about enough. It's not that it's taking away jobs [1], it's that it is taking away skills. Even if you are the biggest critic of AI, it's hard to deny that the frontier models are quite good at the sort of stuff that you learn in school. Write a binary tree in C? Check. Implement radix sort in Python? check. An A* implementation? check. Once upon a time, I had to struggle through these. My code wouldn't run properly because I forgot to release a variable from memory or I was off-by-one on a recursive algorithm. But the struggling is what ultimately helped me actually learn the material [2]. If I could just type out "build a hash table in C" and then shuffle a few things around to make it look like my own, I'd have never really understood the underlying work. At the same time, LLMs are often useful, but still fail quite frequently in real world work. I'm not trusting cursor to do a database migration in production unless I myself understand and check each line of code that it writes. Now, as a hiring manager, what am I supposed to do with new grads? [1] which I think it might be to some extent in some companies, by making existing engineers more productive, but that's a different point [2] to the inevitable responses that say "well I actually learn things better now because the LLM explains it to me", that's great, but what's relevant here is that a large chunk of people learn by struggling

bumby 2y ago
I'm seeing something similar. LLMs have helped me tremendously, especially in tasks like translating from one language to another. But I've also witnessed interns using them as a crutch. They can churn out code faster that I did at an equivalent stage in my career but they really struggle debugging. Often, it seems like they just throw up their hands and pivot to something else (language, task, model) instead of troubleshooting. It almost seems like they are being conditioned to think implementation should always be easy. I often wonder if this is just "old curmudgeons" attitude or if it belies something more systemic about the craft.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
hcarvalhoalves 2y ago

robofanatic 2y ago

Isn't outsourcing has been happening for decades?

BergAndCo 2y ago
[dead]

StefanBatory 2y ago

For me as a fresh graduate in Poland, the job market doesn't even exist for juniors rn. And I live in a big city. Even internships are but a dream.

paleotrope 2y ago

"Even newly minted M.B.A.s from elite programs are struggling to find work." I was worried at first but this is an elite journalism product for elites who are facing economic insecurity and not AI

philsquared_ 2y ago

I don’t think it’s any of the reasons listed in the article or the ones mentioned here either. I’ll be blunt, people don’t want to hire Gen Z because of bad past experiences with that generation. When 1 in 6 companies are "hesitant to hire Gen Z workers," then yeah, obviously unemployment is going to be higher for them. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/1-6-us-companies-reluctant-103100857.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/1-6-us-companies-reluctant-10... That’s just one article, but there are plenty more. Do a basic search for "not hiring Gen Z" or something similar and you’ll find tons of examples. It’s easier for people to believe AI is to blame rather than take the answer straight from the hiring managers mouths. They don’t want to hire Gen Z because they see them as more hassle than they’re worth. I’m not saying whether that’s true or not, but that’s how a lot of managers and business owners feel right now, and you don’t have to look very hard to figure that out.

mediumsmart 2y ago

> it's that it is taking away skills. And for some it is giving away skills. a give and take tool on a need to know basis