10 ms·

Sorry, grads: Entry-level tech jobs are getting wiped out

97 points by nradov 1y ago

ty6853 1y ago
I did a lot of driving forklifts, construction, moving, factory work, etc when junior in the job market after graduating near the top of my class with strong internship experience from a top 10 engineering college. Adjusting expectations is important. If you start with the expectation that all you will have is a pot to piss in then it is all up from there. Things may never look up, but when they do, I've found a lot of employers admire people who were willing to wipe old peoples' asses when the economy is bad rather than wale about the circumstances.
- otikik 1y ago
  A pot? They gave you a pot??
- palmotea 1y ago
  > Adjusting expectations is important. If you start with the expectation that all you will have is a pot to piss in then it is all up from there. You're just coaching people to be passive in the face of a hostile society, and that's bad, because it lets society off the hook for providing for its citizens. Also isn't it strange that's mainly expected of the people at the bottom? Maybe the shareholders should start to expect the number won't keep going up to the max? If it's 2025, and you need to convince yourself that all you may get is "pot to piss in," you should be working to burn it all the fuck down to the ground. After all, isn't it "all up from there"?
  - ty6853 1y ago
    It would be nice if society will help you, but you should expect that they will not, especially if you are a childless adult which is the one class of people society will actually tax back below the poverty line.
  - psunavy03 1y ago
    > you should be working to burn it all the fuck down to the ground. . . . which is literally never the correct answer.
    - ty6853 1y ago
      I don't know that it's the wrong answer, but I am not flippantly going to go tell someone to go get machine gunned by the national guard, especially when I won't be joining them. If they are going to come to that conclusion, I'll let them get to that on their own.
    - palmotea 1y ago
      >> you should be working to burn it all the fuck down to the ground. > ...which is literally never the correct answer. But it's the answer chosen all the time. If "entry-level tech jobs are getting wiped out," some (usually distributed) group made the decision to burn those new-grads plans to the ground. Why should they be insulated from similar decisions? Working "to burn it all the fuck down to the ground" is just spreading that "love" to those groups. Those groups should be threatened with that, because otherwise they're not going to restrain themselves.
      - spacemadness 1y ago
        You have to understand lots of people on HN want to be one of those people on top eventually so they will bend over backwards to apologize for the executive class until they supposedly get there.
        palmotea 1y ago
        > You have to understand lots of people on HN want to be one of those people on top eventually so they will bend over backwards to apologize for the executive class until they supposedly get there. Oh, I totally understand that. HN is full of workers LARPing as tycoons; advocating for policies, attitudes, and ideology that are most likely going to end up being harmful to their own interests.
  - jimbokun 1y ago
    This is bad advice because as an individual you have close to zero influence on recreating society from scratch. Best to be pragmatic in your personal decisions while contributing to your larger political ideals.
- iteria 1y ago
  I graduated into a bad market and I took a shitty job 5 states away with low pay. I was basically a warm body while I waited out the clock on being considered a recent grad. I'm so lucky I had 3 internships so I could fake being an experienced junior and truly start my career. A lot of my peers were too good for those kinds of jobs and while they started their careers at the same time, they didn't make industry and collect paychecks while they did it, so I think I made the correct choice about how to spend those 18months.
- Loudergood 1y ago
  Student loans generally don't wait, and most people wail while they're working the shitty jobs.
  - lotsofpulp 1y ago
    Why is why one shouldn’t take on large amounts of debt for questionable return.
    - michaelmrose 1y ago
      What should they do then?
      - tekla 1y ago
        Get good grades and scholarships
      - lotsofpulp 1y ago
        Government funded schools with lower tuition (possibly even community college), more rigorous degrees with higher likelihoods of stable pay (e.g. medical/engineering), trade schools/apprenticeships.
        eyesofgod 1y ago
        [dead]
        dttze 1y ago
        They did that. Then those jobs still went away. So fuck them, right?
        lotsofpulp 1y ago
        That’s why you choose lower tuition options so debt levels are manageable even with jobs that pay less.
- aredox 1y ago
  >I've found a lot of employers admire people who were willing to wipe old peoples' asses when the economy is bad rather than wale about the circumstances. That's what they'd say to your face, but statistics show that anything than a spotless carreer means you'll never recover. Once you fall behind your peers, you will never be promoted as much as them nor be paid as much.
- close04 1y ago
  For a lot of students out there now the reality of the "opportunity cost" is skewed. They will invest enormous amounts of time and effort in being the best in uni even if this alone may not bring them a guaranteed leg up over the competition when they face the adult working world. My academic career was always revolving around the top but never quite at the top. So eventually I gave up on investing more effort for diminishing returns and focused on having an advantage the others weren't pursuing. I started working very early, with some embarrassingly shitty jobs at first, each of which allowed me to get the next slightly less embarrassingly shitty job subsequently and so on. I'm glossing over what could have been a long string of lucky breaks that probably made all the difference. Anyway, by the time we finished university my colleagues who were right at the top got catapulted into the working world all the way to the level I had years before. Not quite ground level but not far. And I can still see that handicap in most of their careers even now, decades later.
  - ty6853 1y ago
    A lot of truth to that. Although I graduated well after the dot com days, at that time you usually had to be near the top just to get an internship. You could probably let academics slip a bit after that.
- KennyBlanken 1y ago
  Please stop with this nonsense you can 'work your way up' or that if only you work hard enough your efforts will be rewarded. That's long, long gone. Companies don't care if you work hard or not. You're disposable to them. If you work hard, you only get given more work. By turning employment into "gig" work, they've shifted as much of the risk and costs onto workers, too. Companies have weaponized employment practices and now they're just burning everything to the ground because they figure there will always be someone desperate enough. Turns out that doesn't quite work - Amazon for example has had internal memos circulating that say in various communities they're pissing off or injuring so many people they are having trouble finding workers. "Gig" companies care so little, will suspend or cancel workers at the drop of a hat, intentionally or unintentionally. Even Uber's CEO, when he tried going 'undercover' as a driver to see what it was like, admitted he was scared he'd get a less than 5 star rating because it almost instantly torpedos you, especially if you're new. Because the "customer is always right", these companies offer no way to challenge a customer's complaint even if it's obvious nonsense. Why investigate anything, which costs money, if you've got a long line of people desperate to make $6 delivering a cheesebuger 5 miles? Our legislators let silicon valley roll right over a century worth of worker protections because it was "innovative" (ie they got lots of lobbyist cash.) Voters let them do it because they want their delivered cheeseburger, groceries or makeup as cheap as possible....and voters don't care about the "losers" who work those jobs. It's not them, after all...
- happytoexplain 1y ago
  There is a very valid point you are mostly sticking to, but your last sentence is essentially "employers admire people who don't complain", which I'm going to have to push back on. Yes, not complaining is an excellent principle to have generally, but it matters why something bad is happening. A large proportion of people don't just think the economy is bad because, well, it happens, we're all trying our best - they see people and policies making it bad. There is a huge conversation about the details and realities of that perception, but that's irrelevant to the perception's existence. For example: If I am underpaid and overworked because my employer and I and all the people doing their best for the economy are all suffering together under unavoidable circumstances, I am going to stay tough, keep my head up, count my blessings, etc. If I am underpaid and overworked because policy-makers are enabling it and our employers are deciding to shift a disproportionate share of the societal suffering onto employees and we are all allowing a culture of overwork and underpayment to seep in - I'm going to do something you are uncharitably describing as "wailing".
- michaelmrose 1y ago
  What can easily happen is that you take the shit work to survive but it takes so much of your time and so much out of you and you fall behind and miss opportunities and it becomes impossible to climb out of the hole.
- ajsixjxjxbxb 1y ago
  > people who were willing to wipe old peoples' asses when the economy is bad rather than wale about the circumstances. Isn’t there some quote about old men planting trees whose shade they’ll never know? Was that just a myth or did those generations actually exist?
  - ty6853 1y ago
    The vast majority of trees are planted because the value of a sapling ismore than a seedling. It doesn't matter that you will never know the shade, and that the sapling is worthless for industrial purposes, you can profit quite quickly. To be more explicit, the time value of something closer is higher than one further, so you can actually induce under even a hypercapitalist society any arbitrarily long delay investment with 0 'real' payoff until the end.
  - otikik 1y ago
    Unclear origin, here's some investigation: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2020/04/29/tree-shade/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2020/04/29/tree-shade/
- Breza 1y ago
  I respect that. I graduated during the Great Recession. Ended up working for extremely low wages out of college and ultimately went to grad school after getting nowhere in trying to find a better position.
RicDan 1y ago
Can sort of confirm that. Wiped out is maybe the wrong word - they are more heavily being off-shored right now. Whilst there is some very obvious evaluations going on of replacing juniors with <insert your favourite llm>, it's quite obviously not there yet but management level interest is off the charts. We are trying to motion against it as much as we can internally... by arguing that we can use <insert your favourite llm> as a good coaching/mentoring support for juniors to promote them quicker. But yea... We don't like where this is going, and right now it appears that not much can be done by how much money is being poured into this current LLM-based-delusion. Edit: speaking specifically about SWE-Jr. jobs
- seemsclear 1y ago
  The delusion is the public’s belief they can ignore political action and everything will work out for them.
  - corp8drone8sf 1y ago
    both major parties have sold out workers, the only real choice is the green party, workers' party, etc
    - hedora 1y ago
      The data disagrees. Here’s a graph of private sector spending on new factories in the US. 2020-2024 blows every time period out of the water since 1975. Look at what’s happening now: Spending started to collapse immediately after Trump got in: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PRMFGCON https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PRMFGCON
  - RicDan 1y ago
    Definitely agree. I blame educational institutions (I know, they can't do much without enough freedom + budget) for not advocating enough to our democratic responsabilities. I do wish we adapted some stuff from early history (Athens to be precise) - democratic participants got a very low base salary, and they also could vote to ban people from democratic participation (and hence the city) whenever they got too power hungry. Seems like a loss of responsibility allows too much incompetence to prevail.
belter 1y ago
Its not AI, its the economy. Almost 100k US tech layoffs in 2024 and 55k already in 2025. I know it's not showing in the US unemployment statistics yet...I judge because of the relabeling. CCIE's become Tech Support engineers, Junior Developers become Uber drivers..
margorczynski 1y ago
Is it AI or just good ol' offshoring? Mix of both? If AI can just make any dev 10-20% more efficient that's a whole lot of jobs no longer needed.
- alephnerd 1y ago
  Mix of both. You can't justify hiring a new grad for $130K when you can hire top tier mid-career talent in Warsaw, Cluj, or Bangalore for $50-80K and average mid-career talent for $20-40k In fact, companies like Infosys have begun adopting coding copilots en masse to reduce their own new grad hiring by 20%, but increase utilization rates from 70% to 85%. That said, most new grads were not getting substituted by Infosys freshers - they're getting replaced by mid-career H1Bs who were laid off during COVID and returned to the CEE or India Furthermore, a significant number of mid-career Eastern European and Indian engineers, PMs, and managers returned to the old country during the COVID layoffs due to visa status. A lot of those guys were rehired by their old companies to found GCCs abroad. Finally, state and federal governments in India, Poland, Romania, Czechia, etc provide tax incentives that reduce hiring costs by an additional $10-20k in aggregate.
  - ty6853 1y ago
    80k in a rural area outside of Bangalore would be an absolute killing. The real hack here is to avail yourself of a digital nomad or engineer yourself an employment visa via some shell company and then live in the 3rd world while crushing the competition via 1st world education and language skills while passport broing somewhere with lax or unenforced visa rules.
    - alephnerd 1y ago
      > while passport broing somewhere with lax or unenforced visa rules There are significant insurance implications on an employer's side when dealing with employees remoting in random countries (first or third world). Also, you as a company cannot avail tax incentives if employees are digital nomads. For example, Czechia gives $20k per employee if you invest a couple million in office space, but conditions it with butts-in-seats.
dfxm12 1y ago
This article from March suggests it's not just tech jobs, either: https://www.forbes.com/sites/dianehamilton/2025/03/01/are-entry-level-jobs-going-away-the-hidden-workforce-shift/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/dianehamilton/2025/03/01/are-en...
- DaSHacka 1y ago
  It's disappointing any solution to this issue will easily be 5-10 years away, leaving the rest of us plebeians to grapple with the consequences in the meantime. Plus any solution that increases pay for entry-level workers necessarily costs employers more than the peanuts they currently pay workers overseas, so they'll bitch and moan as hard as they can to turn public interest against any politician that tries. Really feels like we're just sitting ducks while other countries get their act together acting as hubs of innovation that already had far more varied industries across the board to begin with.
  - spacemadness 1y ago
    I think keeping an entire generation away from good jobs will result in far worse things in 5-10 years. Unfortunately we’re too greedy and stupid to care. Whatever profits us now is all that matters. We get what we deserve in the end.
erehweb 1y ago
There are a number of industries where you may need experience to become more productive than AI, but nobody wants to hire you when AI is more productive in the first couple of years. Is there a good equilibrium for this, or does it end up with each company saying "We won't hire the juniors, just the experienced people" and then finding there aren't enough experienced people around?
- kcorbitt 1y ago
  There are many industries where you need lots of experience before you're a net contributor to productivity. This is true for everything from hairdressers to doctors. We have ways of dealing with this (eg. taking out loans to undergo years of training). The problem comes if the number of years of experience you need to outperform the frontier AI models advances at more than 1 per year, which is not out of the question.
- immibis 1y ago
  Perhaps by juniors banding together and making new startups which outcompete the dinosaurs - a tale as old as time (or tech startup capitalism, anyway, so since the 1990s).
- scotty79 1y ago
  I think the solution is the same as it was in previous cases. Extend the education and make it more accessible so you can reach useful skill level before you dirty your hands with commercial work. In the old times 12 year old could have economic utility. Now 26 year old often has none. It might be that with AI you might need to keep learning till 35 before you can usefully contribute to the economy.
  - entuno 1y ago
    Which leads to the obvious question of: who's footing the bill for this? Is the taxpayer going to pay for another five or ten years of education for people? Are the young people expected to borrow hundreds of thousands more for training? Are their parents expected to house and feed them for another decade?
corp8drone8sf 1y ago
Commenting anon, because i'm very concerned about how we are leaving the industry for our children, and how little executives care about the future. 1. anything we used to give to entry-level we now give to offshore workers, typically in Asia. While mean wages metrics look great, the cost savings are an illusion because we spend twice as much time communicating and tacking back and forth to the final answer across timezones. compensation consultants dont care about that, they care about mean wage metrics 2. people are are told to hire h1 only -- not explicitly -- but implicitly 3. tech execs hired into the org have relationships with major h1 placement agencies and place from those exclusively, the jobs are advertised with impossible requirements and then quickly sent to h1 pools 4. it is ridiculous to expect a computer science grand to "driving forklifts, construction, moving, factory work" -- what was the point of grinding thru 12yrs of intense schooling if you were going to throw the kids under the bus when they graduate? 5. ai is part of it, perhaps for certain jobs, but it isnt AI causing the issues in technology
- alephnerd 1y ago
  > people are are told to hire h1 only -- not explicitly -- but implicitly I've funded and worked at a number of companies in the Enterprise SaaS space, and that's bull. I'm not saving any costs with a Visa sponsored employee. At that point I may as well fully offshore to a GCC.
  - corp8drone8sf 1y ago
    ))) Yeah that's bull. I'm not saving any costs with a Visa sponsored employee. It often isnt about saving money, it is about having fragile immigrant workers on a leash that you can control with the constant threat of layoff--->deportation
    - supportengineer 1y ago
      I’ve watched this abuse firsthand for most of my career, over 25 years
    - alephnerd 1y ago
monero-xmr 1y ago
I used to pay $125k standard to entry level SWEs back in the 2020-2022 COVID days, fully remote, great benefits. Can hire the same now for $90k, great candidates with good internships, CS degree, etc. But lately I just hire 5+ year experience because there are so many available now, and the cost for them has gone down also.
tekla 1y ago
What did people think would the advanced state of "automate ourselves out of a job" would look like?
- belter 1y ago
  They did not realize that the Theory of Constraints will take precedence over Jevons paradox...
- immibis 1y ago
  That saying was always hyperbole, and what they really meant was to automate your own job, so you get paid the same, but do much less work yourself. Some people probably meant to automate other people out of their jobs, so they get laid off. Those people deserve what they got.
- krapp 1y ago
  They all expected to be millionaires by that point.
- causal 1y ago
  We're nowhere near the advanced state.
- Kinrany 1y ago
  It's not rare, not every form of doing a good job is rewarded.
blargthorwars 1y ago
Keep at it please! My job pipeline is filled with clever young Americans who want to work.
Oras 1y ago
The market right now is tough even for seniors not just entry level. My observation in tech is most jobs are for specialists rather than generalists. Also senior level jobs are quite rare. AI is not the only factor to blame, it’s mostly lack of growth and economic uncertainty, at least this is what I see in the UK.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
strict9 1y ago
It's not AI it's offshoring. This is what I've seen and heard throughout my network. Relentless cost cutting is sold to public and internal staff as AI productivity gains. But it's just on-shore staff reductions. Moving support, design, development and product management away from customers and to the lowest bidder will work for a while. But eventually it won't and the pendulum will swing back in the other direction.
- entuno 1y ago
  The key thing that I feel often gets overlooked in these discussions is that those offshore people are using AI tools as well. It's not "AI or offshoring", it's "offshoring to AI". Because those offshore workers can now be far more productive and can produce written output that's just as good as the stuff native speakers are doing, unlike the broken English responses that used to often distinguish outsourced work. Of course it doesn't for everything - outsourcing never does. But why pay a western salary for someone to use ChatGPT and CoPilot when you can pay a fraction of that to get someone in another country achieving largely the same thing.
- onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago
  > But eventually it won't and the pendulum will swing back in the other direction. The direction it will most likely swing is that legacy companies making poor decisions will be out-competed by new companies making better decisions. Maybe those new companies will be from the US and the EU. Maybe they won't.
- yubblegum 1y ago
  In 2010 I sat in a meet with an exec from an NYC investment bank with my boss, the ceo of a boutique (not Indians ..) outsourcing consultancy. We were in his office and outside was an entire empty floor of cubicles. He casually mentioned how the outsourced work is "crap" and how they usually end up having to redo the projects up to 3 times. He then went on to say how they outsourced "this floor" and their plans for outsourcing the other floors. The economic equation never made any sense. There is, imo, a geopolitical element to the outsourcing pheonomena in context of software and India (which btw was spearheaded by MorganStanley and friends) back in late '90s: India used to be firmly in the non-aligned group and has had long standing pseudo-aliance with USSR/Russians. Giving the IT sector to India was part of the carrot to get India to shift to the West. China got the manufacturing, India got the software.
adamsb6 1y ago
In the mid aughts I decided against computer science as a major based on media forecasts of offshoring destroying the market for programmers. That was a mistake. I ended up a programmer anyway, just with a degree that didn’t really prepare me for it. As for the data, starting with 2019 is going to skew things. In 2022-2023 things went sideways and many big tech employers didn’t extend any intern offers or didn’t even have interns. This year interns are back.
- hedora 1y ago
  This also feels like yet another boom-bust cycle to me. During the boom, many people that couldn’t write a for loop got degrees and somehow got entry level jobs. After the dot com bust, many people avoided CS because such jobs evaporated. This cycle will be a bit worse because four things are hitting simultaneously: (1) Hangover from idiot over hiring during COVID (2) AI is going to replace a lot of incumbent businesses with startups (3) The real economy shows every sign of collapsing due to the trade wars (4) The US is intentionally giving up its position as the best country for skilled workers to move to. I can’t say what will happen with (4), but it seems unlikely (3) is going to win many elections for the incumbents. Anyway, this year, firms are probably going to be simultaneously too conservative (eliminating job positions instead of retraining people to use AI with more aggressive product targets) and too aggressive (betting the magic AI genie will grant middle management’s wishes and also somehow not simultaneously commoditize all the stuff it automates away). Anyway, I think there’s plenty of opportunity this year for any company that’s borderline competent. My personal experience with middle-manager-dominated large firms makes me pessimistic about their futures.
  - WarOnPrivacy 1y ago
    > During the [dot com] boom, many people that couldn’t write a for loop got degrees and somehow got entry level jobs. This wasn't universally true. In the SE US, late 1990s, I got 2 responses over a year of submitting applications for entry level coding jobs. One response was for a position hundreds of mi away. Overlapping this time, I was serving as an employment counselor. I learned that this region was super insular and you need some kind of inside referral to get hired - in pretty much every industry. Local tech wasn't immune to that mindset. It took me a few years to make connections and start working and even then it self-employed, on-site support. Thirty years later I'm still doing that. On the other side, once I broke into an industry I could go all over. I got a referral into an ARC and within a few months I was serving all of them. They were all years needing someone but went without rather than hire cold.
pino82 1y ago
No real problem. By the same amount, young people are smarter and more competent, in particular regarding tech topics. At least that's the dominant narrative since a decade. And I'm sure it's actually true, and least when the question is about knowing all youtokgram memes of the day.
tayo42 1y ago
>The key difference, he said, is that the iterative process to make AI code better takes minutes, while a junior coder might need days for the same task. Your Sr engineer is also still distracted and focused on those tasks. Junior engineers come up with new ideas, can eventually put the whole system together. There's never just one code base. What Ai tools are replacing engineers? I finay tried cursors free tier yesterday and it right off the bat misunderstood my code and made up library implementation details. I always had hard times finding a job with every job search I did. Even living in San Francisco
- spacemadness 1y ago
  They should tell this to the MS employees that very publicly needed to hand hold the .NET junior coder AI repeatedly the other day. This is exactly the kind of hubris people were angry about.
- gtirloni 1y ago
  Exactly. I don't know which planet has this AI fully doing junior jobs unattended. It's not Earth.
  - hedora 1y ago
    I expect current AI models to behave like an L1 or L2 at a big tech company, where they will eventually fire you unless you reach L4. The only reason they’re useful is that, unlike a human, they can be summoned in under a second and you can’t hurt their feelings by rewriting 100% of their stuff.
satvikpendem 1y ago
Most of this is not occurring due to AI or offshoring, that's just what's told to investors. In reality, it's the macroeconomic climate that has shifted since a few years ago, namely Section 174 changes for amortization of R&D expenditures, overhiring during covid, and higher Fed rates.
- glouwbug 1y ago
  The only real answer. AI is the current scapegoat for any self-inflicted short sightedness, like the 0% interest rate over-hiring times of 2020-2021. Why blame yourself as a company when you can blame the loudest current news and market hype wave?
  - satvikpendem 1y ago
    And not just blame but make your stock price go up saying you'll replace all your developers (even though that won't happen for another 20 years, if ever).
- keeda 1y ago
  Section 174 was very unpopular when it came out and many people raised the alarm over it (although that seems to have simmered down over time.) If hiring was impacted by that, a lot of execs would be very vocal about it to increase public pressure on getting it reversed, no?
- frankbreetz 1y ago
  From what I understand this provision is potentially being temporally re-added in the "Big Beautiful Bill" https://www.crowell.com/en/insights/client-alerts/house-committee-passes-part-of-big-beautiful-bill-containing-noteworthy-improvements-to-research-and-development-incentives-for-companies https://www.crowell.com/en/insights/client-alerts/house-comm...
indigodaddy 1y ago
How about something like a NOC tech [1]? You can't AI that one yet I don't think. Also it's still a generally good foot-in-the-door, even for grads who might initially dismiss it as lower-than-thou (I mainly see it as a great starting point because of the fundamentals you will learn that are invaluable and will carry you through your career more than one would imagine). You just have to "work for it" and scrape your way up a bit more, sure-- but I mean, you kinda always have to do this when you are first starting out, no? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24670746 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24670746
Der_Einzige 1y ago
There’s plenty of entry level jobs in AI itself. For some reason, many tech grads still refuse to reskill into AI itself. Ironic for a field that prides itself on how fast moving it is.
- jimbokun 1y ago
  Do those jobs require PhDs?
some_random 1y ago
I remember seeing someone make a joke that COVID-19 never happened, and the evidence that they cited was that people keep making arguments that obviously, clearly do not incorporate several years of global pandemic, lockdowns, deaths, hirings, layoffs, etc. I suppose we have more evidence for that right here with the article citing a 50% drop in new grad hires since 2019 as if 2020-2024 was a nice linear-ish change over time we can extrapolate over.
butterlettuce 1y ago
It would be nice if the President signed an executive order that tariffs companies 1000% for off shoring tech work. These folks are stealing our jerbs.
- hedora 1y ago
  I wouldn’t look to the white house for solutions. Instead of discouraging offshoring, they’re threatening the physical safety of highly skilled foreigners. Those people have been the glue that holds the US economy together since, what, WWII? If the US is no longer an attractive destination, they’ll set up shop overseas. Fast forward ten years, and the jobs they create will definitely not be in the US. Concretely: Silicon Valley’s white collar workers are 66% first generation immigrants, and it’s the 4th largest economy on earth. (The US, including Silicon Valley, is number one). Just about all of my native born coworkers moved here for work.
  - butterlettuce 1y ago
    All that needs to change. The glue to the US economy needs to be Americans. We have the best universities in the world but we decide to invest in foreign students instead of our own for wage reasons.
    - aegypti 1y ago
      It just so obviously doesn’t, and even more obviously won’t. A pool of 9 billion > 340 million is a simple, hard reality that has trivially curb stomped any and all opposition since the dawning of the human race with the only variable being time-to-acceptance.
    - BobaFloutist 1y ago
      Foreign born immigrants are Americans. That's, like, foundational to how this country works. It's our competitive advantage.
- memcg 1y ago
  "As Trump pursues mass deportation, his businesses again seek foreign workers" https://www.citizensforethics.org/reports-investigations/crew-investigations/as-trump-pursues-mass-deportation-his-businesses-again-seek-foreign-workers/ https://www.citizensforethics.org/reports-investigations/cre...
BuckRogers 1y ago
The answer to this is easy. Rewind time and put a 200K minimum salary on visa talent, and ban products sold here to utilize overseas employees. Sell it here, you build it here. Then you have all the jobs you need and more. To fix it today, you do the same thing. But you'd have to also cancel all the visas, and invalidate citizenship that was founded on fraud. Not much more to this story, if your concern is having jobs in the USA for people already here.
- hedora 1y ago
  You’re describing current policy. It’s crashing the economy, as predicted by anyone that has read an introductory economics textbook.
  - BuckRogers 1y ago
    Your definition of "the economy" must be how Google shareholders feel. Which doesn't concern me. Individuals in the USA have been experiencing the pain alone for a few decades now. They've felt a very real crash for quite a while now. For me, how a worker born in the US is doing is the economy. That's the New Right, while your views represent the Left in this country. Any pain Google feels in the shift to tariffs and jobs for Americans rather than the rest of the world isn't optional. They're welcome to shutdown US operations if it's undoable.
    - eyesofgod 1y ago
      > For me, how a worker born in the US is doing is "the economy". That's the New Right, while your views represent the Left in this country. Great, now drop the African deriding American workers and signing praise of Pajeet River-shitter and I'll beleive you.
      - BuckRogers 1y ago
        Interesting litmus test and response. I'm not here to convince you. I'm not actually racist. I like Indians and think they're wonderful people. This topic is really about an injustice, not really a focus on population groups.
clusterhacks 1y ago
We recently had an open position that could have been a fit for a new grad with some internship experience or a solid portfolio of projects from just school. We had just over 20 applicants and selected 6 for interviews using a rubric to score candidates by reviewing CV/resume and cover letter. The rubric doesn't include a specific "years of experience" guideline anywhere. Of our 6 selected candidates, 3 were new grads and 3 were experienced candidates. At that point in our process, 1 of our 3 new grads ghosted us and never responded to multiple contact attempts to schedule an interview - this may have been our top candidate by initial rubric evaluation. One of our other new grad candidates accepted another job and backed out of our scheduled interview. The third new grad did interview and had an unremarkable interview. Ultimately, one of the experienced candidates received a job offer. This experienced candidate was one of the top two by initial rubric review along with the new grad who ghosted us. Funnily enough, these two candidates were the only unanimous selections by everyone on the hiring committee to interview, even using a rubric. There were several parts of the process I found interesting. First, just over 20 applicants is typical for applicant count for an opened position over the last 8-10 years for us. There wasn't a noticeable uptick in applicants despite the general perception of it being a "bad hiring market." Second, we continue to find that many candidates don't have a CV/resume or cover letter that leans into demonstrating the candidate can write code. Maybe this is a result of general hiring processes that lean into automatic scanning and processing of CV/resumes and cover letters while my group actually reads these somewhat carefully and usually from a "we hope this person clearly demonstrates we should interview them" perspective. Third, despite my personal misgivings, the hiring process clearly selects for "has worked with <insert specific set of technical tools> experience. Even a great candidate can't seem to be attractive to other folks in our hiring process if their past experience doesn't include <specific tool/framework> use. Fourth, and this was a change different from past hiring, 4-5 of the applicants were ML/AI-focused candidates with MS degrees (and one PhD). This position is/was clearly just a normal app developer job in an organization that doesn't ship software for sale - we do small-scale app dev and data management for our internal organization users. These ML/AI-focused candidates were interesting for other reasons. Almost none of them demonstrated any experience on paper besides "wrote a little python to load some ML/AI tool and ran experiments." This isn't bad experience on the face of it, but their CV/resumes and cover letters didn't talk about software dev at all. To a candidate, it was almost all "ran and tweaked model for small gain in performance" for some data set. I'm not sure where these folks will land in the current hiring market?
npteljes 1y ago
Exploitation has really nice results in the short term, meaning that it also increases one's ability to compete. If the playing field is not leveled for every player by hindering exploitation via regulation, exploitation will be the name of the game. Not just because of greed, but of course greed helps; but because of survival. Grads, it's not the seasoned workers, or automation. It's the incentives that drive the whole thing. And the people in charge of those incentives, and the context that created those, and the culture that supports all of it.
jauntywundrkind 1y ago
The industry feels so much more mature, in a bad way. We had such an exciting set of decades of making new software, new frameworks, finding out new ways to do things. Devs would be working on all kinds of exciting interesting personal matters. It was frontiers work, expanding possibility. Everything feels so set now. Ever larger industry dominating ever more, with large scale software using established frameworks and technologies. Less vibrant scene of new and mid-life companies, still with exciting things brewing. I struggle to elaborate why I feel it, but the lack of vibrancy, the lack of spark within the industry feels like it would lead so directly to these conditions of there being less entry-level jobs.
- jimbokun 1y ago
  I think the lack of spark is because the cutting edge is LLMs that cost billions to train and operate. Eliminates the possibility of Ramen profitable startups. “Prompt engineering“ isn’t exactly a defensible moat.
computerthings 1y ago
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smithjacky 1y ago
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97 points by nradov 1y ago

I did a lot of driving forklifts, construction, moving, factory work, etc when junior in the job market after graduating near the top of my class with strong internship experience from a top 10 engineering college. Adjusting expectations is important. If you start with the expectation that all you will have is a pot to piss in then it is all up from there. Things may never look up, but when they do, I've found a lot of employers admire people who were willing to wipe old peoples' asses when the economy is bad rather than wale about the circumstances.

otikik 1y ago
A pot? They gave you a pot??
palmotea 1y ago
> Adjusting expectations is important. If you start with the expectation that all you will have is a pot to piss in then it is all up from there. You're just coaching people to be passive in the face of a hostile society, and that's bad, because it lets society off the hook for providing for its citizens. Also isn't it strange that's mainly expected of the people at the bottom? Maybe the shareholders should start to expect the number won't keep going up to the max? If it's 2025, and you need to convince yourself that all you may get is "pot to piss in," you should be working to burn it all the fuck down to the ground. After all, isn't it "all up from there"?
- ty6853 1y ago
  It would be nice if society will help you, but you should expect that they will not, especially if you are a childless adult which is the one class of people society will actually tax back below the poverty line.
- psunavy03 1y ago
  > you should be working to burn it all the fuck down to the ground. . . . which is literally never the correct answer.
  - ty6853 1y ago
    I don't know that it's the wrong answer, but I am not flippantly going to go tell someone to go get machine gunned by the national guard, especially when I won't be joining them. If they are going to come to that conclusion, I'll let them get to that on their own.
  - palmotea 1y ago
    >> you should be working to burn it all the fuck down to the ground. > ...which is literally never the correct answer. But it's the answer chosen all the time. If "entry-level tech jobs are getting wiped out," some (usually distributed) group made the decision to burn those new-grads plans to the ground. Why should they be insulated from similar decisions? Working "to burn it all the fuck down to the ground" is just spreading that "love" to those groups. Those groups should be threatened with that, because otherwise they're not going to restrain themselves.
    - spacemadness 1y ago
      You have to understand lots of people on HN want to be one of those people on top eventually so they will bend over backwards to apologize for the executive class until they supposedly get there.
      - palmotea 1y ago
        > You have to understand lots of people on HN want to be one of those people on top eventually so they will bend over backwards to apologize for the executive class until they supposedly get there. Oh, I totally understand that. HN is full of workers LARPing as tycoons; advocating for policies, attitudes, and ideology that are most likely going to end up being harmful to their own interests.
- jimbokun 1y ago
  This is bad advice because as an individual you have close to zero influence on recreating society from scratch. Best to be pragmatic in your personal decisions while contributing to your larger political ideals.
iteria 1y ago
I graduated into a bad market and I took a shitty job 5 states away with low pay. I was basically a warm body while I waited out the clock on being considered a recent grad. I'm so lucky I had 3 internships so I could fake being an experienced junior and truly start my career. A lot of my peers were too good for those kinds of jobs and while they started their careers at the same time, they didn't make industry and collect paychecks while they did it, so I think I made the correct choice about how to spend those 18months.
Loudergood 1y ago
Student loans generally don't wait, and most people wail while they're working the shitty jobs.
- lotsofpulp 1y ago
  Why is why one shouldn’t take on large amounts of debt for questionable return.
  - michaelmrose 1y ago
    What should they do then?
    - tekla 1y ago
      Get good grades and scholarships
    - lotsofpulp 1y ago
      Government funded schools with lower tuition (possibly even community college), more rigorous degrees with higher likelihoods of stable pay (e.g. medical/engineering), trade schools/apprenticeships.
      - eyesofgod 1y ago
        [dead]
      - dttze 1y ago
        They did that. Then those jobs still went away. So fuck them, right?
        lotsofpulp 1y ago
        That’s why you choose lower tuition options so debt levels are manageable even with jobs that pay less.
aredox 1y ago
>I've found a lot of employers admire people who were willing to wipe old peoples' asses when the economy is bad rather than wale about the circumstances. That's what they'd say to your face, but statistics show that anything than a spotless carreer means you'll never recover. Once you fall behind your peers, you will never be promoted as much as them nor be paid as much.
close04 1y ago
For a lot of students out there now the reality of the "opportunity cost" is skewed. They will invest enormous amounts of time and effort in being the best in uni even if this alone may not bring them a guaranteed leg up over the competition when they face the adult working world. My academic career was always revolving around the top but never quite at the top. So eventually I gave up on investing more effort for diminishing returns and focused on having an advantage the others weren't pursuing. I started working very early, with some embarrassingly shitty jobs at first, each of which allowed me to get the next slightly less embarrassingly shitty job subsequently and so on. I'm glossing over what could have been a long string of lucky breaks that probably made all the difference. Anyway, by the time we finished university my colleagues who were right at the top got catapulted into the working world all the way to the level I had years before. Not quite ground level but not far. And I can still see that handicap in most of their careers even now, decades later.
- ty6853 1y ago
  A lot of truth to that. Although I graduated well after the dot com days, at that time you usually had to be near the top just to get an internship. You could probably let academics slip a bit after that.
KennyBlanken 1y ago
Please stop with this nonsense you can 'work your way up' or that if only you work hard enough your efforts will be rewarded. That's long, long gone. Companies don't care if you work hard or not. You're disposable to them. If you work hard, you only get given more work. By turning employment into "gig" work, they've shifted as much of the risk and costs onto workers, too. Companies have weaponized employment practices and now they're just burning everything to the ground because they figure there will always be someone desperate enough. Turns out that doesn't quite work - Amazon for example has had internal memos circulating that say in various communities they're pissing off or injuring so many people they are having trouble finding workers. "Gig" companies care so little, will suspend or cancel workers at the drop of a hat, intentionally or unintentionally. Even Uber's CEO, when he tried going 'undercover' as a driver to see what it was like, admitted he was scared he'd get a less than 5 star rating because it almost instantly torpedos you, especially if you're new. Because the "customer is always right", these companies offer no way to challenge a customer's complaint even if it's obvious nonsense. Why investigate anything, which costs money, if you've got a long line of people desperate to make $6 delivering a cheesebuger 5 miles? Our legislators let silicon valley roll right over a century worth of worker protections because it was "innovative" (ie they got lots of lobbyist cash.) Voters let them do it because they want their delivered cheeseburger, groceries or makeup as cheap as possible....and voters don't care about the "losers" who work those jobs. It's not them, after all...
happytoexplain 1y ago
There is a very valid point you are mostly sticking to, but your last sentence is essentially "employers admire people who don't complain", which I'm going to have to push back on. Yes, not complaining is an excellent principle to have generally, but it matters why something bad is happening. A large proportion of people don't just think the economy is bad because, well, it happens, we're all trying our best - they see people and policies making it bad. There is a huge conversation about the details and realities of that perception, but that's irrelevant to the perception's existence. For example: If I am underpaid and overworked because my employer and I and all the people doing their best for the economy are all suffering together under unavoidable circumstances, I am going to stay tough, keep my head up, count my blessings, etc. If I am underpaid and overworked because policy-makers are enabling it and our employers are deciding to shift a disproportionate share of the societal suffering onto employees and we are all allowing a culture of overwork and underpayment to seep in - I'm going to do something you are uncharitably describing as "wailing".
michaelmrose 1y ago
What can easily happen is that you take the shit work to survive but it takes so much of your time and so much out of you and you fall behind and miss opportunities and it becomes impossible to climb out of the hole.
ajsixjxjxbxb 1y ago
> people who were willing to wipe old peoples' asses when the economy is bad rather than wale about the circumstances. Isn’t there some quote about old men planting trees whose shade they’ll never know? Was that just a myth or did those generations actually exist?
- ty6853 1y ago
  The vast majority of trees are planted because the value of a sapling ismore than a seedling. It doesn't matter that you will never know the shade, and that the sapling is worthless for industrial purposes, you can profit quite quickly. To be more explicit, the time value of something closer is higher than one further, so you can actually induce under even a hypercapitalist society any arbitrarily long delay investment with 0 'real' payoff until the end.
- otikik 1y ago
  Unclear origin, here's some investigation: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2020/04/29/tree-shade/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2020/04/29/tree-shade/
Breza 1y ago
I respect that. I graduated during the Great Recession. Ended up working for extremely low wages out of college and ultimately went to grad school after getting nowhere in trying to find a better position.

RicDan 1y ago

Can sort of confirm that. Wiped out is maybe the wrong word - they are more heavily being off-shored right now. Whilst there is some very obvious evaluations going on of replacing juniors with <insert your favourite llm>, it's quite obviously not there yet but management level interest is off the charts. We are trying to motion against it as much as we can internally... by arguing that we can use <insert your favourite llm> as a good coaching/mentoring support for juniors to promote them quicker. But yea... We don't like where this is going, and right now it appears that not much can be done by how much money is being poured into this current LLM-based-delusion. Edit: speaking specifically about SWE-Jr. jobs

seemsclear 1y ago
The delusion is the public’s belief they can ignore political action and everything will work out for them.
- corp8drone8sf 1y ago
  both major parties have sold out workers, the only real choice is the green party, workers' party, etc
  - hedora 1y ago
    The data disagrees. Here’s a graph of private sector spending on new factories in the US. 2020-2024 blows every time period out of the water since 1975. Look at what’s happening now: Spending started to collapse immediately after Trump got in: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PRMFGCON https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PRMFGCON
- RicDan 1y ago
  Definitely agree. I blame educational institutions (I know, they can't do much without enough freedom + budget) for not advocating enough to our democratic responsabilities. I do wish we adapted some stuff from early history (Athens to be precise) - democratic participants got a very low base salary, and they also could vote to ban people from democratic participation (and hence the city) whenever they got too power hungry. Seems like a loss of responsibility allows too much incompetence to prevail.

belter 1y ago

Its not AI, its the economy. Almost 100k US tech layoffs in 2024 and 55k already in 2025. I know it's not showing in the US unemployment statistics yet...I judge because of the relabeling. CCIE's become Tech Support engineers, Junior Developers become Uber drivers..

margorczynski 1y ago

Is it AI or just good ol' offshoring? Mix of both? If AI can just make any dev 10-20% more efficient that's a whole lot of jobs no longer needed.

alephnerd 1y ago
Mix of both. You can't justify hiring a new grad for $130K when you can hire top tier mid-career talent in Warsaw, Cluj, or Bangalore for $50-80K and average mid-career talent for $20-40k In fact, companies like Infosys have begun adopting coding copilots en masse to reduce their own new grad hiring by 20%, but increase utilization rates from 70% to 85%. That said, most new grads were not getting substituted by Infosys freshers - they're getting replaced by mid-career H1Bs who were laid off during COVID and returned to the CEE or India Furthermore, a significant number of mid-career Eastern European and Indian engineers, PMs, and managers returned to the old country during the COVID layoffs due to visa status. A lot of those guys were rehired by their old companies to found GCCs abroad. Finally, state and federal governments in India, Poland, Romania, Czechia, etc provide tax incentives that reduce hiring costs by an additional $10-20k in aggregate.
- ty6853 1y ago
  80k in a rural area outside of Bangalore would be an absolute killing. The real hack here is to avail yourself of a digital nomad or engineer yourself an employment visa via some shell company and then live in the 3rd world while crushing the competition via 1st world education and language skills while passport broing somewhere with lax or unenforced visa rules.
  - alephnerd 1y ago
    > while passport broing somewhere with lax or unenforced visa rules There are significant insurance implications on an employer's side when dealing with employees remoting in random countries (first or third world). Also, you as a company cannot avail tax incentives if employees are digital nomads. For example, Czechia gives $20k per employee if you invest a couple million in office space, but conditions it with butts-in-seats.

dfxm12 1y ago

This article from March suggests it's not just tech jobs, either: https://www.forbes.com/sites/dianehamilton/2025/03/01/are-entry-level-jobs-going-away-the-hidden-workforce-shift/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/dianehamilton/2025/03/01/are-en...

DaSHacka 1y ago
It's disappointing any solution to this issue will easily be 5-10 years away, leaving the rest of us plebeians to grapple with the consequences in the meantime. Plus any solution that increases pay for entry-level workers necessarily costs employers more than the peanuts they currently pay workers overseas, so they'll bitch and moan as hard as they can to turn public interest against any politician that tries. Really feels like we're just sitting ducks while other countries get their act together acting as hubs of innovation that already had far more varied industries across the board to begin with.
- spacemadness 1y ago
  I think keeping an entire generation away from good jobs will result in far worse things in 5-10 years. Unfortunately we’re too greedy and stupid to care. Whatever profits us now is all that matters. We get what we deserve in the end.

erehweb 1y ago

There are a number of industries where you may need experience to become more productive than AI, but nobody wants to hire you when AI is more productive in the first couple of years. Is there a good equilibrium for this, or does it end up with each company saying "We won't hire the juniors, just the experienced people" and then finding there aren't enough experienced people around?

kcorbitt 1y ago
There are many industries where you need lots of experience before you're a net contributor to productivity. This is true for everything from hairdressers to doctors. We have ways of dealing with this (eg. taking out loans to undergo years of training). The problem comes if the number of years of experience you need to outperform the frontier AI models advances at more than 1 per year, which is not out of the question.
immibis 1y ago
Perhaps by juniors banding together and making new startups which outcompete the dinosaurs - a tale as old as time (or tech startup capitalism, anyway, so since the 1990s).
scotty79 1y ago
I think the solution is the same as it was in previous cases. Extend the education and make it more accessible so you can reach useful skill level before you dirty your hands with commercial work. In the old times 12 year old could have economic utility. Now 26 year old often has none. It might be that with AI you might need to keep learning till 35 before you can usefully contribute to the economy.
- entuno 1y ago
  Which leads to the obvious question of: who's footing the bill for this? Is the taxpayer going to pay for another five or ten years of education for people? Are the young people expected to borrow hundreds of thousands more for training? Are their parents expected to house and feed them for another decade?

corp8drone8sf 1y ago

Commenting anon, because i'm very concerned about how we are leaving the industry for our children, and how little executives care about the future. 1. anything we used to give to entry-level we now give to offshore workers, typically in Asia. While mean wages metrics look great, the cost savings are an illusion because we spend twice as much time communicating and tacking back and forth to the final answer across timezones. compensation consultants dont care about that, they care about mean wage metrics 2. people are are told to hire h1 only -- not explicitly -- but implicitly 3. tech execs hired into the org have relationships with major h1 placement agencies and place from those exclusively, the jobs are advertised with impossible requirements and then quickly sent to h1 pools 4. it is ridiculous to expect a computer science grand to "driving forklifts, construction, moving, factory work" -- what was the point of grinding thru 12yrs of intense schooling if you were going to throw the kids under the bus when they graduate? 5. ai is part of it, perhaps for certain jobs, but it isnt AI causing the issues in technology

alephnerd 1y ago
> people are are told to hire h1 only -- not explicitly -- but implicitly I've funded and worked at a number of companies in the Enterprise SaaS space, and that's bull. I'm not saving any costs with a Visa sponsored employee. At that point I may as well fully offshore to a GCC.
- corp8drone8sf 1y ago
  ))) Yeah that's bull. I'm not saving any costs with a Visa sponsored employee. It often isnt about saving money, it is about having fragile immigrant workers on a leash that you can control with the constant threat of layoff--->deportation
  - supportengineer 1y ago
    I’ve watched this abuse firsthand for most of my career, over 25 years
  - alephnerd 1y ago

monero-xmr 1y ago

I used to pay $125k standard to entry level SWEs back in the 2020-2022 COVID days, fully remote, great benefits. Can hire the same now for $90k, great candidates with good internships, CS degree, etc. But lately I just hire 5+ year experience because there are so many available now, and the cost for them has gone down also.

tekla 1y ago

What did people think would the advanced state of "automate ourselves out of a job" would look like?

belter 1y ago
They did not realize that the Theory of Constraints will take precedence over Jevons paradox...
immibis 1y ago
That saying was always hyperbole, and what they really meant was to automate your own job, so you get paid the same, but do much less work yourself. Some people probably meant to automate other people out of their jobs, so they get laid off. Those people deserve what they got.
krapp 1y ago
They all expected to be millionaires by that point.
causal 1y ago
We're nowhere near the advanced state.
Kinrany 1y ago
It's not rare, not every form of doing a good job is rewarded.

blargthorwars 1y ago

Keep at it please! My job pipeline is filled with clever young Americans who want to work.

Oras 1y ago

The market right now is tough even for seniors not just entry level. My observation in tech is most jobs are for specialists rather than generalists. Also senior level jobs are quite rare. AI is not the only factor to blame, it’s mostly lack of growth and economic uncertainty, at least this is what I see in the UK.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

strict9 1y ago

It's not AI it's offshoring. This is what I've seen and heard throughout my network. Relentless cost cutting is sold to public and internal staff as AI productivity gains. But it's just on-shore staff reductions. Moving support, design, development and product management away from customers and to the lowest bidder will work for a while. But eventually it won't and the pendulum will swing back in the other direction.

entuno 1y ago
The key thing that I feel often gets overlooked in these discussions is that those offshore people are using AI tools as well. It's not "AI or offshoring", it's "offshoring to AI". Because those offshore workers can now be far more productive and can produce written output that's just as good as the stuff native speakers are doing, unlike the broken English responses that used to often distinguish outsourced work. Of course it doesn't for everything - outsourcing never does. But why pay a western salary for someone to use ChatGPT and CoPilot when you can pay a fraction of that to get someone in another country achieving largely the same thing.
onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago
> But eventually it won't and the pendulum will swing back in the other direction. The direction it will most likely swing is that legacy companies making poor decisions will be out-competed by new companies making better decisions. Maybe those new companies will be from the US and the EU. Maybe they won't.
yubblegum 1y ago
In 2010 I sat in a meet with an exec from an NYC investment bank with my boss, the ceo of a boutique (not Indians ..) outsourcing consultancy. We were in his office and outside was an entire empty floor of cubicles. He casually mentioned how the outsourced work is "crap" and how they usually end up having to redo the projects up to 3 times. He then went on to say how they outsourced "this floor" and their plans for outsourcing the other floors. The economic equation never made any sense. There is, imo, a geopolitical element to the outsourcing pheonomena in context of software and India (which btw was spearheaded by MorganStanley and friends) back in late '90s: India used to be firmly in the non-aligned group and has had long standing pseudo-aliance with USSR/Russians. Giving the IT sector to India was part of the carrot to get India to shift to the West. China got the manufacturing, India got the software.

adamsb6 1y ago

In the mid aughts I decided against computer science as a major based on media forecasts of offshoring destroying the market for programmers. That was a mistake. I ended up a programmer anyway, just with a degree that didn’t really prepare me for it. As for the data, starting with 2019 is going to skew things. In 2022-2023 things went sideways and many big tech employers didn’t extend any intern offers or didn’t even have interns. This year interns are back.

hedora 1y ago
This also feels like yet another boom-bust cycle to me. During the boom, many people that couldn’t write a for loop got degrees and somehow got entry level jobs. After the dot com bust, many people avoided CS because such jobs evaporated. This cycle will be a bit worse because four things are hitting simultaneously: (1) Hangover from idiot over hiring during COVID (2) AI is going to replace a lot of incumbent businesses with startups (3) The real economy shows every sign of collapsing due to the trade wars (4) The US is intentionally giving up its position as the best country for skilled workers to move to. I can’t say what will happen with (4), but it seems unlikely (3) is going to win many elections for the incumbents. Anyway, this year, firms are probably going to be simultaneously too conservative (eliminating job positions instead of retraining people to use AI with more aggressive product targets) and too aggressive (betting the magic AI genie will grant middle management’s wishes and also somehow not simultaneously commoditize all the stuff it automates away). Anyway, I think there’s plenty of opportunity this year for any company that’s borderline competent. My personal experience with middle-manager-dominated large firms makes me pessimistic about their futures.
- WarOnPrivacy 1y ago
  > During the [dot com] boom, many people that couldn’t write a for loop got degrees and somehow got entry level jobs. This wasn't universally true. In the SE US, late 1990s, I got 2 responses over a year of submitting applications for entry level coding jobs. One response was for a position hundreds of mi away. Overlapping this time, I was serving as an employment counselor. I learned that this region was super insular and you need some kind of inside referral to get hired - in pretty much every industry. Local tech wasn't immune to that mindset. It took me a few years to make connections and start working and even then it self-employed, on-site support. Thirty years later I'm still doing that. On the other side, once I broke into an industry I could go all over. I got a referral into an ARC and within a few months I was serving all of them. They were all years needing someone but went without rather than hire cold.

pino82 1y ago

No real problem. By the same amount, young people are smarter and more competent, in particular regarding tech topics. At least that's the dominant narrative since a decade. And I'm sure it's actually true, and least when the question is about knowing all youtokgram memes of the day.

tayo42 1y ago

>The key difference, he said, is that the iterative process to make AI code better takes minutes, while a junior coder might need days for the same task. Your Sr engineer is also still distracted and focused on those tasks. Junior engineers come up with new ideas, can eventually put the whole system together. There's never just one code base. What Ai tools are replacing engineers? I finay tried cursors free tier yesterday and it right off the bat misunderstood my code and made up library implementation details. I always had hard times finding a job with every job search I did. Even living in San Francisco

spacemadness 1y ago
They should tell this to the MS employees that very publicly needed to hand hold the .NET junior coder AI repeatedly the other day. This is exactly the kind of hubris people were angry about.
gtirloni 1y ago
Exactly. I don't know which planet has this AI fully doing junior jobs unattended. It's not Earth.
- hedora 1y ago
  I expect current AI models to behave like an L1 or L2 at a big tech company, where they will eventually fire you unless you reach L4. The only reason they’re useful is that, unlike a human, they can be summoned in under a second and you can’t hurt their feelings by rewriting 100% of their stuff.

satvikpendem 1y ago

Most of this is not occurring due to AI or offshoring, that's just what's told to investors. In reality, it's the macroeconomic climate that has shifted since a few years ago, namely Section 174 changes for amortization of R&D expenditures, overhiring during covid, and higher Fed rates.

glouwbug 1y ago
The only real answer. AI is the current scapegoat for any self-inflicted short sightedness, like the 0% interest rate over-hiring times of 2020-2021. Why blame yourself as a company when you can blame the loudest current news and market hype wave?
- satvikpendem 1y ago
  And not just blame but make your stock price go up saying you'll replace all your developers (even though that won't happen for another 20 years, if ever).
keeda 1y ago
Section 174 was very unpopular when it came out and many people raised the alarm over it (although that seems to have simmered down over time.) If hiring was impacted by that, a lot of execs would be very vocal about it to increase public pressure on getting it reversed, no?
frankbreetz 1y ago
From what I understand this provision is potentially being temporally re-added in the "Big Beautiful Bill" https://www.crowell.com/en/insights/client-alerts/house-committee-passes-part-of-big-beautiful-bill-containing-noteworthy-improvements-to-research-and-development-incentives-for-companies https://www.crowell.com/en/insights/client-alerts/house-comm...

indigodaddy 1y ago

How about something like a NOC tech [1]? You can't AI that one yet I don't think. Also it's still a generally good foot-in-the-door, even for grads who might initially dismiss it as lower-than-thou (I mainly see it as a great starting point because of the fundamentals you will learn that are invaluable and will carry you through your career more than one would imagine). You just have to "work for it" and scrape your way up a bit more, sure-- but I mean, you kinda always have to do this when you are first starting out, no? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24670746 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24670746

Der_Einzige 1y ago

There’s plenty of entry level jobs in AI itself. For some reason, many tech grads still refuse to reskill into AI itself. Ironic for a field that prides itself on how fast moving it is.

jimbokun 1y ago
Do those jobs require PhDs?

some_random 1y ago

I remember seeing someone make a joke that COVID-19 never happened, and the evidence that they cited was that people keep making arguments that obviously, clearly do not incorporate several years of global pandemic, lockdowns, deaths, hirings, layoffs, etc. I suppose we have more evidence for that right here with the article citing a 50% drop in new grad hires since 2019 as if 2020-2024 was a nice linear-ish change over time we can extrapolate over.

butterlettuce 1y ago

It would be nice if the President signed an executive order that tariffs companies 1000% for off shoring tech work. These folks are stealing our jerbs.

hedora 1y ago
I wouldn’t look to the white house for solutions. Instead of discouraging offshoring, they’re threatening the physical safety of highly skilled foreigners. Those people have been the glue that holds the US economy together since, what, WWII? If the US is no longer an attractive destination, they’ll set up shop overseas. Fast forward ten years, and the jobs they create will definitely not be in the US. Concretely: Silicon Valley’s white collar workers are 66% first generation immigrants, and it’s the 4th largest economy on earth. (The US, including Silicon Valley, is number one). Just about all of my native born coworkers moved here for work.
- butterlettuce 1y ago
  All that needs to change. The glue to the US economy needs to be Americans. We have the best universities in the world but we decide to invest in foreign students instead of our own for wage reasons.
  - aegypti 1y ago
    It just so obviously doesn’t, and even more obviously won’t. A pool of 9 billion > 340 million is a simple, hard reality that has trivially curb stomped any and all opposition since the dawning of the human race with the only variable being time-to-acceptance.
  - BobaFloutist 1y ago
    Foreign born immigrants are Americans. That's, like, foundational to how this country works. It's our competitive advantage.
memcg 1y ago
"As Trump pursues mass deportation, his businesses again seek foreign workers" https://www.citizensforethics.org/reports-investigations/crew-investigations/as-trump-pursues-mass-deportation-his-businesses-again-seek-foreign-workers/ https://www.citizensforethics.org/reports-investigations/cre...

BuckRogers 1y ago

The answer to this is easy. Rewind time and put a 200K minimum salary on visa talent, and ban products sold here to utilize overseas employees. Sell it here, you build it here. Then you have all the jobs you need and more. To fix it today, you do the same thing. But you'd have to also cancel all the visas, and invalidate citizenship that was founded on fraud. Not much more to this story, if your concern is having jobs in the USA for people already here.

hedora 1y ago
You’re describing current policy. It’s crashing the economy, as predicted by anyone that has read an introductory economics textbook.
- BuckRogers 1y ago
  Your definition of "the economy" must be how Google shareholders feel. Which doesn't concern me. Individuals in the USA have been experiencing the pain alone for a few decades now. They've felt a very real crash for quite a while now. For me, how a worker born in the US is doing is the economy. That's the New Right, while your views represent the Left in this country. Any pain Google feels in the shift to tariffs and jobs for Americans rather than the rest of the world isn't optional. They're welcome to shutdown US operations if it's undoable.
  - eyesofgod 1y ago
    > For me, how a worker born in the US is doing is "the economy". That's the New Right, while your views represent the Left in this country. Great, now drop the African deriding American workers and signing praise of Pajeet River-shitter and I'll beleive you.
    - BuckRogers 1y ago
      Interesting litmus test and response. I'm not here to convince you. I'm not actually racist. I like Indians and think they're wonderful people. This topic is really about an injustice, not really a focus on population groups.

clusterhacks 1y ago

We recently had an open position that could have been a fit for a new grad with some internship experience or a solid portfolio of projects from just school. We had just over 20 applicants and selected 6 for interviews using a rubric to score candidates by reviewing CV/resume and cover letter. The rubric doesn't include a specific "years of experience" guideline anywhere. Of our 6 selected candidates, 3 were new grads and 3 were experienced candidates. At that point in our process, 1 of our 3 new grads ghosted us and never responded to multiple contact attempts to schedule an interview - this may have been our top candidate by initial rubric evaluation. One of our other new grad candidates accepted another job and backed out of our scheduled interview. The third new grad did interview and had an unremarkable interview. Ultimately, one of the experienced candidates received a job offer. This experienced candidate was one of the top two by initial rubric review along with the new grad who ghosted us. Funnily enough, these two candidates were the only unanimous selections by everyone on the hiring committee to interview, even using a rubric. There were several parts of the process I found interesting. First, just over 20 applicants is typical for applicant count for an opened position over the last 8-10 years for us. There wasn't a noticeable uptick in applicants despite the general perception of it being a "bad hiring market." Second, we continue to find that many candidates don't have a CV/resume or cover letter that leans into demonstrating the candidate can write code. Maybe this is a result of general hiring processes that lean into automatic scanning and processing of CV/resumes and cover letters while my group actually reads these somewhat carefully and usually from a "we hope this person clearly demonstrates we should interview them" perspective. Third, despite my personal misgivings, the hiring process clearly selects for "has worked with <insert specific set of technical tools> experience. Even a great candidate can't seem to be attractive to other folks in our hiring process if their past experience doesn't include <specific tool/framework> use. Fourth, and this was a change different from past hiring, 4-5 of the applicants were ML/AI-focused candidates with MS degrees (and one PhD). This position is/was clearly just a normal app developer job in an organization that doesn't ship software for sale - we do small-scale app dev and data management for our internal organization users. These ML/AI-focused candidates were interesting for other reasons. Almost none of them demonstrated any experience on paper besides "wrote a little python to load some ML/AI tool and ran experiments." This isn't bad experience on the face of it, but their CV/resumes and cover letters didn't talk about software dev at all. To a candidate, it was almost all "ran and tweaked model for small gain in performance" for some data set. I'm not sure where these folks will land in the current hiring market?

npteljes 1y ago

Exploitation has really nice results in the short term, meaning that it also increases one's ability to compete. If the playing field is not leveled for every player by hindering exploitation via regulation, exploitation will be the name of the game. Not just because of greed, but of course greed helps; but because of survival. Grads, it's not the seasoned workers, or automation. It's the incentives that drive the whole thing. And the people in charge of those incentives, and the context that created those, and the culture that supports all of it.

jauntywundrkind 1y ago

The industry feels so much more mature, in a bad way. We had such an exciting set of decades of making new software, new frameworks, finding out new ways to do things. Devs would be working on all kinds of exciting interesting personal matters. It was frontiers work, expanding possibility. Everything feels so set now. Ever larger industry dominating ever more, with large scale software using established frameworks and technologies. Less vibrant scene of new and mid-life companies, still with exciting things brewing. I struggle to elaborate why I feel it, but the lack of vibrancy, the lack of spark within the industry feels like it would lead so directly to these conditions of there being less entry-level jobs.

jimbokun 1y ago
I think the lack of spark is because the cutting edge is LLMs that cost billions to train and operate. Eliminates the possibility of Ramen profitable startups. “Prompt engineering“ isn’t exactly a defensible moat.

computerthings 1y ago

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smithjacky 1y ago

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