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Entry-level jobs down by a third since launch of ChatGPT
- lsharkey602 1y agoSee also: Engineering / programming entry level jobs down by one third: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/02/23/fears-of-ai-bloodbath-for-tech-jobs-prompts-calls-to-scrap/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/02/23/fears-of-ai-... Finance / corporate sectors entry level jobs down by one third: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/06/22/city-giants-replace-graduate-jobs-with-ai/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/06/22/city-giants-...
- khelavastr 1y agoChatGPT is not to blame for logistics, construction, medical, and other kinds of entry level jobs being down by a third..
- apples_oranges 1y agoyep, also correlation is not causation..
- swexbe 1y ago[Citation needed]
- devoutsalsa 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Citation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Citation
- absurdo 1y ago[flagged]
- jf22 1y agoWhat is to blame?
- jvanderbot 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_the_economy,_stupid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_the_economy,_stupid inb4 "America is the world"
- azemetre 1y agoThe people that implement and own these systems, owners not workers.
- x0x0 1y agoOur trade policy being determined by a coked-up narcissistic child that tantrums and creates a tariff anytime he hasn't been mentioned on the tv for too long or his buddies want to frontrun the market on the pullback and steal some money is not helping. How confident do you feel about our economic policy? Even if your company isn't directly involved in international trade, there's a good chance your customers are. My customers are putting off non-essential software.
- ulrikrasmussen 1y agoRight, in a very short time we just went from money being virtually free to interest rates soaring, coupled with fears of trade war and general market uncertainty. I can't really fathom how people can attribute this to just LLMs without looking around to consider the state of the rest of the world. I remember back in 2017 when I was looking at yet another blockchain company which had raised huge sums of money to develop the next dubious blockchain of no value while throwing piles of money at large teams of PhDs, thinking that the world is in need of a recession to stop this lunacy. It happened.
- deadbabe 1y agoBC = Before ChatGPT, AD = AI Domination So we are currently in 3 AD, where the last remaining entry level jobs are being hunted and made extinct.
- selimthegrim 1y agoThat’s ok, we’ll resurrect them as direwolf jobs
- honkycat 1y agoIt's not AI. We are in a recession caused by fear and instability. Tech may just be dying in general. This could finally be the collapse we have been waiting for. While the US was allowing capitalists to hoard all of the USs excess capital, China was facilitating the development of important industries via central planning. Look at Intel. The owning class has become so greedy and incompetent. They aren't even running functional companies anymore: just grifting for government money then using that for stock buybacks.
- skirge 1y agostupid government is the root cause - and government is chosen by voters and does what voters want it to do. China is monarchy and monarchs listen to no one.
- mgol94 1y agoFor US democracy replace "voters" with "lobbyists"
- 9rx 1y agoVoters and lobbyists are the same thing. Regularly telling your elected hire what to do is the onus on all participants in a representative system. The employee you hired isn't a mind reader. The only reason we imagine that there is a distinction is because most voters are too lazy to talk to the person they hired, so those who do stand out.
- honkycat 1y ago> Voters and lobbyists are the same thing one is a large corporation with money paying for access and favors, the other is a regular person who votes. Absolutely absurd.
- 9rx 1y agoYou may be thinking of a specific lobbyist, but that specificity is now only being introduced in your comment. It does not apply to comments that came earlier. It remains that the system of government in the US expects regular lobbying from all voters. Without other qualifiers, lobbyists and voters are the same thing.
- reedf1 1y agoI think it is possible that the widespread introduction of ChatGPT will cause a brief hiatus on hiring due to the inelasticity of demand. For the sake of argument, imagine that ChatGPT makes your average developer 4x more productive. It will take a while before the expectation becomes that 4x more work is delivered. That 4x more work is scheduled in sprints. That 4x more features are developed. That 4x more projects are sold to clients/users. When the demand eventually catches up (if it exists), the hiring will begin again.
- elmean 1y agoomg 4x scrum master inbound we are gonna be so agile
- ai-christianson 1y agoMoving very fast, but going nowhere.
- ai-christianson 1y agoWe just shipped a major feature on our SaaS product. We, of course, used AI extensively. The thing is, this feature leaned on every bit of experience and wisdom we had as a team --things like making sure the model is right, making sure the system makes sense overall and all the pieces fit together properly. I don't know that "4x" is how it works --in this case, the AI let us really tap into the experience and skill we already had. It made us faster, but if we were missing the experience and wisdom part, we'd just be more prolific at creating messes.
- MajimasEyepatch 1y agoBut presumably you could have built it before, just slower, which is the point. For now, that speed-up just looks like a win because it’s novel, but eventually the speed-up will be baked into people’s expectations.
- ai-christianson 1y ago
- BoredPositron 1y agopost hoc ergo propter hoc.
- rel2thr 1y agoI was talking to the head of accounting for a small biz the other day, and they were talking about buying an AI accounts payable solution. And how typically they would hire a person for this but now they use the AI. Now this solution might not even use an LLM , it existed pre-chatgpt , but I think the word of mouth of chatgpt and AI is causing business people to seek out automations where they would normally hire.
- dmix 1y agoBasically data entry then?
- SecretDreams 1y agoHow much does the solution cost vs the headcount? How reliable is the solution vs the headcount in non-typical scenarios? Always the first questions I ask.
- arethuza 1y agoI wonder what happens when their new accounts payable AI starts paying everyone on time and when the contract says they should be paid?
- holiday_road 1y agoHaha, it might bankrupt the company but at least I’ll be able to understand the emails I get from AP now.
- trollbridge 1y agoThis really makes no sense - computer based automated accounts payable has been around since the 1960s, and is an extremely competitive market. AI and LLM don’t exactly bring some huge breakthrough here. Most the purpose of hiring someone is handling edge cases, checking for fraud, etc - one client of mine made a single AP mistake (accepting a change to where to send payments) that cost them the equivalent of an AP clerk’s salary for a year. They now have a part time AP clerk and part of her duties is calling any vendor who sends them a change of payment instructions. They’re fraudulent about half the time.
- ttul 1y agoI run a mature software company that is being driven for profit (we are out of the fantastic future phase and solidly in the “make money” phase). Even with all the pressure to cut costs and increase automation, the most valuable use of LLMs is to make the software developers work more effectively, producing the feature improvements that customers want so that we can ensure customers will renew and upgrade. And to the extent that we are cutting costs, we are using AI to help us write code that lets us use infrastructure more efficiently (because infrastructure is the bulk of our costs). But this is a software company. I think out in the “real world,” there are some low hanging fruit wins where AI replaces extremely routine boilerplate jobs that never required a lot of human intelligence in the first place. But even then, I’d say that the general drift is that the humans who were doing those low-level jobs have a chance to step up into jobs requiring higher-level intelligence where humans have a chance to really shine. And companies are competing not by just getting rid of salaries, but by providing much better service by being able to afford to have more higher-tier people on the payroll. And by higher-tier, I don’t necessarily mean more expensive. It can be the same people that were doing the low-level jobs; they just now can spend their human-level intelligence doing more interesting and challenging work.
- 486sx33 1y agoSo basically compressing the pay scale even further …
- eru 1y agoWell, many people complain about pay inequality. Compressing scales is the opposite of that, so should be welcomed?
- landl0rd 1y agoMost of those people aren’t working in highly-paid disciplines like high tech. Generally those disciplines necessarily have wider spreads. I am perfectly fine with this. If I suddenly have to think really hard at my job all day and do terribly if I’m undersea and still get paid the same or less, I will be left pretty bitter.
- gedy 1y agoIt's an innovative-sounding excuse for weak economic performance and the unfavorable tax rules for engineers.
- eru 1y agoWhich tax rules are you talking about? (The article is about the UK job market. What tax rules have recently changed for engineers there?)
- bachmeier 1y agoOkay. It also coincides with the end of the post-pandemic hiring boom and the UK bank rate going from 0.1% to 5.25%. It's kind of funny that reliable data analysis has never been part of the AI hype when you consider that AI is used for data analysis.
- eru 1y ago> It also coincides with the end of the post-pandemic hiring boom and the UK bank rate going from 0.1% to 5.25%. I agree that the former is a strong signal. However the latter doesn't tell you anything without further context: did interest rates go up, because the economy was strong, or did rising interest rates dampen the economy? (It's similar to how you can't tell how hot it is in my apartment, purely from looking at my heating bills: does a low heating bill mean that it's cold in my flat, because I'm too cheap too heat? Or does a low heating bill mean it's summer and really hot anyway?)
- HDThoreaun 1y ago> did interest rates go up, because the economy was strong, or did rising interest rates dampen the economy? It doesnt matter. Whether it went from strong -> weak or weak -> weaker is beside the point, the question is if genAI is the main reason for entry level job loss and raising interest rates are another possible answer.
- captainbland 1y agoIn this case it was widely publicised that interest rates went up to try to bring inflation down (which was significantly above the 2% target). Growth was weak to unremarkable although the hiring market was good for job seekers at the time shortly before the interest rises were introduced.
- eru 1y agoYes, if you bring in more context interest rates can be enlightening. But by themselves they are almost useless information.
- 1y ago
- wonderwonder 1y agoSoon the meme will be true. Entry level jobs will require 5-7 years of experience and you will need to be an expert in the 23 technologies mentioned in the job req. you will also continue to get spammed by recruiters seeking Java engineers because your resume say Javascript
- falcor84 1y ago> However, these broader improvements are not benefiting all parts of the workforce equally. Graduate job postings dropped by 4.2% in May and are now down 28.4% compared with the same time last year—the lowest level seen since July 2020. > More broadly, entry-level roles (including apprenticeships, internships and junior jobs) have declined by 32% since November 2022, when ChatGPT’s commercial breakthrough triggered a rapid transformation in how companies operate and hire. > Entry-level roles now make up just 25% of all jobs advertised in the UK, down from nearly 29% two years ago. That's such a poor presentation of the numbers. If only they could have included a small data table with something like date|total-jobs|entry-level-jobs|percentage-entry-level.
- jjallen 1y agoCan't help but wonder/predict that this will cause a long-term deflationary trend. Basically labor is going to peak and then get cheaper and cheaper. So those with capital are going to benefit from this (obviously). Hopefully this transition benefits everyone. I just don't see how those with zero capital are going to survive well. Most of the US economy (sorry to be US-centric but I am American) is people performing services and information based work (or at least _tons_ of it is). This is the portion of the economy that is going to be the most and first affected by AI.
- josh2600 1y agoThis is a combo of high interest rates and the insane IRS tax rules related to R&D expenses for software companies. If companies can’t hire people to build the product they can’t afford to invest in entry level people to push it.
- madaxe_again 1y agoThe IRS doesn’t have much influence on the U.K. jobs market.
- pfisherman 1y agoCould this also be attributed to rising interest rates, a giant tax increase (tariffs), and the highly uncertain - err I mean “dynamic” — operating environment caused by the current administration? From my viewpoint, companies are in a soft hiring freeze so that they can maintain a cash cushion to deal with volatility.
- ferguess_k 1y agoMy thoughts about AI: 1. For business stakeholders, they are motivated to find ways to use AI to achieve whatever they want, because business requests are always ASAP and they don't want to wait for downstream software engineers to do the job. This has always been the case since the start of the computing business, I believe. (Maybe not the case during the mainframe/supercomputing era as the "business" sometimes are engineers themselves so it's easier to communicate) 2. Many software engineering jobs are not that technically challenging. For example Frontend, Data engineering, etc. A lot of time is spent on requirement clarification and collecting. Business might eventually figure out that the best way to use AI is NOT to make AI adapt to humans, but to make humans to adapt to AI. I'm pretty confident that if we have an integrated AI and the business stakeholders can ask questions in a way that AI can understand, 80% of my job (as a DE) could be done by AI. But it requires feeding data into AI and training the business stakeholders to use it properly. TBF, a lot of my work COULD be solved by automation, but we never had the time to properly automate the data pipelines. 3. Whatever the outcome, junior software developers are having and are going to have to a tough time. Unless they work in some low level system programming positions, they have to prove that they are MUCH better than AI to justify for a hire. Nowadays companies expect senior developers to use AI to enhance their productivity, so juniors need to learn that too to catch up -- but they also need to learn to program without AI to actually obtain the knowledge properly. 4. AI is going to impact every field, not just programming. Office work is the first to get impacted, and then blue collars too. Unions and governments are going to hold for a while, maybe a long while, but as long as there is one major player (China for example) that is pushing for AI advancement, the others HAVE to follow suite, or they run the risk of losing everything. The Russo-Ukraine war and Israel-Iran war are the bells that toll for all of us, and the existence crisis brought upon all of us by the increasing numbers of hot wars are going to make everyone push for productivity, whether in production or killing. 5. If we can't figure out how to make the world a bit more fair and happier for the average people (you and me) because AI really takes off, a dark dystopian future awaits us. Good luck. We might have some 10-20 years to achieve that.
- riffic 1y agocorrelation isn't causation. look at the tremendous wealth inequality first.
- alkonaut 1y agoI don't believe these are causally connected to any significant degree until I see any evidence for it.
- chrsw 1y agoWhen we went from typewriters to computers you still needed a human to type something. Typing is just the output of thinking. Now we are trying to build thinking machines.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- 5350-uiop-1130 1y agothey realised they could squeeze more work from less people they fired lots of people. and the ones left were happy to do the extra work.
- v5v3 1y agoGuys, that article is by a web scraping job search website seeking free publicity. It will be blocked by the big players such as indeed and LinkedIn, and possibly also blocked by direct corporate websites. So wouldn't take any notice of it. If the average salary and employment rate both drop then that would be a sign.
- rors 1y agoThere has also been a big change in the UK’s tax regime that discourages hiring new workers https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/oct/30/bosses-reeves-tax-rises-employers-national-insurance-contributions https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/oct/30/bosses-reeve...
- b0a04gl 1y ago[dead]
- phtrivier 1y agoThe article makes a correlation between the loss of "entry-level jobs" and the release of ChatGPT, implying that AI is displacing those "entry-level" jobs. But then it gives details: > By contrast, the healthcare and nursing sector – previously a consistent driver of job growth – saw vacancies fall by 10.21% in May. Other sectors with notable drops included admin (-9.22%), maintenance (-7.95%), and domestic help and cleaning (-5.72%). Am I missing something here ? Apart from the "admin" part, I fail to see how the reduction in "healthcare, nursing, maintenance, domestic help and cleaning" can be attributed to ChatGPT, or LLMs in general. Or am I misunderstanding the claim ? I can completely imagine why people would fire their house cleaner, care for they elderly themselves, postpone repairing that fridge, etc... But it would purely be because: "we can't afford it". So, revenue inequality, energy shortage, world insecurity, etc... could play a part. LLMs ? I don't see how. (Or would it be a ripple effect of growing inequality ? The AI boost is increasing inequality, and now, tech bros are the only one who can afford going to the restaurant or hiring a cleaner - but they only eat 3 times a day, and only have x rooms to clean ?) Quite frankly: "in the last 2 years since ChatGPT came out, we had dozen of trade wars and three real ones, no one wants to invest any more" looks like a more plausible explanation.
- InkCanon 1y agoThese jobs are being offshored to India. You can tell by how they're massively hiring there. Google launches largest office in India https://www.entrepreneur.com/en-in/news-and-trends/google-launches-its-largest-office-in-india-to-fuel-ai/487295 https://www.entrepreneur.com/en-in/news-and-trends/google-la... Microsoft India head says no layoffs in India https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/microsoft-layoffs-no-not-in-india-says-microsofts-india-and-south-asia-head-puneet-chandok/articleshow/117225199.cms https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/mic...
- breadwinner 1y agoDid you miss this: "Google in India has a workforce of over 10,000 spread across major cities in India." That's out of a total workforce of about 200,000.
- nomnomaster 1y agoWorked with Indians. Extremely aggressive, yet capable enough and organized. Not surprised. With ChatGPT making hiring in the US far more expensive yet inadequate enough to make hiring Indians a necessity. Just know your security both online and offline if you have to work with them in your ranks. They won't stop with just eating your lunch.
- jm4 1y agoAggressive in what way?
- otabdeveloper4 1y agoEveryone who ever drank milk died. Think about it.
- joshdavham 1y agoThen how do explain the fact that I'm still alive? /s
- rich_sasha 1y agoUK is a weird one. As well as unemployment, people struggling with CoL, you have a dire shortage of labour, in so many industries - healthcare, transportation, retail, hospitality, childcare&teaching and surely others. In particular, that seems to suggest that at the same time you have people and companies who can't find jobs / employees. Entry level postings being down could mean it's getting more squeezed still, or could mean people are giving up on hiring for these unfillable posts. Or something else still. Either way it's a basket case.
- Havoc 1y agoThink that article could have done with a bit more work on causation front.
- alexvitkov 1y agoA: ChatGPT exists B: Entry-level jobs are down Apply some propositional logic or something: A&B => A->B Therefore ChatGPT took the entry level jobs.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- 0xbadcafebee 1y agoI would love to see a list of real positions that were eliminated and replaced with ChatGPT. Not assumptions, suggestions, inferences, quandaries, hypotheticals or related subjects. Show me the paid position that ChatGPT replaced.
- bArray 1y ago> However, entry-level opportunities have taken a significant hit, dropping by nearly a third since the advent of widely available generative AI tools at the end of 2022. As others have pointed out, we're off the back of COVID and money is tight. Most companies are looking to shrink team sizes, hence the lack of hiring. AI tools have almost zero relevance, and the rest of the article does not substantiate the claim at all. > Despite this, year-on-year growth remained positive at +0.49%, marking the third consecutive month of annual improvement and suggesting a slow but steady recovery from the recent market slump. There are things that can be done to screw with numbers, but it only works for a short time. The UK for example only counts unemployment as those actively looking for work, but it is well known that there is a growing number of permanently unemployed which is hidden. The number of people applying for PIP (a type of disability allowance typically awarded to those unable to work) is growing by 1k a day [0]. In perspective, the population of the UK grows by ~1.6k a day and is projected to fall. The growth figure is likely based on the ONS [1], which are constantly having to revise their figures for data that was already available at the time of publication [2] - they do this a lot. One hack by this government is when they grew the public sector at the cost of the private sector, which is unsustainable. A company I know halved their employees but still pay the same amount of national insurance, so the economic value per employee is reduced due to increased overheads. This is not unique to the UK, though. I speak to many Europeans that go through a similar situation, and I hear of similar stories throughout the West. The EU for example has a growing issue with ECB bond management where it plays games to to try to bring down borrowing costs. The Japanese market, a large purchaser of foreign debt, is starting to get concerned [2], and signals a potential crisis for the US to be able to borrow at low rates. From all accounts China is just about keeping their head above the water and are pulling a lot of tricks. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jun/24/pat-mcfadden-welfare-cuts-1000-people-a-day-pip https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jun/24/pat-mcfadde... [1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/grossdomesticproductgdp/bulletins/quarterlynationalaccounts/januarytomarch2025 https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/grossdomesticproductgdp/bulle... [2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/business-68680004 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/business-68680004 [3] https://www.reuters.com/markets/asia/japan-consider-buying-back-some-super-long-government-bonds-sources-say-2025-06-09/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/asia/japan-consider-buying-b...
- diob 1y agoCorrelation is not causation. I think the reality is infinitely more complex, given how many huge changes coincided with the launch of ChatGPT.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- rightlane 1y agoThis maps perfectly with what I'm seeing in the consulting space. Clients are asking exclusively for very senior developers. The expectation is that a senior developer will use AI and replace the junior devs. The game has become how quickly can we train someone up so that the client will accept them as a "senior"