5 ms·

AI is wrecking a fragile job market for college graduates

57 points by alephnerd 1y ago

bitexploder 1y ago
This will create what I am calling a “seniority crunch”. Entry level jobs are hard to get, humans aren’t learning the deeper aspects and reasoning parts of knowledge work. Gap created for people with this knowledge. Senior IC jobs demand goes up. Fewer with xp to fill it. LLMs don’t reason well. They can’t do that and likely never will be coaxed into it. Just one scenario I think is plausible.
- karlgkk 1y ago
  No, this is the likely path. LLMs are hitting a wall. They’ll get better, much better, but high context “brownfield” tasks are going to remain difficult and require human handholding. The industry is cutting itself off at the knees.
- lokrian 1y ago
  Or it will lead to demand for massive government job programs, huge tax increases to pay for, free enterprise being smothered, everything being run by government bureaucrats.
  - soco 1y ago
    All thanks to AI entrepreneurs, such a great achievement. Just like AirBnB destroying the historical centers nowadays, disruption at its best - just a different disruption from what they claim.
- anilgulecha 1y ago
  It's not like juniors roles will go away. More and more - it's looking like there's a higher bar for high compensation that was the norm. It seems like juniors SWEs will have to toil more to reach higher level of skills, become valuable to their teams, before they "make" it. I'm seeing this trend across the engg leaders I speak with.
  - soco 1y ago
    And who's gonna pay them while doing this ramp up? Years and years of getting skills? What are the eng leaders saying about it, if anything?
    - anilgulecha 1y ago
      Of course engineers will be paid, just that entry level pay has come down. (Pay at entry level has fallen at least 40% in the mid-size product sector).
- randcraw 1y ago
  Or it will require college students to complete one or more internships which use AI to show they have already learned to be productive using AI before they graduate.
- Spartan-S63 1y ago
  I think this is the most likely outcome. It'll drive salaries up in 5-10 years when there's a serious talent pipeline shortage and the demand for senior talent isn't satisfied by a dry pipeline.
deadbabe 1y ago
AI is doing no such thing. Money is tight, we can’t afford to just hire the way we used to, and now there’s more college graduates than ever it seems.
- 14123newsletter 1y ago
  They are not, but if AI is doing the thing they are advertised as, it will be.
- Arainach 1y ago
  >Money is tight ...say the businesses pulling in record revenue and profit numbers. Do the people who say things like "money is tight" think most of the rest of us are stupid? Based on how many people parrot those lines despite all evidence, maybe we are communally that stupid.
- happytoexplain 1y ago
  Money is tight for humans. While the sea level has gone down for everybody over the decades, businesses have not shared a proportional level of financial suffering compared to humans, by a long shot.
vic_nyc 1y ago
where is the non-paywall link?
- tomhow 1y ago
  Looks like there isn't one, so we need to bury the submission. If anyone knows of a way to read the article without a subscription, please reply here or email us at hn@ycombinator.com and we'll restore it.
rr808 1y ago
Honestly college grads esp tech and finance are well overpaid, I feel the new generation has crazy expectations of earning FAANG salaries. Hopefully the current economy will continue to increase wages of the blue collar workers and bring down the high end to more normal salaries.
- zeofig 1y ago
  Yeah and then they can enjoy a future where the previous generation earned twice as much money which was itself worth twice as much. Have fun buying a house kids!
  - rr808 1y ago
    I actually worked in the 90s and 2000s and software was not a popular career because it didn't pay much. Programmers were nerds who did it for the tech, not the money. Ir you say they earned twice as much you have no idea, I had room mates until I was mid thirties.
    - brewdad 1y ago
      Software wasn't paying astronomical salaries back then but it was paying at least as much as any other engineering discipline. Sometime in the 2000s, engineering salaries stayed normal and software salaries skyrocketed.
      - SoftTalker 1y ago
        It was the first dotcom boom and VC money that caused the inflation of developer salaries. Prior to that, software development was just another cost center office job like accounting for most companies.
        JustExAWS 1y ago
        I worked in B2B companies from 2000 to 2020 across 5 out of the 6 companies there was a direct line between our work and net new revenue. The one job I did have during they time period where I was a cost c center was when I was an architect over integrating acquired companies systems as part of a PE rollup strategy (never again). Those other 5 weren’t anything glamorous - bill processing, fleet management with ruggedized mobile devices, railroad train car repair software and two health care related companies. I knew to stay away from cost center jobs after my first job out of college when looking for my second job in 1999. Cost center jobs hardly ever pay well. That’s one reason I run away from any company that is run by PE companies that are more interested in “efficiencies” than growth and I’ve been offered a couple of jobs as an architect for those companies. Since 2020 I have worked in consulting companies where there was a direct line from my billable hours to revenue and indirect attributions from “enablement” projects 6)/4 influenced the company.
vasilzhigilei 1y ago
It's not an AI issue. It's that in 4 years of a CS degree, CS students never touch a single kubectl command or barely build one functional web application in one software engineering related course. It's the failure of CS programs that is causing job market issues for college graduates. It's just that when money was easy, companies could pay for training interns and recent grads things they should have learned in school. Now money is tight, so we see these job market problems. I am hopeful that colleges will adapt their curriculums based on the changing job market.
- j45 1y ago
  A gap between graduate skills and industry requirements did exist before AI. The pandemic likely also caused further changes in industry and their requirements.
- Hammershaft 1y ago
  What you're advocating for are applied vocational studies, not computer science.
  - scarface_74 1y ago
    Whey he’s advocating for is that people don’t want to get in tens of thousands of debt without expecting to get a job because they need money to survive and pay off said debt
  - alephnerd 1y ago
    There is a middle ground between both. If teaching fundamentals, then force students to utilize these fundamentals to build into applied or industry usecases. For example - leveraging the K8s thread - force students in their OS class to understand HOW to apply data structures to manage scalability problems AND forcing students to understand Linux kernel internals like cgroups. Most universities don't offer course to connect these fundamentals together - not even my Ivy League alma mater based on my own survey of curricula. Everyone is incentivized to understand the bare minimum, overindex on Leetcode, and skim over harder fundamental courses. On top of that, ime at my alma mater, most CS faculty was essentially applied math nerds who could see beauty in a well formatted inductive proof but would glaze out when pushed on implementing Paxos using best practices around kernel or system performance. And vice versa for the system nerds. In a world where AI/ML can increasingly automate away boiler plate work and even conduct limited reasoning, understanding how fundamentals and (shudder) first principles are connected into become a product or solution is what matters. And thus, this becomes a critical thinking problem, which just cannot be learnt without experimentation and getting into the weeds.
appleaday1 1y ago
Actually...
nikolayasdf123 1y ago
soon there will be no job market
mrbungie 1y ago
Is it really? or is it just a very good excuse for layoffs and "do more with less" policies?
- happytoexplain 1y ago
  Is that different?
  - mrbungie 1y ago
    Yep, it is different. If AI is really wrecking the job market structurally due to new efficiencies, one would hope those effects will be permanent (i.e we won't need juniors anymore because AI will fill those spaces permanently, with or without human intervention; and thats not going to change because AI is only going to get better, blabla, yada, yada). If it is not, it would be a matter of eventually reaching AI winter status and/or just finding a new thing to hype and the tech job market will open its gates again. Of course there is some nuance to it, both things can happen at the same time with different intensities.
xorgun 1y ago
Teaching fundamentals only is a footgun. People need to learn how to ship shit, while also learning fundamentals
jaco6 1y ago
[dead]
ChrisArchitect 1y ago
See also, from a number of versions of this story around a few months ago: For Some Recent Graduates, the A.I. Job Apocalypse May Already Be Here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44146650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44146650 And conversely: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44136117 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44136117
Simulacra 1y ago
I just haven't seen this. Not at all. AI is a useful tool, but it is nowhere close to replacing humans, except where companies want to be bastards by forcing customers to use an AI instead of a person. It's going to be quite a while until an AI actually takes a full job.
bookofjoe 1y ago
https://archive.ph/nlnr2 https://archive.ph/nlnr2

57 points by alephnerd 1y ago

This will create what I am calling a “seniority crunch”. Entry level jobs are hard to get, humans aren’t learning the deeper aspects and reasoning parts of knowledge work. Gap created for people with this knowledge. Senior IC jobs demand goes up. Fewer with xp to fill it. LLMs don’t reason well. They can’t do that and likely never will be coaxed into it. Just one scenario I think is plausible.

karlgkk 1y ago
No, this is the likely path. LLMs are hitting a wall. They’ll get better, much better, but high context “brownfield” tasks are going to remain difficult and require human handholding. The industry is cutting itself off at the knees.
lokrian 1y ago
Or it will lead to demand for massive government job programs, huge tax increases to pay for, free enterprise being smothered, everything being run by government bureaucrats.
- soco 1y ago
  All thanks to AI entrepreneurs, such a great achievement. Just like AirBnB destroying the historical centers nowadays, disruption at its best - just a different disruption from what they claim.
anilgulecha 1y ago
It's not like juniors roles will go away. More and more - it's looking like there's a higher bar for high compensation that was the norm. It seems like juniors SWEs will have to toil more to reach higher level of skills, become valuable to their teams, before they "make" it. I'm seeing this trend across the engg leaders I speak with.
- soco 1y ago
  And who's gonna pay them while doing this ramp up? Years and years of getting skills? What are the eng leaders saying about it, if anything?
  - anilgulecha 1y ago
    Of course engineers will be paid, just that entry level pay has come down. (Pay at entry level has fallen at least 40% in the mid-size product sector).
randcraw 1y ago
Or it will require college students to complete one or more internships which use AI to show they have already learned to be productive using AI before they graduate.
Spartan-S63 1y ago
I think this is the most likely outcome. It'll drive salaries up in 5-10 years when there's a serious talent pipeline shortage and the demand for senior talent isn't satisfied by a dry pipeline.

deadbabe 1y ago

AI is doing no such thing. Money is tight, we can’t afford to just hire the way we used to, and now there’s more college graduates than ever it seems.

14123newsletter 1y ago
They are not, but if AI is doing the thing they are advertised as, it will be.
Arainach 1y ago
>Money is tight ...say the businesses pulling in record revenue and profit numbers. Do the people who say things like "money is tight" think most of the rest of us are stupid? Based on how many people parrot those lines despite all evidence, maybe we are communally that stupid.
happytoexplain 1y ago
Money is tight for humans. While the sea level has gone down for everybody over the decades, businesses have not shared a proportional level of financial suffering compared to humans, by a long shot.

vic_nyc 1y ago

where is the non-paywall link?

tomhow 1y ago
Looks like there isn't one, so we need to bury the submission. If anyone knows of a way to read the article without a subscription, please reply here or email us at hn@ycombinator.com and we'll restore it.

rr808 1y ago

Honestly college grads esp tech and finance are well overpaid, I feel the new generation has crazy expectations of earning FAANG salaries. Hopefully the current economy will continue to increase wages of the blue collar workers and bring down the high end to more normal salaries.

zeofig 1y ago
Yeah and then they can enjoy a future where the previous generation earned twice as much money which was itself worth twice as much. Have fun buying a house kids!
- rr808 1y ago
  I actually worked in the 90s and 2000s and software was not a popular career because it didn't pay much. Programmers were nerds who did it for the tech, not the money. Ir you say they earned twice as much you have no idea, I had room mates until I was mid thirties.
  - brewdad 1y ago
    Software wasn't paying astronomical salaries back then but it was paying at least as much as any other engineering discipline. Sometime in the 2000s, engineering salaries stayed normal and software salaries skyrocketed.
    - SoftTalker 1y ago
      It was the first dotcom boom and VC money that caused the inflation of developer salaries. Prior to that, software development was just another cost center office job like accounting for most companies.
      - JustExAWS 1y ago
        I worked in B2B companies from 2000 to 2020 across 5 out of the 6 companies there was a direct line between our work and net new revenue. The one job I did have during they time period where I was a cost c center was when I was an architect over integrating acquired companies systems as part of a PE rollup strategy (never again). Those other 5 weren’t anything glamorous - bill processing, fleet management with ruggedized mobile devices, railroad train car repair software and two health care related companies. I knew to stay away from cost center jobs after my first job out of college when looking for my second job in 1999. Cost center jobs hardly ever pay well. That’s one reason I run away from any company that is run by PE companies that are more interested in “efficiencies” than growth and I’ve been offered a couple of jobs as an architect for those companies. Since 2020 I have worked in consulting companies where there was a direct line from my billable hours to revenue and indirect attributions from “enablement” projects 6)/4 influenced the company.

vasilzhigilei 1y ago

It's not an AI issue. It's that in 4 years of a CS degree, CS students never touch a single kubectl command or barely build one functional web application in one software engineering related course. It's the failure of CS programs that is causing job market issues for college graduates. It's just that when money was easy, companies could pay for training interns and recent grads things they should have learned in school. Now money is tight, so we see these job market problems. I am hopeful that colleges will adapt their curriculums based on the changing job market.

j45 1y ago
A gap between graduate skills and industry requirements did exist before AI. The pandemic likely also caused further changes in industry and their requirements.
Hammershaft 1y ago
What you're advocating for are applied vocational studies, not computer science.
- scarface_74 1y ago
  Whey he’s advocating for is that people don’t want to get in tens of thousands of debt without expecting to get a job because they need money to survive and pay off said debt
- alephnerd 1y ago
  There is a middle ground between both. If teaching fundamentals, then force students to utilize these fundamentals to build into applied or industry usecases. For example - leveraging the K8s thread - force students in their OS class to understand HOW to apply data structures to manage scalability problems AND forcing students to understand Linux kernel internals like cgroups. Most universities don't offer course to connect these fundamentals together - not even my Ivy League alma mater based on my own survey of curricula. Everyone is incentivized to understand the bare minimum, overindex on Leetcode, and skim over harder fundamental courses. On top of that, ime at my alma mater, most CS faculty was essentially applied math nerds who could see beauty in a well formatted inductive proof but would glaze out when pushed on implementing Paxos using best practices around kernel or system performance. And vice versa for the system nerds. In a world where AI/ML can increasingly automate away boiler plate work and even conduct limited reasoning, understanding how fundamentals and (shudder) first principles are connected into become a product or solution is what matters. And thus, this becomes a critical thinking problem, which just cannot be learnt without experimentation and getting into the weeds.

appleaday1 1y ago

Actually...

nikolayasdf123 1y ago

soon there will be no job market

mrbungie 1y ago

Is it really? or is it just a very good excuse for layoffs and "do more with less" policies?

happytoexplain 1y ago
Is that different?
- mrbungie 1y ago
  Yep, it is different. If AI is really wrecking the job market structurally due to new efficiencies, one would hope those effects will be permanent (i.e we won't need juniors anymore because AI will fill those spaces permanently, with or without human intervention; and thats not going to change because AI is only going to get better, blabla, yada, yada). If it is not, it would be a matter of eventually reaching AI winter status and/or just finding a new thing to hype and the tech job market will open its gates again. Of course there is some nuance to it, both things can happen at the same time with different intensities.

xorgun 1y ago

Teaching fundamentals only is a footgun. People need to learn how to ship shit, while also learning fundamentals

jaco6 1y ago

[dead]

ChrisArchitect 1y ago

See also, from a number of versions of this story around a few months ago: For Some Recent Graduates, the A.I. Job Apocalypse May Already Be Here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44146650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44146650 And conversely: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44136117 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44136117

Simulacra 1y ago

I just haven't seen this. Not at all. AI is a useful tool, but it is nowhere close to replacing humans, except where companies want to be bastards by forcing customers to use an AI instead of a person. It's going to be quite a while until an AI actually takes a full job.

bookofjoe 1y ago

https://archive.ph/nlnr2 https://archive.ph/nlnr2