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Generative AI as Seniority-Biased Technological Change
- zeuch 1y agoNew Harvard's study (62M workers, 285k firms) shows firms adopting generative AI cut junior hiring sharply while continuing to grow senior roles — eroding the bottom rungs of career ladders and reshaping how careers start.
- FrustratedMonky 1y agoIn 10 years where do the senior dev's come from? Real question. Seems like with lower entry level jobs now, in 10 years there won't be seniors to hire.
- cubefox 1y agoIn 10 years a lot of the senior developers might be cut as well due to strongly improved AI.
- candiddevmike 1y agoI think a large chunk of people are naively assuming exponential growth and no longer needing senior devs in 10 years.
- thw_9a83c 1y agoI suppose the idea is that those junior developers who weren't hired will spend 10 years doing intensive, unpaid self-study so that they can knock on the door as experienced seniors by that time.
- planccck 1y agoAre you serious? How on earth are these people going to eat or pay rent for 10 years? As well, most companies would laugh you out the door if you were applying a senior role without any experience working in the role.
- thw_9a83c 1y ago> Are you serious? No, I was being sarcastic.
- selimthegrim 1y agoLaugh all you want, for some people it’s more real than you think.
- thw_9a83c 1y agoI'm not laughing at all. I'm definitely not making fun of those who may be affected by this. My sarcasm was directed at people or companies planning to implement such ideas.
- softwaredoug 1y agoJunior devs eventually will have been brought up with agentic coding, etc. Hopefully whatever the "new way" becomes is how they'll be taught. Currently part of the problem is the taboo using AI coding in undergrad CS programs. And I don't know the answer. But someone will find the right way to teach new/better ways of working with and without generative AI. It may just become second nature to everyone.
- Workaccount2 1y agoKids are always the best with technology. The generation in high school right now will be god tier at getting results from LLMs.
- swexbe 1y agoMight have been the case before. But these days, kids are brought up on locked-down content-focused machines (e.g. ipads). They struggle with anything harder than restarting an app.
- bopbopbop7 1y agoHow are high school kids that barely know the basics of the topic going to get “god tier” results from LLMs?
- hattmall 1y agoI can see how that would seem logical, but imo the issue with it not following the normal trend is the inconsistency and inaccurate results of LLMs.
- dandellion 1y agoWhen my little cousin was three and already knew how to use the phone by himself people were claiming he was gonna be a tech wizard and everybody was talking about digital natives. But when he got to high school he didn't know how to turn a computer on. How useful is it to be god tier at getting results from LLMs, if you have zero clue if the result you got is any good?
- basscomm 1y ago
- rs999gti 1y ago> In 10 years where do the senior dev's come from? From company interns. Internships won't go away, there will just be less of them. For example, some companies will turn down interns because they do not have the time to train them due to project load. With AI, now employed developers can be picky on whether or not to take on interns.
- throwawayoldie 1y agoIn 10 years, the management (or "leadership" if you like the taste of boot) responsible for doing the cutting will have moved on to something else, with no consequences for them.
- neutronicus 1y agoFrom the bread line, after they've all been displaced by AI, if you happen to need one for God knows what reason, the CEOs are hoping
- ModernMech 1y agoThey will be promoted but they won't have the requisite experience. We'll have people in the highest positions with the usual titles, but they will be severely underqualified. Enshitification will ensue.
- gruez 1y agoEven if we grant this is going to be a problem, it makes no sense for any individual company to do anything about it. Why take on the cost of training a junior when they can bail in a few years? This is especially true if you're not a big tech company, which puts you at risk of having your junior-turned-senior employees poached by big tech.
- zxor 1y agoGive your juniors reasons to stay at your company? It's not hard if the company cares at all.
- gruez 1y ago>It's not hard if the company cares at all. It's pretty hard for a non-big tech company to pay big tech level salaries.
- zxor 1y agoYou can incentivize people to stay with things other than salary. Salary plays a part of course, but there is a lot of other aspects that make staying at a job worthwhile.
- zelda420 1y agoAnd most of my friends and colleagues would take a full remote role that pays half what big tech, 5 days in office pays. Add in an extra week of PTO and you have a great pitch to devs.
- krapht 1y agoI'll believe it when I see it reflected in applicant resumes. (east coast tech firm)
- zelda420 1y agoWhat do you mean? You’re not getting applicant resumes to your smaller org? I personally turned down an Apple offer because they required 3 days in office and went this a much smaller fully remote team.
- JustExAWS 1y agoSeniors that are 30 years old will still be around and now then they will make more money.
- pdntspa 1y agoThere will still be plenty of seniors, they will be in the 40s and 50s. The problem you speak of is much further out, once those seniors retire.
- oinfoalgo 1y ago10 years is Hassabis current AGI projection. I think this is the gambit that we have already committed to.
- rd 1y agoWhat was the incentive for companies to train juniors into seniors in the past, post job-hopping era? Curious to know if that incentive has warped in the past two decades or so as someone who's starting their career now.
- hackable_sand 1y agoCompanies are organisms
- gruez 1y agoHow does that answer the question?
- hackable_sand 1y agoParent should be able to deduce and internalize the information they need from this analogy.
- bix6 1y agoThere is no incentive now because the social contract is broken and there is too much mobility. Best you can do is find a supportive boss / a company that provides training opportunities.
- zapnuk 1y agoSame as always? Cheap labor. It doesn't take that much to train someone to be somewhat useful, in mmany cases. The main educators are universities and trade schools. Not companies. And if they want more loyalty the can always provide more incentives for juniors to stay longer. At least in my bubble it's astonishing how it's almost never worth it to stay at a company. You'd likely get overlooked for promotions and salary rises are almost insultingly low.
- TuringNYC 1y ago>> What was the incentive for companies to train juniors into seniors in the past, post job-hopping era? You get a lot in the interim!!! I started at Andersen Consulting (now Accenture.) The annual attrition was ~20%, but they still invested over a year of training into me. But it worked: - They needed grunt work in early years (me, working 75hr billable weeks). Not sure how much of this is viable now given LLMs - They had great margins on the other four years. Not sure how much of this is viable now, as margins have shrunk in the past 25yrs as there is more way competition - They used me to train the next cohort in years 4/5 - I appreciated the training and give them 60hr billable weeks on average for five years It was a brutal and exhausing five years but i'm forever thankful to AndersenConsulting/Accenture for the experience.
- zeuch 1y agoIf entry-level roles are shrinking, how should companies rethink talent development? Without the traditional “bottom rungs,” how do we grow future seniors if fewer juniors ever get the chance to start?
- red-iron-pine 1y agopresumably this also means the relative value of seniors is now increasing, as the pipeline to replace them is smaller. its like how the generic "we take anyone" online security degree has poisoned that market -- nothing but hoards of entry level goobers, but no real heavy hitters on the mid-to-high end. put another way, the market is tight but there are still reasonable options for seniors. then again we live under capitalism
- zeuch 1y agoAgree, increased value and demand for seniors. But how will the market solve the generation of new seniors if juniors are getting less opportunities? Take the software development sector as example: if we replace junior devs by AI coding agents and put senior devs to review the agent's work, how will we produce more seniors (with wide experience in the sector) if the juniors are not coding anymore?
- trzy 1y agoWho cares? This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to finally gatekeep software engineering the way lawyers and finance professionals do with their fields! Enjoy the windfall in 5 years!
- candiddevmike 1y agoWhen were companies ever thinking about talent development, especially for SWE? We had some loose "mentorship" roles but IME most folks are left to their own devices or just learn by bandwagoning things from reddit.
- gota 1y agoI think open source contributions/projects will still be a way to gain verifiable experience. Other than that, I guess developing software in some capacity while doing a non-strictly software job - say, in accounting, marketing, healtcare, etc. This might not be a relevant number of people if 'vibe coding' takes hold and the fundamentals are not learned/ignored by these accountants, marketers, healthcare workers, etc. If that is the case, we'd have a lot of 'informed beginners' with 10+ years of experience tangentially related to software. Edit: As a result of the above, we might see an un-ironic return to the 'learn to code' mantra in the following years. Perhaps now qualified 'learn to -actually- code'? I'd wager a dollar on that discourse popping up in ~5 years time if the trend of not hiring junior devs continues.
- capestart 1y ago[dead]
- lukev 1y agoIt's pretty clear this is happening. The question is... is this based on existing capability of LLMs to do these jobs? Or are companies doing this on the expectation that AI is advanced enough to pick up the slack? I have observed a disconnect in which management is typically far more optimistic about AI being capable of performing a specific task than are the workers who currently perform that task. And to what extent is AI-related job cutting just an excuse for what management would want to do anyway?
- 0_____0 1y agoThis was close to my first thought as well. I don't think we're far enough along the LLM adoption curve to actually know how it will affect the business case and thus employment long term. In the last couple of years of LLM/AI honeymoon, the changes to accommodate the technology may obscure direct and second order effects.
- elevatortrim 1y agoI do not see anything in this study that accounts for the decline in economic activity. Is it AI replacing the jobs, or is it that companies are not optimistically hiring, which disproportionally impacts entry level jobs?
- spacephysics 1y agoAgree, I think the high cost of full time hires for entry level software jobs (total comp + onboarding + mentoring) vs investing in AI and seeing if that gap can be filled is a far less risky choice at the current economic state. 6-12 months in, the AI bet doesnt pay off, then just stop spending money in it. cancel/dont renew contracts and move some teams around. For full time entry hires, we typically dont see meaningful positive productivity (their cost is less than what they produce) for 6-8 months. Additionally, entry level takes time away from senior folks reducing their productivity. And if you need to cut payroll cost, its far more complicated, and worse for morale than just cutting AI spend. So given the above, plus economy seemingly pre-recession (or have been according to some leading indicators) seems best to wait or hire very cautiously for next 6-8 months at least.
- smokedetector1 1y agoInteresting. However just because this is true right now doesn't mean it will be true going forward. Unique to the current moment is that there are simultaneously (1) high interest rates and a challenging economy (2) a narrative that AI adoption should enable cutting junior roles. This could lead to companies that would anyway be doing layoffs choosing to lay off or not hire juniors, and replace with AI adoption. To really test the implied theory that using AI enables cutting junior hiring, we need to see it in a better economy, in otherwise growing companies, or with some kind of control (though not sure how this would really be possible).
- greyb 1y ago>Unique to the current moment is that there are simultaneously (1) high interest rates and a challenging economy (2) a narrative that AI adoption should enable cutting junior roles. I'm not disputing your point, but I'm curious: given that the main headline measures that we tend to see about the US economy right now involve the labour market. How do you establish the counterfactual?
- goalieca 1y agoWhen there are downturns in tech, companies squeeze out junior people. This happens often. After 2008 a whole cohort of top talent from software engineering schools were lucky to get lower paying QA jobs and only a few landed software development positions. There were chief economists for banks writing about the underemployed generation (generalized to all white collar) and how they can’t get started or have the same opportunities. I think we might be seeing this now but headlines get more clicks with AI taking our jobs.
- rsynnott 1y ago> I think we might be seeing this now but headlines get more clicks with AI taking our jobs. Note that last time round it took the media a year or so to _notice_; it didn't immediately become clear what was going on.
- dboreham 1y ago
- osigurdson 1y agoWhat happens when companies refuse to hire, even though there is an obvious need? It has to lead to reduced growth. If the majority of companies do this, I would think it would lead to a severe deflationary cycle.
- toomuchtodo 1y agoThey burn out employees until a failure mode is reached.
- osigurdson 1y agoIf a few companies do this it is probably fine, but more interesting if most companies do this. It seems that it would be akin to a self inflicted depression with severe deflation.
- toomuchtodo 1y agoFrom your lips to Blackrock's ears.
- osigurdson 1y agoI'm sorry, I don't understand.
- toomuchtodo 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackRock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackRock They are the world’s largest asset manager. So goes the economy, so goes the economic outcome of their clients.
- osigurdson 1y agoYes, of course familiar with BlackRock. People say they own everything, but they really just have ETFs. The biggest problem is the fact that they seem to have voting rights on the stocks that they purchase on behalf of their clients - it should not work like this.
- PolicyPhantom 1y agoGenerative AI may automate some entry-level tasks, but young professionals are not just “replaceable labor.” They bring growth potential, adaptation, and social learning. Without frameworks to manage AI’s role, we risk undermining the very training grounds that prepare the next generation of experts.
- skiffer 1y ago[dead]
- JustExAWS 1y agoHow do they bring more “growth potential” than a mid level developer with 3-5 years of experience? The average tenure of a developer is 2-3 years. I expect that to increase going forward slightly as the job market continues to suck. But why would I care about the growth of the company when my promotion criteria is based on delivering quarterly or yearly goals? Those goals can much more easily be met by paying slightly more for a mid level developer who doesn’t do negative work both directly and by taking time away from the existing team?
- PolicyPhantom 1y agoYou’re absolutely right that mid-level hires buy immediate productivity. But “growth potential” isn’t just romanticism — it’s an investable trajectory. With the right project design, feedback loops, and domain exposure, juniors can grow into “multipliers” — people who combine technical skills with adaptability or domain expertise. That’s a kind of return you rarely get from simply adding another mid-level hire. In practice, resilient organizations balance both: mid-levels for immediate throughput, and juniors for long-term strength.
- JustExAWS 1y agoOf course I meant 3-5 years of experience not 35 years of experience. :) I just edited it. You’re not “investing” in anyone if their tenure is going to be 2-3 years with the first one doing negative work. And why should juniors stay? Because of salary compression and inversion, where HR determines raises. But the free market determines comp for new employees, it makes sense for them to jump ship to make more money. I’ve seen this at every company I’ve worked for from startups, to mid size companies, to boring old enterprise companies to BigTech. Where even managers can’t fight for employees to get raises at market rates. But they can get an open req to pay at market rates when that employee leaves. And who is incentivize to care about “the organization” when line level managers and even directors or incentivized to care about the next quarter to the next year?
- esafak 1y agoThe tragedy of the commons: companies acting in their self interest at the expense of the industry by drying up the workforce pipeline. The next generation will pay, like when America stopped producing hardware. This is cause for government intervention.
- ileonichwiesz 1y agoIt should be, but the government loves AI - incidentally it’s also the one thing currently propping up the economy.
- carlosjobim 1y agoIt has been like this for decades by now, and your precious government loves this because they also consist of old people who hate the younger generations. Any and every time the government intervenes it is to stomp down on the youth and nothing else.
- nitwit005 1y agoUnfortunately, the government intervention will, if anything, probably just be to increase the number of Visas granted. It's the easiest and fastest fix.
- thw_9a83c 1y agoIn the future, there will be two kinds of companies: 1. Those that encourage people to use AI agents aggressively to increase productivity. 2. Those that encourage people to use AI agents aggressively to be more productive while still hiring young people. Which type of company will be more innovative, productive, and successful in the long run?
- dayvid 1y agoAny job that doesn't creatively generate revenue will be systematized and automated as soon as possible. AI agents are just an acceleration factor for this
- koakuma-chan 1y agoI don't understand how you want innovation and productivity in a world with rapidly increasing population. We need less and less people while producing more and more people. Where am I wrong?
- thw_9a83c 1y agoI don't see developed countries to have a "rapidly increasing population" problem.
- carlosjobim 1y agoPractically the whole planet is experiencing population decline now. The poster you're replying to is basing his argument on an obsolete worldview.
- koakuma-chan 1y agoYeah, it felt like we went from 7B to 8B really quickly, but I guess it's over now.
- jf22 1y agoThis isn't accurate. Birth rates are declining but population is still increasing in most countries.
- gwbas1c 1y agoEntry-level jobs are also hard to get when there is a hiring slowdown; and in the US there is a hiring slowdown. Is this a case of "correlation does not imply causation?"
- petcat 1y agoWe had some marketing folks give us a company-wide demo of Chat GPT and some other Gen AI tools and showed us how cool it is and how quick they can make stylish and sophisticated pitch decks and marketing materials now. And the entire time I'm watching this I'm just thinking that they don't realize that they are only demonstrating the tools that are going to replace their own jobs. Kinda sad, really. Demand for soft skills and creatives is going to continue to decline. Dev jobs too.
- johnrob 1y agoLLMs are good at creating single use documents, like a pitch deck used for one prospective customer (never to be used again). But for long lived documents, on which future work builds atop, the bar is higher and the value of LLMs is more grey.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- mingus88 1y agoI have the opposite expectation actually In the late 90s you weee considered a prodigy if you understood how to use a search engine. I had so many opportunities simply because I could find and retain information. So LLMs have solved this. Knowing a framework or being able to create apps is not a marketable skill any longer. What are we supposed to do now? It’s the soft skills that matter now. Being well liked has always been more important in a job than being the best at it. We all know that engineer who knows they are hot shit but everyone avoids because they are insufferable. Those marketing people don’t need to spend a week on their deck any longer. They can work the customer relationship now. Knowing how to iterate with an LLM to give the customer exactly what they need is the valuable skill now.
- octo888 1y agoExperienced that too. They're basically forced to give those demos
- bobafett-9902 1y ago
- apwell23 1y agoThese studies would be more meaningful if this was a time of economic boom. Entry-level jobs get "hollowed out" in a stagnant economy regardless of "AI". AI = not hiring because no new work but spin as a "AI" . Markets are hungry of any utterance of the the word AI from the CEO. so ridiculous. but we've collectively decided to ignore BS as long as we can scam each other and pray you are not the last one holding the bag.
- haijo2 1y agoPretty much lol. You have to somehow have the discipline to avoid getting caught up in the noise until the hype starts to fade away.
- Devasta 1y agoThe economic turmoil in the US is hollowing out the entry level jobs, AI is just the cover companies are using. The constant tariff changing means that companies have to be very pessimistic in their long term planning, as any assumptions they make can be turned on their head with no notice.
- ivape 1y agoAnother way to look at it is that legacy jobs have no future therefore there is no point bringing in the next generation into a dying system. Another way to look at it is that hiring is fine, and that the vain entitled generation we all suspected was going to emerge feels that a job should absolutely be available to them, and immediately. Another way to look at it is that journalism has been dead for quite a while, and writing about the same fear-based topics like “omg hiring apocalypse” is what makes these people predictable money (along with other topics). Another way to look at it is that we raised a generation of narcissistic parents and children that have been going “omg grades”, “omg good college”, “omg internship”, “omg job” for so long that that these lamentations feel normalized. A healthy dose of stfu was never given to them. Neurotic motherfuckers.
- haijo2 1y agoThe second point has some truth to it from what I've been hearing from talking to senior folks, taking on new grads within the finance sector.
- reb 1y agoThe pessimistic reading is well-represented, so here's another: AI changes the definition of "entry-level", but it doesn't eliminate the class of professional labor that experienced workers would rather not do. Until AI can do literally everything we can, that class of work will continue to exist, and it'll continue to be handed to the least experienced workers as a way for them to learn, get oriented, and earn access to more interesting problems and/or higher pay while experienced folks rest on their laurels or push the state of the art.
- 5350-uiop-1130 1y agosoon there will be entire new industries of "Bullshit Jobs" to keep the masses occupied they rather pay people to sit in a room pressing a button every hour than have them loitering around on UBI either that or in the pod
- Krssst 1y agoWould the entire tracking, advertisement and general enshittification industry already count as bullshit jobs?
- cryoshon 1y agoToday they're admitting AI is hollowing out entry-level jobs. The reality is that it can and will replace mid-level and eventually even quite senior jobs. Why? It's already doing a lot of the loadbearing work in those mid-level roles too now, it's just a bit awkward for management to admit it. One common current mode of work is people using AI to accomplish their work tasks very quickly, and then loafing a bit more with the extra time. So leaders refrain from hiring, pocket the savings, and keep a tight lid on compensation for those who remain. At some point they'll probably try to squeeze the workforce for some additional productivity, and cut those who don't deliver it. Note that the "ease" of using AI for work tasks will be a rationale for why additional compensation is not warranted for those who remain.
- haijo2 1y agoLol this is so far from reality. Where have you actually seen this fella? Im tired of reading all these claims with no primary evidence to support it.
- ForHackernews 1y ago> the largest effects in wholesale and retail trade Hard for me to believe that AI in its current state is hollowing out junior shop assistant and salesperson roles. Either those jobs were already vulnerable to "dumb" touchscreen kiosks or they require emotional intelligence and embodied presence that LLMs lack.
- axpy906 1y agoIt’s really hard to adjust for economic factors here. I am in agreement with skepticism in this thread as job numbers got revised downward heavily in both 2024 and 2025 (too negatives in some months) indicating a poor economic situation.
- addicted 1y agoWould similar research in other countries also return similar results? The US is going through a lot of upheaval, which whether you think is positive or negative, is unique, and a confounding factor for any such research.
- clusterhacks 1y agoI am confused about how to feel about the data the paper is based on. If you look at the paper, the data description is: "Our primary data source is a detailed LinkedIn-based resume dataset provided by Revelio Labs ... We complement the worker resume data with Revelio’s database of job postings, which tracks recruitment activity by the firms since 2021 ... The final sample consists of 284,974 U.S. firms that were successfully matched to both employee position data and job postings and that were actively hiring between January 2021 and March 2025.3 For these firms, we observe 156,765,776 positions dating back to 2015 and 245,838,118 job postings since 2021, of which 198,773,384 successfully matched with their raw text description." They identified 245 million job postings from 2021 forward in the United States? I mean the U.S. population is like 236 million for the 18-65 age group (based on wikipedia, 64.9% of 342 total population). And they find a very small percentage of firms using generative AI: "Our approach allows us to capture firms that have actively begun integrating generative AI into their operations. By this measure, 10,599 firms, about 3.7 percent of our sample, adopted generative AI during the study period." Maybe I am wildly underestimating just how much LinkedIn is used worldwide for recruiting? As a tech person, I'm also very used to seeing the same job listing re-listed by what seems to be a large number of low-effort "recruiting" firms on LinkedIn. I think for trying to figure out how generative AI is affecting entry-level jobs, I would have been much more interested in some case studies. Something like find three to five companies (larger than startups? 100+ employees? 500+?) that have decided to hire fewer entry-level employees by adding generative AI into their work as a matter of policy. Then maybe circling back from the case studies to this larger LinkedIn dataset and tied the case study information into the LinkedIn data somehow.
- squigz 1y ago> For these firms, we observe 156,765,776 positions dating back to 2015 and 245,838,118 job postings since 2021, of which 198,773,384 successfully matched with their raw text description." I'm obviously misreading this somehow. How do you have 156m positions dating back to 2015, but far more than that number in a smaller timeframe?
- clusterhacks 1y ago
- pluc 1y agoThe new career path for devs has them start with prompt engineering. I can't wait for the chickens to come home to roost.
- wnc3141 1y agoI heard an argument that the valuation of AI/ AI-adjacent firms only makes sense if 1) companies grow their aggregate top-line revenues by multiple trillion dollars of 2) this amounts to the potential savings from gutting knowledge-based employment across an economy. Of course in the long run a chronically underemployed economy will have little demand for products and services, but that is beyond the scope of companies who, in general, are focused on winning short term and zero-sum market capture. However I believe that while a billion dollar valuation is a market and strategy problem, a trillion dollar valuation is a political problem - and I would hope that a mandate of broad gainful employment translates to political action - although this remains to be seen.
- anthem2025 1y ago[dead]
- m3kw9 1y agoWhat if, new entry level jobs are just more about using AI.
- wonderwonder 1y agoSalary wise, we are in a race to the bottom. Massive outsourcing of jobs to India and similar where wages are much lower than comparable US employees coupled with Ai replacing entry level roles. On a longer time scale you have humanoid robots potentially coming as well. Self driving cars and trucks are going to torpedo trucking and low pay positions such as Uber // taxi driver. The wealth is getting centralized amongst a couple dozen high tech companies. All in all I am pretty negative on the prospects for young people as they enter the workforce and additionally for older tech people as they are currently operating in an environment where losing your job very possibly means the end of the road.
- budoso 1y agoI wonder how these findings would hold up if the analysis could control for the widespread corporate strategy of replacing domestic junior roles with dedicated offshore teams?
- jopsen 1y agoIsn't this just economic uncertainty, after math of the hiring spree following covid, macro economic conditions (interest rate, etc). It still feels too early to predict the outcome, winds may change again.
- dudeinjapan 1y ago"Seniority-bias" is the wrong word. It's "skill-bias", or better yet, "tacit-knowledge bias". The reason why old hands (who have been in the game long enough to be promoted to something approximating "Senior") are so deadly with AI is because they know all the traps/pitfalls to watch out for. Sure, the AIs may become good enough in 5-10 years to have learned all these pitfalls, but make hay while the sun is shining! "Senior EMs" who are pure HR managers/non-coders will be priced-out of their jobs in an AI agentic world, as (surprise!) you can't report AI agents to HR. Juniors who can use AI effectively will thrive and climbs the ranks rapidly.
- j45 1y agoIt is strange to read an article that is not about ageism in tech as it normally has been. Maybe people will learn to learn from each other and together moving forward.
- keeda 1y agoInterestingly, the authors do at least acknowledge the alternative hypotheses that we wonder about (including this thread) in studies like this: > Some observers have also linked AI to recent labor market trends: since late 2022, unemployment among recent college graduates has risen sharply, even as the unemploy-ment rate for young workers overall has remained steady (Appendix Figure A.1). Others, however, question the importance of AI in these developments, pointing to alternative factors such as economic uncertainty, post-Covid retrenchment, and increased offshoring (e.g., Financial Times, 2025). (No mention of ZIRP. Also, they used LLMs to classify data, so there's that.) I only had a quick look, and IANAE, but while the study does not discuss these factors any further, their methodology may implicitly account for them. Briefly, the study looks at employment of junior employees vs senior employees over the last 2 years across a bunch of companies that it categorizes as AI adopters vs non-adopters (based on an admittedly very narrow definition of "adoption".) It finds that starting in 2023 Q1, the hiring of juniors dropped sharply while that of seniors kept growing in firms that adopted AI compared to non-adopters. Given this approach, maybe those confounding factors cancel out? Like, why would economic uncertainty, offshoring, ZIRP or whatever impact only firms adopting AI and not others within the same sector? Some other interesting findings: - Juniors who do get hired, get promoted more quickly, likely due to lower competition. Could be yet another mechanism that increases the gap between the haves and the have-nots. - The biggest effects are in the wholesale / retail trade sector, which is surprising because offhand, I would not have thought this sector to be much impacted by AI. I follow some labor economists and these findings align a lot with what they've been saying about the job reports over the years. Another very interesting finding is that graduates of mid-tier colleges are impacted the most, whereas elite and "less selective" institutions are least affected. Something to consider when evaluating the ROI of tuition for a given college...
- golemotron 1y agoIsn't every advanced technology is seniority-biased?
- nudgeOrnurture 1y ago[dead]
- andro_dev 1y agoIt’s nice and dandy, but most job postings are fake or ghost jobs.
- PeterStuer 1y agoI bet those youngsters still have a much easier time than a seasoned 60+ yo with proven AI skills in landing a new job.
- zeuch 1y agoReading through this thread, it feels like there are two main camps: 1. Those who see this as mostly macroeconomics + hype (high interest rates, weak economy, AI as a convenient excuse). 2. Those who believe AI is genuinely reshaping the work structure (seniors + AI can cover more ground, making juniors less necessary). Maybe it’s both. The economy explains why companies are cautious now, but AI explains where they are cutting first — the “bottom rungs.” The bigger question, then, is: even if AI isn’t the sole cause, what happens when a whole generation of juniors doesn’t get trained? That’s not just a company-level problem, it’s an industry-wide pipeline issue. How do we avoid a tragedy of the commons here — where everyone optimizes short-term and we end up with fewer capable seniors in 10 years?
- elizabetht2 1y ago[dead]