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AI is wiping out entry-level tech jobs, leaving graduates stranded
- PKop 10mo agoH1B and foreign worker visas are, AI is political cover and it's a lie.
- sharemywin 10mo agowhat if cool new tech is just slowing down and AI is masking it.
- cratermoon 10mo agoNot a "what if". Can you name 3 new cool technologies that have come out in the last 5 years?
- ericmcer 10mo agoUhhh, LLMs? The shit computers can do now is absurd compared to 2020. If you showed engineers from 2020 Claude, Cursor, and Stable Diffusion and didn't tell them how they worked their minds would be fucking exploding.
- solumunus 10mo agoIt’s really incredible how quickly people take things for granted.
- saubeidl 10mo agoLLMs are one, granted. GP asked for three, though.
- FloorEgg 10mo agoGGPs question doesn't make sense though. What does it mean for a technology to "come out". Also what does three prove? Is three supposed to be a benchmark of some kind? I would wager every year there are dozens, probably hundreds, of novel technologies being successfully commercialized. The rate is exponentially increasing. New procedural generation methods for designing parking garages. New manufacturing approaches for fuselage assembly of aircraft. New cold-rolled steel shaping and folding methods. New solid state battery assembly methods. New drug discovery and testing methods. New mineral refinement processes. New logistics routing software. New heat pump designs. New robotics actuators. See what I mean?
- potbelly83 10mo agoGreat list, and most of those don't involve big tech. I think what your list illustrates is that progress is being made, but it requires deep domain expertise.
- FloorEgg 10mo agoTechnology advances like a fractal stain, ever increasing the diversity of jobs to be done to decrease entropy locally while increasing it globally. I would wager we are very far from peak complexity, and as long as complexity keeps increasing there will always be opportunities to do meaningful innovative work.
- AnimalMuppet 10mo ago1. We may be at the peak complexity that our population will support. As the population stops growing, and then starts declining, we may not have the number of people to maintain this level of specialization. 2. We may be at the peak complexity that our sources of energy will support. (Though the transition to renewables may help with that.) 3. We may be at the peak complexity that humans can stand without too many of them becoming dehumanized by their work. I could see evidence for this one already appearing in society, though I'm not certain that this is the cause.
- FloorEgg 10mo ago1. Human potential may be orders of magnitude greater than what people are capable of today. Population projections may be wrong. 2. Kardachev? You think we are at peak energy production? Fusion? Do you see energy usage slowing down, or speeding up, or staying constant? 3. Is the evidence you're seeing appear in society just evidence you're seeing appear in media? If media is an industry that competes for attention, and the best way to get and keep attention is not telling truth but novel threats + viewpoint validation, could it be that the evidence isn't actually evidence but misinformation? What exactly makes people feel dehumanized? Do you think people felt more or less dehumanized during the great depression and WW2? Do you think the world is more or less complex now than then? From the points you're making you seem young (maybe early-mid 20s) and I wonder if you feel this way because you're early in your career and haven't experienced what makes work meaningful. In my early career I worked jobs like front-line retail and maintenance. Those jobs were not complex, and they felt dehumanizing. I was not appreciated. The more complex my work has become, the more creative I get to be, the more I'm appreciated for doing it, and the more human I feel. I can't speak for "society" but this has been a strong trend for me. Maybe it's because I work directly for customers and I know the work I do has an impact. Maybe people who are caught up in huge complex companies tossed around doing valueless meaningless work feel dehumanized. That makes sense to me, but I don't think the problem is complexity, I think the problem is getting paid to be performative instead of creating real value for other people. Integrity misalignment. Being paid to act in ways that aren't in alignment with personal values is dehumanizing (literally dissolves our humanity).
- kylehotchkiss 10mo agoSo LLMs exist therefore nothing else is worth the time? That’s sort of the gist of HN these past few years
- manicennui 10mo agoSurely you have realized by now that a large portion of the HN userbase is here for get rich quick schemes.
- kylehotchkiss 10mo agoahh brings me back to the blockchain days, and the many excuses people tried to use them instead of a SQL database for whatever reason
- phantasmish 10mo agoMoreover: people’ve been crowing about LLM-enabled productivity for longer than it took a tiny team to conceive and build goddamn Doom. In a cave! With a box of scraps! Isn’t the sales pitch that they greatly expand accessibility and reduce cost of a variety of valuable work? Ok, so where’s the output? Where’s the fucking beef? Shit’s looking all-bun at the moment, unless you’re into running scams, astroturfing, spammy blogs, or want to make ELIZA your waifu.
- ericmcer 10mo agoNo I was just skeptical of the GPs assertion that tech hasn't produced anything "cool" in the last 5 years when it has been a nonstop barrage of insane shit that people are achieving with LLMs. Like the ability for computers to generate images/videos/songs so reliably that we are debating if it is going to ruin human artists... whether you think that is terrible or good it would be dumb to say "nothing is happening in tech".
- throw310822 10mo agoThis was posted earlier today: https://www.danshapiro.com/blog/2025/12/i-made-the-xkcd-impossible-app-without-any-words/ https://www.danshapiro.com/blog/2025/12/i-made-the-xkcd-impo... The xkcd comic is from 11 years ago (September 2014).
- kylehotchkiss 10mo agoYeah. Where are all the great new Mac native apps putting electron to shame, avalanche of new JS frameworks, and affordable SaaS to automate more of life? AI can write decent code, why am I not benefiting from that a consumer?
- ynavigator 10mo agoWell, if you're a consumer of code, then technically you benefit. Otherwise, you probably won't notice it as much.
- sp527 10mo agoIt's almost like a lot of our technologies were pretty mature already and an AI trained on 'what has been' has little to offer with respect to 'what could be'.
- kylehotchkiss 10mo agooof that's profound. Really nice closing thought for 2025.
- giancarlostoro 10mo agoNeura Link, Quantum computers are making interesting milestones with Microsoft releasing a processor chip for Quantum computing. Green steel is another interesting one, though not as 'sexy' as the previous two.
- stuckinhell 10mo agodidn't believe the quantum stuff, so I googled it. I'm shocked how far its come. Even China has some kind of photonic quantum chips now.
- zzleeper 10mo agoWait so quantum is going to actually deliver something useful within the next 10-20 years??
- dlivingston 10mo ago1. Copilot for Microsoft PowerPoint 2. Copilot for Windows Notepad 3. Copilot for Windows 11 Start Menu
- Ifkaluva 10mo agoNah man, I’m still waiting for Copilot for vim.
- ar_lan 10mo agoLLMs, Apple Silicon, self-driving cars just off the top of my head without really thinking about it.
- reshlo 10mo agoAll of those things are more than 5 years old.
- ar_lan 10mo agoI could not get in a Waymo and travel across San Francisco five years ago, are you serious?
- AlotOfReading 10mo agoGPT-2 was 6 years ago, the first Apple silicon (though not branded as such at the time) was 15 years ago, and the first public riders in autonomous vehicles happened around 10 years ago. Also, 2/3 of those are "AI".
- jajuuka 10mo ago1 year is being pedantic. Apple Silicon is clearly referring to the M series chips which have disrupted and transformed the desktop/laptop market. Self driving also refers to the recent boom and ubiquity of self driving vehicles.
- iAMkenough 10mo agoM series is an interation of A series, "disrupting markets" since 2010. LLMs are an iteration of SmarterChild. "Self driving vehicles" is an iteration of the self-parking and lane assist vehicles of the last decade. I'm bored.
- warmedcookie 10mo agoDamn, what an LLM roast. Smarterchild couldn't even recall past 3 messages
- astrange 10mo agoIncredibly cheaper batteries and solar panels. Much better induction stoves.
- cratermoon 10mo agoI was thinking computer-related, but those are good, and better battery technology helps with computing.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- irishmanlondon 10mo ago[dead]
- techblueberry 10mo agoNot that like I think one should put too much stock in head lines. But "Wiping Out" seems to translate to a 6.1% unemployment rate and 16.5% underemployment rate? https://www.finalroundai.com/blog/computer-science-graduates-face-worst-job-market-in-decades https://www.finalroundai.com/blog/computer-science-graduates...
- schubidubiduba 10mo agoI think the numbers you are arguing with here are for all employees, not just fresh graduates. Blame the article for using suboptimal numbers, but the "wiping out" part is definitely justified when talking about jobs for graduates
- gruez 10mo ago>I think the numbers you are arguing with here are for all employees, not just fresh graduates. If you click through to new york fed's website, the unemployment figures are 4.8% for "recent college graduates (aged 22-27)", 2.7% for all college graduates, and 4.0% for all workers. That's elevated, but hardly "wiping out".
- causal 10mo agoIt would be justified if AI were actually the cause, but this article does nothing to prove that. The only "tech jobs" that can even demonstrate direct replacement are call-center type roles. Everything else is just loosely blamed on AI, which is a convenient scapegoat as billions of dollars of investment are redirected from hiring to building data centers.
- shagie 10mo agoWhen you see 6.1% unemployment for computer science new grads, that invariably comes from https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:explore:outcomes-by-major https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:... Computer Science is tied for fourth lowest underemployment and is the 7th highest unemployment... and is also the highest early career median wage. That needs to be compared to the underemployment chart https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:explore:underemployment https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:... and the unemployment chart https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:explore:unemployment https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:... (and make sure to compare that with 2009). Computer science is not getting wiped out by AI. Entry level jobs exist, though people may need to reset their expectations (note that median job being $80k) from getting a $150k job out of college - that was always the exception rather than the average. There are average jobs out there that people with a "want to be on the coast and $150k" or "must be remote so I don't relocate" are thumbing their nose at.
- devwastaken 10mo agoBig tech are doing it on purpose with h1b’s and exportation of labor to capture the market in India and non-china asia. they are desperate and afraid. The U.S has a national security interest in completely stopping all of it. They dont, because every administration is paid not to. Regulate tech, ban labor export, ban labor import, protect your countries from the sellout.
- stuffn 10mo agoI don't see why you're being downvoted. Aside from being a little inflammatory your premise is correct. It's not a secret companies do not want to hire Americans. Americans are expensive, demand too many benefits like fair pay, healthcare, and vacations. They also are (mostly) at-will. H1B solves all these problem. When that doesn't work, there's 400 Infosys-likes available to export that labor cheaply. We have seen this with several industries, the last most prominent one being auto manufacture. All that matters is that the next quarters earnings are more than the last. No one hates the American worker more than Americans. Other countries have far better worker protections than us. I see no reason H1B couldn't be solved by having an high barrier to entry (500k one time fee) and maintenance (100k per year). Then, force them to be paid at the highest bracket in their field. If H1Bs are what it's proponents say - necessary for rare talent not found else where - then this fee should be pennies on the value they provide. I also see no reason we can't tax exported labor in a similarly extreme manner. If the labor truly can't be found in America the high price of the labor on tax and fee terms should be dwarfed by their added value. If it is not the case that high fees and taxes on H1B and exported labor make sense then the only conclusion is the vast majority of H1Bs and exported labor are not "rare talent" and thus aren't necessary. They can come through the normal immigration routes and integrate into the workforce as a naturalized American.
- garbawarb 10mo agoWhat exactly are the normal immigration routes? Employment-based immigration (H1B) is the only avenue that makes sense for a skilled worker. And usually skilled immigrants are the ones a country wants to attract.
- nine_zeros 10mo ago[dead]
- ZeroConcerns 10mo agoThe 'recent graduates' quoted in this article all seem to be from (for lack of a better description) 'developing countries' hoping to get a (again, generalizing) 'high-paying FAANG job'. My initial reaction would be that these people, unfortunately, got scammed, and that the scammers-promising-abundant-high-paying-jobs have now found a convenient scapegoat? AI has done nothing so far to reduce the backlog of junior developer positions from where I can see, but, yeah, that's all in "Europoor" and "EU residency required" territory, so what do I know...
- Kolonie 10mo agoFor the last few decades its been offshoring that filled the management agenda in the way AI does today so it doesn't seem surprising to me that the first gap would be in the places you might offshore a testing department to, etc.
- ZeroConcerns 10mo agoOffshoring has the exact same benefits/problems that AI has (i.e: it's cheap, yet you have to specify everything in excruciating detail) and has not been a significant factor in junior hiring, like, ever, in my experience.
- Kolonie 10mo agoMy experience is that it is not a reduction in work in the place being offshored, but it changes the shape of the labor market and certainly in the places being offshored to. Replace offshore with something cheaper and a lot of juniors in top offshore locations are the quickest to feel it. Local juniors might be worth hiring again if they need a lot of oversight once agents make them questionably productive.
- hamdingers 10mo agoAnd, as usual, no mention of the massive shortsighted overhiring during the post-covid bull market.
- Bender 10mo agoWhat happens when there are no more entry-level humans to be promoted to mid-level, and so on?
- palmotea 10mo ago> What happens when there are no more entry-level humans to be promoted to mid-level, and so on? No business cares about that question, just like the Onceler didn't care how many Truffula trees were left. It's not their problem. Business is business, and business must grow, regardless of crummies in tummies, you know.
- doctorwho42 10mo agoIt even has a name, tragedy of the commons. I have been saying it constantly for the last few years with all this AI hype over LLM's going on. But with business focus really narrowing down to short time frames, what do you expect
- astrange 10mo agoThe "business" doesn't care about this, but individual employees care about their job duties, not their business. And some of them do have a job duty where they care about this. (i.e. this cynical complaint is exactly the opposite of the cynical complaint about managers/directors engaging in empire building.)
- disgruntledphd2 10mo agoThat line always hits hard whenever I read that story to my kids.
- azemetre 10mo agoWell looked at what has always happened in society when young people have no hope for the future: massive societal disruption mostly in the forms of revolution + violence. Since this isn't the 1800s anymore there won't be any major revolutions but I expect way more societal violence going forward. If you have no hope for the future it's not hard to go to very dark paths quickly, usually through no fault of your own sadly. Now add how easy it is for malicious actors to get an audience and how LLM tech makes this even easier to do. Nice recipe for a powder keg.
- causal 10mo agoNo it's not. There is no shortage of tech problems to solve and there are no tech jobs that AI can do alone. AI is sucking up investment and AI hype is making executives stupid. Hundreds of billions of dollars that used to go towards hiring is now going towards data centers. But AI is not doing tech jobs. These headlines do nothing but increase the hype by pointing towards the wrong cause entirely. Edit: You cannot square these headlines https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46289160 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46289160
- jpalomaki 10mo agoIt might be a question of where the seniors put their time: coaching juniors or working with AI tools.
- devnullbrain 10mo agoThis article asserts 7 times that jobs are being replaced by AI and the only data to substantiate it is a link to an EY report that is paywalled, doesn't hold up to the text of the link, and doesn't hold up to what contemporary journalists wrote about the report. Bad article. Hope a human didn't write it.
- spwa4 10mo agoEntry level jobs have been getting wiped out for at least 5 years, including tech jobs, which includes 2 years that not even ChatGPT 3.5 was available. That was the first version that would reasonably respond to any useful question. And if you're being honest, other entry level jobs are far worse of than tech jobs. Entry-level bakers ... outright don't really exist anymore. Even agentic computing (ie. an AI doing anything on it's own accord for tech-savy users, never mind average users) is new from this year. I would argue it's still pretty far from widespread. Neither my wife nor my kids, despite my explaining repeatedly, even know what that is, never mind caring. I'm repeating the mantra from before, and I get that it's not useful. But no, it's not AI wiping out entry-level jobs. It's governments failing to prop up the economy. On the plus side, this means it can be fixed. However, I very much doubt the current morons in charge are going to ...
- phantasmish 10mo agoI’d go farther and guess that the tech job market would be even worse today without every company with at least 500 headcount (and many smaller than that), whether a tech company or not, putting money into “AI initiatives”. I don’t think we’ve seen any amount of a net drop in tech jobs on account of LLMs (yet). I actually think they’re (spending on projects using them, that is) countering a drop that was going to happen anyway due to other factors (tightening credit being a huge one; business investment hesitation due to things like batshit crazy and chaotic handling of tariffs; consumer sentiment; et c)
- alexgotoi 10mo agoEveryone loves blaming AI for entry-level woes, but check the numbers: CS grads hit 6.1% unemployment while nursing sits at 1.4%. That's not "wiping out" jobs, that's oversupply meeting picky hiring after years of "learn to code" hype. AI is eating the boring tasks juniors used to grind: data cleaning, basic fixes, report drafts. Companies save cash, skip the ramp-up, and wonder why their mid-level pipeline is drying up. Sarcastic bonus: great for margins, sucks for growing actual talent. Long term though, this forces everyone to level up faster. Juniors who grok AI oversight instead of rote coding will thrive when the real systems engineering kicks in. Short term pain, massive upside if you adapt. I will include this thread in the https://hackernewsai.com/ https://hackernewsai.com/ newsletter.
- QuercusMax 10mo agoBasic coding to solve simple problems is something that high schoolers and even bright middle schoolers can do. By the time I was in college I had been coding for most of a decade. Part of the issue is that many of the folks coming out of school started learning this stuff WAY too late. It's like if you waited until college to start learning to play piano, and wonder why you can't get a job when you graduate. You need a lot of time at the keyboard (pun intended) to build those skills.
- Ifkaluva 10mo agoI’m not sure if this is true. At the company where I work (one of the FAANGs), there is suddenly a large number of junior IC roles opening up. This despite the trend of the last few years to only hire L5 and above. My read of the situation: - junior level jobs were sacrificed as cost cutting measures, to allow larger investment in AI - some analysts read this as “the junior levels are being automated! Evidence: there is some AI stuff, and there are no junior roles!” - but it was never true, and now the tide is turning. I’m not sure I ever heard anybody in my company claim that the dearth of junior openings was due to to “we are going to automate the juniors”. I think all of that narrative was external analysts trying to read the tea leaves too hard. And, wannabes like Marc Benioff pretending to be tech leaders, but that’s a helpful reminder that Benioff is simply “not serious people”.
- ChrisbyMe 10mo agoAgree, the death of the junior SWE is greatly exaggerated. (At least in FAANG) Maybe there was some idea that if AI actually solved software engineering in a few years you wouldn't need any more SWEs. Industry is moving away from that idea this year.
- groos 10mo agoThe death, maybe, but not the lack of hiring. At $BIGCORP, where I work, I haven't seen an externally hired junior dev in at least 2 years in an extended team of ~100 people.
- Ifkaluva 10mo agoMy prediction is that you will see that trend reverse soon. Have the teams become top-heavy?
- dragonwriter 10mo agoMy prediction is that you won't see it reverse too soon, but that AI has nothing to do with it. It's just (for now, until the AI bubble itself bursts) a convenient scapegoat for people who haven't come to grips with the broad economic malaise outside of, but not caused by, AI.
- viccis 10mo agoIt doesn't help that a lot of the graduates I've talked to or interviewed seemed to treat a compsci degree as nothing more than a piece of paper they needed to get to be handed a high paying tech job. If you're motivated enough to learn enough job skills to be useful on your own then I guess you can treat your degree that way. But if you got through 4 years through cheating and minmaxing the easiest route possible and wound up with no retained skills to show for it? Congrats, you played yourself and fell for the "college is useless" meme. Coulda just skipped the student loans and bombed interviews without the 4 year degree.
- trhway 10mo agoIt has happened several times - junior web devs can't find jobs, junior Java devs can't find jobs, etc... usually after a surge wave in the related tech area. We had large overall surge in tech around Covid time, and as usually there is some adjustment now.
- ivape 10mo agoThe dotcom bubble had comp sci lecture halls with students overflowing into the hallway. I don’t blame people, it’s migratory. Jobs and resources are there, so, go there. Then we blame the other group of students for not going there and picking majors where the jobs aren’t. We need some kind of apprenticeship program honestly, or AI will solve the thing entirely and let people follow their honest desires and live reasonably in the world.
- bossyTeacher 10mo ago> AI will solve the thing entirely and let people follow their honest desires and live reasonably in the world. I always find hilarious that people treat transformer tech as a public good. Transformers, like any other tech out there owned by large tech companies. Short of forcing the few companies who own the top models to abide to your rule, there is no chance OpenAI is going to give itself up to the government. And even if they did, it means nothing if Microsoft/Amazon/Google/etc do not provide you with the facilities to deploy the model. A much realistic solution is that Big Tech will collude with governments to keep certain autonomy and restrict its use only for the elites
- llmslave 10mo agoMy senior SWE job at FAANG has essentially turned into prompting Opus 4.5. There is almost no reason to delegate the work, especially low level grunt work. People disputing this are either in denial, or lacking the skill set to leverage AI. One or two more Opus releases from anthropic and this field is cooked
- drivebyhooting 10mo agoWhat kind of work do you do that is simple enough that can be accomplished solely through prompting?
- ivape 10mo agoThe golden handcuff type where you update documentation with new UI elements.
- llmslave 10mo ago: )
- llmslave 10mo agodistributed systems, log diving, deployments, etc
- gervwyk 10mo agoIt all depends on how you prompt. and the prompt system you’ve setup.. when done well, you just “steer” the code /system. Quite amazing to see it come together. But there are multiple layers to this.
- hactually 10mo agoany sort of web tech based development. Frontend, backend, animations, design, infra, distributed systems engineering, networking.
- Capricorn2481 10mo agoIt's a troll account called llmslave made a couple months ago. Odds are low it's even a human.
- alecco 10mo agoAI? Ah, India. "Over $50 billion in under 24 hours: Why Big Tech is doubling down on investing in India" https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/11/big-tech-microsoft-amazon-google-india-billions-in-investment.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/11/big-tech-microsoft-amazon-go...
- esseph 10mo agoMicrosoft recently announced the intent to train 20 MILLION Indian workers.
- GoatInGrey 10mo agoI can confirm from consulting experience that India is where the jobs went. My office provides professional services to North American and European industrial customers in manufacturing and distribution. Roughly 85% of these customers have fully Indian IT teams. Running a SOQL query in our Salesforce instance for 'Devi', 'Singh', and 'Kumar' yields over two thousand hits across client contacts, even. Since the workers are hired for cost over quality, they're typically incompetent. Though many have learned to parasitize SME and support staff expertise by asking highly specific questions in an extended sequence. It's a salami-slicing strategy where the majority of the work ends up being performed by those SMEs and support staff while the incompetent workers collect the paychecks and credit. I'm pushing my teams to more aggressively identify and call out this behavior, but it's so systemic that it's an endless battle with every new project coming in the door. Personal frustrations aside, it's very dangerous from both economic and national security perspectives for India to be building and administering so much of the West's IT infrastructure. Our entire economy depends on it, yet we're voluntarily concentrating that dependency in a single foreign nation. A Pacific conflict alone could sever us from the majority of our IT workforce, regardless of India's intentions.
- btech1232132 10mo agoCurrently looking for a new role in biotech and it seems like at many companies it is almost 40:1 india vs united states roles being posted. This is in R&D not even manufacturing.
- 10mo ago
- rgreeko42 10mo agoOutsourcing, end of ZIRP, end of R&D tax credit. Macro-economic conditions are pushing companies to do more with fewer people. AI might be helping with this, but it's pure marketing BS to blame it for the state of tech employment.
- dkobia 10mo agoI had the privilege of working with a great SWE intern this year. Their fresh ideas and strong work ethic made a real impact. Experienced engineers need this kind of energy. Yes many over-rely on LLMs, but new engineers see possibilities we've stopped noticing and ask the questions we've stopped asking. Experience is invaluable, but it can quietly calcify into 'this is just how things are done.'
- random9749832 10mo agoMaybe rather than telling everyone to "learn to code" we could have told them to do jobs they are more suited to doing: serving food, nursing, construction etc. all which have tangible benefits to society. When I went to Japan, it felt like all kinds of people were doing all kinds of jobs many hours into the day, whether it is managing an arcade, selling tickets at the station, working at a konbini or whatever small job. Maybe we need to not give such lofty ideas to the new generation and represent blue collar jobs as "foreigner" or "failure" jobs.
- akpa1 10mo agoFor that to work, we would first need to make those blue collar jobs into ones that actually pay well enough for people to thrive instead of merely survive
- random9749832 10mo agoBoth the economy and culture play a role in the types of jobs people aim for. Tech used to be for "nerds" now it is "cool" because they watched The Social Network and Bill Gates told them they are smart enough to be part of the club.
- astrange 10mo agoJapan doesn't do that. Those part time jobs don't pay very well. There's just much lower overhead to having them, you don't have to own a car or a giant house to be in commute range etc.
- random9749832 10mo agoJust to be clear not everywhere that's facing rising unemployment or requiring an influx of foreigners that citizens don't want to do is America and not everyone doing those jobs were part-time. But it is true, they do have a huge part-time work force.
- arjie 10mo agoInteresting. At least some of this has to be the bullwhip effect modeled with employers as retail, universities as suppliers, and graduating students as further back suppliers. The 4 year lead time in production of employable labour causes a whip crack backwards through the supply chain when there is a sudden shift at the retail end. It's true that a lot of things which were once junior contributor things are now things I'd rather do, but my scarce resource is attention. And humans have a sufficiently large context window and self-agentic behaviour that they're still superior to a machine.
- papichulo4 10mo agoSaying that "we're firing to use AI" makes you look like you have ROI on your AI investments and you're keeping up. In fact there are possibly other macro-economic effects at play: 1. The inability to deduct engineering for tax purposes in the year they were spent: "Under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) from 2017, the law requires companies to amortize (spread out) all domestic R&D expenses, including software development costs, over five years, starting in tax years after December 31, 2021, instead of deducting them immediately. This means if you spend $100,000 on software development in 2023, you can only deduct 1/5th (or $20,000) each year over five years" 2. End of zero-interest rates. 3. Pandemic era hiring bloat - let's be honest we hired too many non-technical people, companies are still letting attrition take place (~10%/yr where I am) instead of firing. 4. Strong dollar. My company is moving seats to Canada, Ireland, and India instead of hiring in the US. Getting 1.5-2 engineers in Ireland instead of 1 senior on the US west coast. Otherwise AI is an accelerator to make more money, increase profits and efficiency. Yes it has a high cost, but so does/did Cloud, every SaaS product we've bought/integrated.
- tsycho 10mo agoEvidence I can give in support of the article: - very few teams have headcount, or expecting to grow - the number of interview requests get has dropped off a cliff. So BigTech is definitely hiring less IMHO. That said, I am not sure if it's only or even primarily due to replacement by AI. I think there's generally a lot of uncertainty about the future, and the AI investment bubble popping, and hence companies are being extra cautious about costs that repeat (employees) vs costs that can be stopped whenever they want (buying more GPUs). And in parallel, they are hoping that "agents" will reduce some of the junior hiring need, but this hasn't happened at scale in practice, yet. I would expect junior SWE hiring to slowly rebound, but likely stabilize at a slower pace than in the pre-layoff years.
- nosianu 10mo ago> Evidence I can give in support of the article: I only want to point out that evidence of less hiring is not evidence for AI-anything. As others have pointed out, here and previously, things like outsourcing to India, or for Europe Eastern Europe, is also going strong. That's another explanation for less jobs "here", but they are not gone, they just moved to cheaper places. As has been going on for decades, it just continues unevenly. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/11/big-tech-microsoft-amazon-google-india-billions-in-investment.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/11/big-tech-microsoft-amazon-go... > Over $50 billion in under 24 hours: Why Big Tech is doubling down on investing in India https://news.microsoft.com/source/asia/2025/12/09/microsoft-invests-us17-5-billion-in-india-to-drive-ai-diffusion-at-population-scale/ https://news.microsoft.com/source/asia/2025/12/09/microsoft-... > Microsoft invests US$17.5 billion in India to drive AI diffusion at population scale
- diamond559 10mo agoYouth unemployment is up and among new hires in general bc of the uncertain and deteriorating business conditions.
- beej71 10mo agoReminds me of that comic where the dog runs a ball up to his owner with the thought bubble "Throw!" When the owner goes to take the ball, the dog steps back, thinking, "No take! Only throw!" So in the glorious future, well only need senior devs to manage AI. No juniors! Only seniors!
- Ekaros 10mo agoI am not a hiring manager. But if there is more supply of non-junior workers. Doesn't it make sense to actually hire those if compensation might even be lower than before? You hire juniors to support them, or because experienced devs are too expensive or there simply aren't enough of them. If there are enough of them on market for more reasonable price wouldn't actually choosing from that cohort make more sense?
- lrvick 10mo agoUnfortunately if it takes you 4 years to significantly upskill in tech, you are learning way too slow to survive in this industry. Most of the major innovators I know are dropouts, because they realized college is suited to train you to work in academia, where very few jobs exist, almost no one worth working for cares about degrees anymore, and the debt only makes surviving harder. IMO the best education and credentials come from picking interesting projects you have no idea how to do, then learn everything in your way to ship them as open source so potential employers can see your work. If you can get a degree on a scholarship for free, wonderful, but college should be viewed as more of a hobby or a way to network, rather than a way of obtaining marketable technical skills.
- Ifkaluva 10mo agoI don’t agree that “college is to train you to work in academia”. I work in FAANG, none of my colleagues are dropouts. Many BigTech founders are dropouts, but that’s a separate game altogether.
- lrvick 10mo agoI would agree FAANGs are an exception who have historically hired almost exclusively academics who hire other academics, and it shows. They let many coast for years at a time and get away with being a specialist unable to deliver value outside of their specialization or rapidly learn new skills. Many get the job with academic success and treat the job as a continuation of their academic career. Many get "tenure" and can do whatever they want and are effectively paid to just not work for competitors. I know lots of people working at those orgs that brag about how well they get away with doing nothing of value and we all know these people (but of course not everyone is like that). No offense but I do not feel the overwhelming majority of roles at these companies are delivering value to humanity apart from shareholders, or something most people should aspire towards in a career, and do not think most of the skills learned in these orgs are all that useful in the world outside those walls. Also those same FAANGs are clearly aware of the above at some level and doing mass layoffs, or not replacing people who leave, and those workers are having a really hard time finding a home in the non-FAANG working world where they are expected to be highly motivated generalists.
- bfrog 10mo agoWe have new grads, they could not be replaced by AI. If you have new grads AI can replace I’m not sure why it required a college degree.
- WhyOhWhyQ 10mo agoWhat's your field, broadly, if you don't mind sharing?
- mmarian 10mo agoMy personal experience is that it's not AI wiping out jobs, it's offshoring.
- cadamsdotcom 10mo agoIf only there were some kind of tool that junior engineers could use to build portfolio pieces to differentiate themselves. And if only there were some kind of tool that junior engineers could use to upskill themselves to mid-level. Sadly we’ll have to wait until at least 2022 for that.