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IBM tripling entry-level jobs after finding the limits of AI adoption
- toomuchtodo 8mo agohttps://archive.today/D6Kyc https://archive.today/D6Kyc
- awesome_dude 8mo ago> In the HR department, entry-level staffers now spend time intervening when HR chatbots fall short, correcting output and talking to managers as needed, rather than fielding every question themselves. The job is essentially changing from "You have to know what to say, and say it" to "make sure the AI says what you know to be right"
- westurner 8mo agoTripling entry-level hiring is a good plan. > Some executives and economists argue that younger workers are a better investment for companies in the midst of technological upheaval.
- verdverm 8mo agoIBM, in the midst of a tech upheaval? They are so dysfunctional, it's the core of why I left
- thaway123123 8mo agoIs this for their in-house development or for their consulting services? Because the latter would still be indicative of AI hurting entry level hiring since it may signal that other firms are not really willing to hire a full time entry level employee whose job may be obsoleted by AI, and paying for a consultant from IBM may be a lower risk alternative in case AI doesn't pan out.
- raw_anon_1111 8mo agoAnd if it is for consulting, I doubt very serious they will based in the US. You can’t be priced competitive hiring an entry level consultant in the US and no company is willing to pay the bill rate for US based entry level consultants unless their email address is @amazon.com or @google.com. Source: current (full time) staff consultant at a third party cloud consulting firm and former consultant (full time) at Amazon.
- xenospn 8mo agoWhy would Amazon bring on a full-time consultant instead of just hiring you?
- Insanity 8mo agoMy partner is also a consultant and one client was Google. I’m also confused about the exact reason why they didn’t just hire someone.
- roenxi 8mo ago"You see we leased this back from the company we sold it to and that way it comes under the monthly current budget and not the capital account." ~ Monty Python, Meaning of Line (1983), on The Machine that Goes Ping.
- raw_anon_1111 8mo agoNo that’s not what I meant at all. Amazon Professional Services are made up of full time “blue badge” employees who get the same type of base + bonus + RSUs that all other blue badge employees get.
- raw_anon_1111 8mo agoI worked internally at AWS Professional Services - their internal consulting department - every AWS ProServe employee is a “blue badge” employee with the same initial four year offer structure of base + prorated signing bonus + RSUs (5/15/40/40). Google also has a large internal consulting department for GCP. I can’t fault you for not knowing AWS ProServe exists. I didn’t know either until a recruiter reached out to me.
- faragon 8mo agoWith the workforce may happen like with DRAM and NAND flash memories: unexpected demand in one side leaving without enough offer in other sides.
- joe_mamba 8mo agoDoubt it. Unless we go through another decade of ZIRP tied to a newly invented hyped technology that lacks specialists, and discovering new untapped markets, there's not gonna be any massive demand spike of junior labor in tech that can't be met causing wages to shoot up. The "learn to code" saga has run its course. Coder is the new factory worker job where I live, a commodity.
- jerlam 8mo agoProbably not on the IBM jobs site yet, where the number of entry level jobs is low compared to the size of the company (~250k): https://www.ibm.com/careers/search?field_keyword_18[0]=Entry%20Level https://www.ibm.com/careers/search?field_keyword_18[0]=Entry... Total: 240 United States: 25 India: 29 Canada: 15
- google234123 8mo agoAren't those general jobs opening. Like junior swe only needs a single generic posting for all positions
- roncesvalles 8mo agoExactly, that's why counting job postings is a terrible proxy for gauging market conditions. Companies may hire anywhere from 0 to 100s of people through the same JD.
- techsocialism 8mo ago[dead]
- mathattack 8mo agoInteresting given the current age discrimination lawsuit: https://www.cohenmilstein.com/case-study/ibm-age-discrimination-litigation/ https://www.cohenmilstein.com/case-study/ibm-age-discriminat...
- notepad0x90 8mo agoAnother one? What is it with IBM, they must really save lots of money in a way no one else has figured out by firing people at 50yo. This is like the 3rd or 4th one i've heard from them.
- Spooky23 8mo agoIt’s not very hard. Take a guy making $200k and 30% benefit overhead and replace with two offshore people at $50k total comp.
- lukevp 8mo ago25k TC for an engineer? From where?
- notepad0x90 8mo agoThey don't have to keep giving people raises, why wait until the guy is 50, why not when he is 30 and making $100k? It's not like they have people doing manual labor, it's office jobs. People's faculties don't decline until their late 60's at the earliest. Why don't other multinationals do this and get sued also, what makes IBM special?
- ChrisArchitect 8mo ago[dupe] Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46995146 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46995146
- dang 8mo agoThanks - we-ve merged that thread hither.
- Nextgrid 8mo agoBold move. Not because it's wrong, but because it risks initiating the collapse of the AI bubble and the whole "AI is gonna replace all skilled work, any day now, just give us another billion". Seems like IBM can no longer wait for that day.
- int0x29 8mo agoIs IBM invested big in LLMs? I don't get the impression they have much to lose there.
- cootsnuck 8mo agoThey said they're going to invest like $150B over five years. Which is quite a bit smaller than other big tech firms. They have their Granite family of models, but they're small language models so surely significantly less resources are going into them.
- brianwawok 8mo agoI mean it’s IBM. On average, 70% of their decisions are bad ones. Not sure I’d pay a single bit of attention to what they do.
- Nextgrid 8mo agoTo a non-technical individual IBM is still seen as a reputable brand (their consulting business would've been bankrupt long ago otherwise) and they will absolutely pay attention.
- bayindirh 8mo agoYeah, they are only 114 years old. How they can have the knowledge to stay afloat in trying times like this?
- small_model 8mo agoAgree, They could have owned the home computer market, but were out-manvoured by a couple of young programmers. They are hardly the company you want to look to for guidance on the future.
- newzino 8mo ago[flagged]
- alienbaby 8mo ago"software engineers will spend less time on routine coding—and more on interacting with customers" Ahh, what could possibly go wrong!
- optimalsolver 8mo agoI’m a people person. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNuu9CpdjIo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNuu9CpdjIo
- Nextgrid 8mo agoWhy is that bad? You write better code when you actually understand the business domain and the requirement. It's much easier to understand it when you get it direct from the source than filtered down through dozens of product managers and JIRA tickets.
- secondcoming 8mo agoProgrammers have an unfortunate tendancy to be too honest!
- Insanity 8mo agoNot sure why this is being downvoted. It’s spot on imo. Engineers who don’t want to understand the domain and the customers won’t be as effective in an engineering organization as those who do. It always baffles me when someone wants to only think about the code as if it exists in a vacuum. (Although for junior engineers it’s a bit more acceptable than for senior engineers).
- johnnyanmac 8mo agoWe're assuming we all somehow have perfect customers with technical knowledge who know exactly what they want and can express it as such, while gracefully accepting pushback over constraints brought up. Anyone who's worked in a "bikeshed sensitive" stack of programming knows how quickly things railroad off when such customers get direct access to an engineer. Think being a fullstack dev but you constantly get requests over button colors while you're trying to get the database setup.
- xhkkffbf 8mo agoPerhaps I'm being cynical, but could they be leaving out some detail? Perhaps they're replacing even more older workers with entry level workers than before? Maybe the AI makes the entry level workers just as good-- and much cheaper.
- altcunn 8mo ago[dead]
- wayeq 8mo ago> The "AI will replace all junior devs" narrative never accounted for the fact that you still need humans who understand the business domain, can ask the right questions, and can catch when the AI is confidently wrong. You work with junior devs that have those abilities? Because I certainly don't.
- mattdeboard 8mo agoNot many, but junior devs grow into senior devs who do, which is the point. If there are no junior devs there is no one growing into those skill sets.
- layer8 8mo agoThe title is a bit misleading. Reading the article, the argument seems to be that entry-level applicants (are expected to) have the highest AI literacy, so they want them to drive AI adoption.
- gerdesj 8mo agoI hope they have a good 10 years experience in that "literacy".
- MikeNotThePope 8mo agoI just run sub agents in parallel. Yesterday I used Codex for the first time yesterday. I spun up 350,640 agents and got 10 years of experience in 15 minutes.
- cruffle_duffle 8mo agoNew metric: agent-hours spent on a task. Or so we measure in tokens. Clearly more tokens burned == more experience right?
- AlexCoventry 8mo agoThere are actually books which recommend that organizations track employee tokens burned as a proxy for AI adoption. Surprised me a bit.
- reactordev 8mo agoit's the only KPI available.
- ponector 8mo agoYou should also mention how many millions lines of code you* created.
- gunsle 8mo ago
- sqircles 8mo agoIBM has cut ~8,000 jobs in the past year or so. Sounds like business as usual to me, with a little sensationalization.
- nomilk 8mo agoThe title could be dead wrong; the tripling of junior jobs might not be due to the limits of AI, but because of AI increasing the productivity of juniors to that of a mid or senior (or at least 2-3x-ing the output of juniors), thus making hiring juniors an appealing prospect to increase the company's output relative to competitors who aren't hiring in response to AI tech improvements. Hope this is the case and hope it happens across broadly across the economy. While the gutter press fear mongers of job losses, if AI makes the average employee much more useful (even if its via newly created roles), it's conceivable there's a jobs/salaries boom, including among those who 'lose their job' and move into a new one!
- small_model 8mo agoThey hire juniors, give them Claude Code and some specs and save a mid/senior devs salary. I believe coding is over for SWE's by end of 2027, but will take time to diffuse though the economy hence still need some cheap labour for a few years, given the H1-B ban this is one way without offshoring.
- jimbob45 8mo agoIf you had a truly thorough QA department, you might get away with that. Sadly, trashing QA is everyone’s second favorite new fad.
- geraneum 8mo agoI want the big_model take.
- selimthegrim 8mo agoThese are just the draft tokens.
- aussieguy1234 8mo agoI realized the AI replacing developers hype was all hype after watching this. Why Replacing Developers with AI is Going Horribly Wrong https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WfjGZCuxl-U&pp=ygUvV2h5IHJlcGxhY2luZyBkZXZlbG9wZXJzIHdpdGggYWkgaXMgZ29pbmcgd3JvbmfSBwkJhwoBhyohjO8%3D https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WfjGZCuxl-U&pp=ygUvV2h5IHJlcGx... A bunch of big companies took big bets on this hype and got burned badly.
- vb-8448 8mo agoIt must be refactored: IBM is hopping that juniors(less paid) with AI can be sold as seniors.
- MattDamonSpace 8mo agoStill a wildly different thesis than the “juniors are fucked, ladder’s been raised”
- vb-8448 8mo agojust to be clear: from my standpoint it's the worst period ever being a junior in tech, you are not "fucked" if you are junior, but hard times are ahead of you.
- fragmede 8mo agoOTOH, as a junior, you haven't learned all the wrong lessons that don't apply anymore, and you have fewer responsibilities than the seniors.
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 8mo agoThat still doesn’t sound employable
- ohyoutravel 8mo agoLike what
- xp84 8mo agoSome things take very little time and effort to manifest into the world today that used to take a great deal. So one of the big changes is around whether some things are worth doing at all. Note: I'm not taking any particular side of the "Juniors are F**d" vs "no they're not" argument.
- culi 8mo ago
- egedev 8mo ago[dead]
- tl2do 8mo ago[flagged]
- ahmeni 8mo agoHuh, weird, another "technological marvel" whose primary effect just seems to be devaluing labour.
- surajrmal 8mo agoTechnologies entire job is to make it less work to accomplish something and therefore easier and cheaper. In some cases that will make it possible to do things you couldn't do before but in many cases it'll just end up causing the value of said labor to fall. The problem isn't change, but the rate of change and the fact it's affecting our own field rather than someone else's.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- kittbuilds 8mo ago[dead]
- heliumtera 8mo agoNooooo how dare you!!! AGI is coming and engineers are obsolete! Think about the economy and the AI children
- slopinthebag 8mo agoYou know when someone is singing the praises about AI and they get asked "if you're so much more productive with AI, what have you built with it"? Well I think a bunch of companies are asking this same question to their employees and realising that the productivity gains they are betting on were overhyped. LLM's can be a very useful tool and will probably lead to measurable productivity increases in the future, at their current state they are not capable of replacing most knowledge workers. Remember, even computers as a whole didn't measurably impact the economy for years after their adoption. The real world is a messy place and hard to predict!
- throwaway613746 8mo ago> "if you're so much more productive with AI, what have you built with it" If my boss asked me a question like this my reply would be "exactly what you told me to build, check jira". If you want to know if I'm more productive - look at the metrics. Isn't that what you pay Atlassian for? Maybe you could ask their AI...
- bluGill 8mo agoAs a senior engineer sometimes the system shows I did nothing because I was helping others. sometimes I get the really hard problem -'the isn't speller teh' type bugs are more common than thread race conditions - but a lot faster to solve.
- throwaway613746 8mo ago[dead]
- echelon 8mo agoNo. They're firing high paid seniors and replacing them with low pay juniors. This is IBM we're talking about. The "limits of AI" bit is just smokescreen. Firing seniors: > Just a week after his comments, however, IBM announced it would cut thousands of workers by the end of the year as it shifts focus to high-growth software and AI areas. A company spokesperson told Fortune at the time that the round of layoffs would impact a relatively low single-digit percentage of the company’s global workforce, and when combined with new hiring, would leave IBM’s U.S. headcount roughly flat. New workers will use AI: > While she admitted that many of the responsibilities that previously defined entry-level jobs can now be automated, IBM has since rewritten its roles across sectors to account for AI fluency. For example, software engineers will spend less time on routine coding—and more on interacting with customers, and HR staffers will work more on intervening with chatbots, rather than having to answer every question.
- fud101 8mo agoI always though the usual 'they only hire seniors now' was a questionable take. If anything, all you need is a semi warm blooded human to hit retry until the agents get something functional. It's more likely tech will transform into an industry of lowly paid juniors imho, if it hasn't already started. Senior level skill is more replacable, not just because it's cheaper to hire juniors augmented with mostly AI but because they are more adaptable to the new dystopia since they never experienced anything else. They are less likely to get hung up on some code not being 'best practice' or 'efficient' or even 'correct'. They will just want to get the app working regardless of what goes in the sausage, etc.
- boondongle 8mo agoNo - it's that they fired their vets in high cost areas and kept them in low cost areas. A large number of vets can now choose to reapply for their old job (or similar job) at a fraction of the price with their pension/benefits reduced and the vets in low cost centers now become the SMEs. In many places in the company they were not taken seriously due to both internal politics, but also quite a bit of performative "output" that either didn't do anything or had to be redone. Nothing to do with AI - everything to do with Arvind Krishna. One of the reasons the market loves him, but the tech community doesn't necessarily take IBM seriously.
- iamleppert 8mo agoAn AI model has no drive or desire, or embodiment for that matter. Simply put, they don't exist in the real world and don't have the requirements or urgency to do anything unless prompted by a human, because, you know, survival under capitalism. Until they have to survive and compete like the rest of us and face the same pressures, they are going to be forever be relegated as mere tools.
- victor9000 8mo agoYes, junior candidates lacking the knowledge and wisdom to redirect an LLM, that's who will unlock the mythical AI productivity.
- chasd00 8mo agoSome stats are trickling out in my company. Code heavy consulting projects show about 18% efficiency gains but I have problems with that number because no one has been able to tell me how it was calculated. Story points actual vs estimated is probably how it was done but that’s nonsensical because we all know how subjective estimates and even actuals are. It’s probably impossible to get a real number that doesn’t have significant “well I feel about x% more efficient…”
- fragmede 8mo agobetter than lines of code at least!
- culi 8mo agoMore interesting imo would be a measure of maintainability. I've heard that code that's largely written by AI is rarely remembered by the engineer that submitted even a week after merging You're almost "locked in" to using more AI on top of it then. It may also make it harder to give estimates to non-technical staff on how long it'd take to make a change or implement a new feature
- chasd00 8mo agoI don’t know how to measure maintainability but the AI generated code I’ve seen in my projects is pretty plain vanilla standard patterns with comments. So less of a headache than a LOT of human code I’ve seen. Also, one thing the agents are good at, at least in my experience so far, is documenting existing code. This goes a long ways in maintenance, it’s not always perfect but as the saying goes documentation is like sex, when it’s good it’s great when it’s bad it’s better than nothing.
- brigandish 8mo agoSomething I occasionally do is ask it to extensively comment a section of code for me, and to tell me what it thinks the intent of the code was, which takes a lot of cognitive load off of me. It means I'm in the loop without shutting off my brain, as I do have to read the code and understand it, so I find it a sweet spot of LLM use.
- lijok 8mo agoWhen you read the comments here just remember there are people using ChatGPT to write code.
- cluckindan 8mo agoAnd those people probably aren’t developers by trade, just power users who superficially understand the moving parts but who cannot write code themselves.
- halamadrid 8mo agoI pay $20 for OpenAI and codex makes me incredibly productive. With very careful prompts aimed at tiny tasks, I can review, fix and get a lot of things done. I’ll happily pay up to $2k/month for it if I was left with no choice, but I don’t think it will ever get that expensive since you can run models locally and it could have the same result. That being said, my outputs are similarish in the big picture. When I get something done, I typically don’t have the energy to keep going to get it to 2x or 3x because the cognitive load is about the same. However I get a lot of time freed up which is amazing because I’m able to play golf 3-4 times a week which would have been impossible without AI. Productive? Yes. Time saved? Yes. Overall outputs? Similar.
- velcrovan 8mo agoI would like to know what models people are running locally that get the same results as a $20/month ChatGPT plan
- joquarky 8mo agoAnd what hardware they needed to run the model, because that's the real pinch in local inference.
- colonCapitalDee 8mo agoThere are no models that you can run locally that'll match a frontier LLM
- saratogacx 8mo agoThe run at home was in the context of $2k/mo. At that price you can get your money back on self-hosted hardware at a much more reasonable pace compared to 20/mo (or even 200).
- ineedasername 8mo agoSame? Not quite as good as that. But google’s Gemma 3 27B is highly similar to their last Flash model. The latest Qwen3 variants are very good, to my need at least they are the best open coders, but really— here’s the thing: There’s so many varieties, specialized to different tasks or simply different in performance. Maybe we’ll get to a one-size fits all at some point, but for now trying out a few can pay off. It also starts to build a better sense of the ecosystem as a whole. For running them: if you have an Nvidia GPU w/ 8GB of vram you’re probably able to run a bunch— quantized. It gets a bit esoteric when you start getting into quantization varieties but generally speaking you should find out the sort of integer & float math your gpu has optimized support for and then choose the largest quantized model that corresponds to support and still fits in vram. Most often that’s what will perform the best in both speed and quality, unless you need to run more than 1 model at a time. To give you a reference point on model choice, performance, gpu, etc: one of my systems runs with an nvidia 4080 w/ 16GB VRAM. Using Qwen 3 Coder 30B, heavily quantized, I can get about 60 tokens per second.
- jghn 8mo agoBrings a new angle on the old joke: "Actually, Indians"
- ectospheno 8mo agoIBM has practiced ageism for decades with the same playbook. AI is just the latest excuse. Fire a wide enough swath so it isn’t all old employees and then only hire entry level positions. Often within the same year. Repeat.
- ulfw 8mo agoWhat does tripling actually mean in this context? E.g. If you cut hiring from say 1,000 a year to 10 and now are 'tripling' it to 30 then that's still a nothingburger.
- Jang-woo 8mo agoAI is not removing entry-level roles — it’s exposing where judgment boundaries actually exist.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- lexicalmathical 8mo agoWe are witnessing the Secularization of Code.
- sinuhe69 8mo agoThe article said they called for triple junior hire but cut 1000 jobs a month later, “so the number of jobs stay roughly the same”. Certainly they didn’t mean 1000 junior positions were cut. So what they really want to say is that they cut senior positions as a way of saving cost/make profit in the age of AI? Totally contrary to what other companies believe? Sounds quite insane to me!
- 1970-01-01 8mo agoIBM is one of those companies that measures success by complexity. Meaning if it's complicated, they make money with consultants. If it's simple, they bundle it with other complex solutions that require consulting.
- javafox 8mo agoI had the chance to try a IBM internal AI. It was a normal chat interface where one could select models up to Sonnet 4.5. I have not seen anything agentic. So there is that.