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AI is hitting entry-level jobs hardest, Stanford study finds
- joey9prints 2mo agoI built a digital internship for this very reason, to help the pre-entry level interns get work experience. Given ai has mostly replaced their admin work load. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48914589 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48914589
- LogTrim 2mo ago[dead]
- jdw64 2mo agoI wish there were studies on when this situation will normalize. Will the lost jobs ever come back? Or not?
- nemomarx 2mo agoWhat kind of study could predict the future like this? Every technological change is different each time, I think. For example - at first ATMs created more jobs in banking because employees could move to more complex services. But banks are back to downsizing after further advancements streamlined those services too, aiui.
- vineyardmike 2mo agoThose jobs aren’t coming back as-is, because AI isn’t going anywhere. Job markets change over time. I’ve just started transitioning my career closer to management, so I develop/manage roughly 50/50. At this point, if I had to manage a tight budget, I’d rather have an entry level salary as tokens for a senior engineer. We’ll need a way, as a society, to help new adults transitions from education to productive employee. But individual companies don’t have aligned incentives.
- bcjdjsndon 2mo ago> But individual companies don’t have aligned incentives. Be realistic. Would you start a business and risk it's viability giving away free training to the public? No, and neither would anyone else.
- dominotw 2mo agoare you incharge of making those decisions at work? maybe govt can tax ai companies and use that money to prearm juniors with tokens that only they can use.
- whatshisface 2mo agoMasters degrees are a way for people to spend longer in the education-costs-more-than-the-value-to-the-educator phase of their career.
- Marsymars 2mo ago> I’ve just started transitioning my career closer to management, so I develop/manage roughly 50/50. At this point, if I had to manage a tight budget, I’d rather have an entry level salary as tokens for a senior engineer. A high-potential junior you can at least justify as an investment in the future. The other people who are going to get squeezed are the later-career developers who are below-average in ability. (I'm not using "below average" here pejoratively - just noting that by definition, half of developers are below-average.) Outside of big tech, there are piles of organizations with devs who don't make big-tech salary and who are only marginally productive for what they're getting paid. If you're an organization that only has the budget to pay non-junior devs $80k... you can see the implications of having the option to spend your dev budget on seniors + tokens instead.
- whatshisface 2mo agoI'm not seeing the reason why typical engineers can't vibecode. Non-coders can vibecode. I have read hundreds of posts claiming that senior engineers can vibecode but not a single one saying that juniors cannot.
- augment_me 2mo agoYou have market theory saying that at some point, you will not have enough seniors because no juniors were trained. So seniors will become more and more expensive due to lack of supply. At some point, it will be cheaper to take the risk and train the junior entry person again, and things will stabilize out. The sad part is that there will be a generation of 10 years or so of lost juniors while seniors are abundant.
- FpUser 2mo ago>"At some point, it will be cheaper to take the risk and train the junior entry person again" I think they will have big problem finding people who will actually train those juniors by then.
- RivieraKid 2mo agoAt that point AI will be significantly more advanced than today.
- augment_me 2mo agoSure but we can't work on hypotheticals. Otherwise we can also say that information work is 90% automated, society has 50% unemployment of white-collar workers and capitalism is over because there is no purchasing power. There is enough incentives from people in power to keep status quo(bread and circuses) that if we are trying to answer the question using another framework than the current one we are just speculating
- seahawks78 2mo ago2022-30 will be known as the lost generation in tech. I think the situation will improve in 2030s and AI/coding will become hot again. Or may be perhaps as soon as Feds start to open their purse to print money again aka QE.
- bcjdjsndon 2mo agoDid horse and cart operators ever get their jobs back?
- boshalfoshal 2mo agoThis is unironically the best comparison. maybe they became taxi drivers. But that too will be gone soon. Can't beat capitalism + technological innovation.
- da_chicken 2mo agoI mean... yes. Blacksmiths, wheelwrights, and wainwrights transitioned to auto mechanic or carpentry work. Not all of them, but for most the skills were portable. Several of the carriage-making businesses transitioned to automobiles. Studebaker and Oakland (which became Pontiac), for example. I'm sure the most experienced people lost big, of course, and we shouldn't minimize the damage done to people's livlihoods. Unless you mean taxicab drivers, which was the term for them before the automobile. Taxicab = taximeter cabriolet, and a cabriolet is a style of horse-drawn carriage. It really was the horse people that lost out the most. That's why the idiomatic reference is for buggy whips, not so much for buggies themselves.
- AnimalMuppet 2mo agoYou're right. And yet, just last week I met a farrier - a guy who shoes horses. He's young, too. Went to a horseshoeing school in Cheyenne. I mentioned it to my daughter. She said, "Rich people are going to keep having horses." I'm pretty sure she's not wrong. But there's still a lot fewer farriers than there used to be...
- bcjdjsndon 2mo agoHorses as a pet obviously weren't affected by the internal combustion engine lol you can't swap out a two stroke for old long features
- bcjdjsndon 2mo ago> Blacksmiths, wheelwrights, and wainwrights transitioned to auto mechanic or carpentry work. Not the same as the horse and cart operator, for various reasons... Maybe the wheelwright? But even that seems like a specialism of carpentry > It really was the horse people that lost out the most. That's why the idiomatic reference is for buggy whips, not so much for buggies themselves. .... Had you forgotten what I'd wrote by the time you got to this point?
- drop_star 2mo agoAsk the people that worked on printing presses
- pianopatrick 2mo agoI would plan based on the lost jobs not coming back. I would also plan that the trend of AI getting better and taking more jobs will continue. Plan for the worst, hope for the best. A lot of people may have to transition to careers that people do not want to have AI do, like nursing. The earlier you start such a transition the easier it is because you still have resources to make moves.
- FpUser 2mo ago>"A lot of people may have to transition to careers that people do not want to have AI do, like nursing." Becoming bum or going off the grid would be way more attractive to me than working my ass of in stressful conditions for meager pay so some motherfuckers can buy yet another yacht
- pianopatrick 2mo agoSuit yourself, I won't get in your way.
- FpUser 2mo ago>"I won't get in your way." Smart choice
- commandlinefan 2mo agoAnd if they don't, what then? What does a post-job society look like? I'm skeptical of communism, but I'm skeptical because it doesn't work in a society where some people need to do something (like raise crops) but aren't incentivized to do so. But if there's actually nothing humans need to do? The question is, will we reach logical conclusions peacefully or violently?
- chessucation 2mo agoit seems that the shift is different in kind from previous ones (but then again, perhaps people thought that about previous labor disruptions as well) take ATMs. they automated the task but the rung above it remained human. someone to handle exceptions, sell the mortgage, etc. running a branch actually became cheaper. cheaper branches meant more branches, so teller headcount went up for two decades. what seems different now isn't that the models are better at tasks. it's that the rung above is being climbed at the same time. the coordination layer is getting absorbed concurrently rather than a generation later. that doesn't mean no new work appears but every historical instance seems to have some kind of "escape route" which i'm not sure exists this time around.
- jeremyw 2mo agoDirect link: https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/publication/canaries-in-the-coal-mine-six-facts-about-the-recent-employment-effects-of-artificial-intelligence/ https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/publication/canaries-in-...
- Zigurd 2mo agoThe article assumes that jobs that can be automated are vulnerable. But in the postmortem of the AI driven layoffs so far, it's more that expectations about AI and productivity are driving the job cuts. In other words shareholders and senior management are being shown the appearance of expectations about AI being met, whether or not it's working. Entry-level jobs are an obvious place to look things that can be cut to create an AI budget.
- jordanb 2mo agoYep if a hiring manager wants to open a req for a junior, before AI he'd get praise for being tight with budget and hiring someone cheap and trainable. Now he gets asked: if a junior can do the work why aren't you using AI? So instead of opening the req he says to the team "we need to figure out how to make AI do more."
- bcjdjsndon 2mo ago> Entry-level jobs are an obvious place to look things that can be cut to create an AI budget. Kitchen potwasher, day labourer, apprentice welder etc none of these entry level jobs are affected by an LLM. But nobody on HN works in those industries.... connection maybe?
- bluefirebrand 2mo agoI think "junior software engineer" is more like the entry level job that people on HN care about
- tfrancisl 2mo agoIt's not what the article or study are about. Theyre about entry level white collar jobs.
- bcjdjsndon 2mo agoIs it? I can't find a list of job titles but I saw it included manufacturing industries...
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- suriyaG 2mo agothis is a super non-popular take on HN. but the entry-level job market has always been tough. with AI, outside the big tech world, it is hard to justify hiring entry level engineers as the time to train them ( 1 year+ ) to be productive enough is such a drag on the seniors, when the agents deliver things more care and more edge cases.
- slipperybeluga 2mo ago[dead]
- cosmic_cheese 2mo agoFrom personal experience, back in the 2010s it was particularly harsh for those with a non-standard background. What few "opportunities" that existed were a handful of unpaid or grossly underpaid internships which were closed off to those who weren't students or recent graduates. Everybody wanted employees who were ready to start pumping out code with little or no training. That's not to diminish how much more difficult it's become since then but breaking into the industry has never been easy.
- y-curious 2mo agoI got my first dev job by moving laterally within a company from customer support. Helpdesk aka “Helldesk” was a common pipeline for people. I don’t think those jobs are easy to get either now.
- tayo42 2mo agoI feel like I never see anyone else say this. That was about when I got my career started and it was always difficult for me. And now it seems over despite all that work in the begining.
- ghaff 2mo agoThat sounds about right. There was a well-established funnel from schools directly into entry-level positions. Absent that funnel, it's not clear how getting those entry-level positions was ever especially straightforward outside of a very robust tech hiring environment over the past decade.
- d_burfoot 2mo agoPartly this is because the big companies are diverting vast amounts of money towards building data centers, instead of hiring new grads. I expect young people who learn AI skills will be fine, once the data center spending binge is over.
- dominotw 2mo agothey really dont need to divert. They are sitting on historical unfathomable amounts of money.
- slipperybeluga 2mo ago[dead]
- boshalfoshal 2mo agoWhat does "learning AI skills" even mean? You're typing into a prompt box. You are not applying any skill, the model is. At best, the skill you need is discernment about _what_ to type in this magical box. But if that gets cheaper and the output of your company doesn't necessarily scale horizontally that well. Why would I need as many people as before?
- vanuatu 2mo ago- knowing what to prompt - directing the model and knowing when its going off the rails - verification - setting up the right loops, harness, graphs around the models economics still apply to hiring people. if all your competitors are using ai and there's market share to fight over and people still are a productivity positive vs. only ai, hiring will increase as we've seen recently with swes
- bogzz 2mo agoAgain though, these recommendations are so vacuous. If you already are a capable developer, then you can pick all of that up within a week. "Learn AI skills" is such a low effort reflexive response that I'd expect it from a non-technical executive, not from an HN commenter.
- Alien1Being 2mo agoAI VENDOR HYPE
- ofjcihen 2mo agoSo we have a crunch of expiring/retiring workers on the senior end and a cutoff of the flow of new talent from the junior end. They’d better pray that we see automation gains above and beyond what we’ve seen so far or else we’ll be paying the price in a single generation.
- bluefirebrand 2mo agoMy really big worry is that the people making these choices just do not care about a single thing beyond this single generation Not a psychologist but my take on most of the wealthy people in the world is they are essentially narcissistic hedonists. They only care about growing wealth as a means to the end of maximizing the amount of fun they can have and to keep their egos happy that they have the most. They don't seem to care about the future at all
- ofjcihen 2mo agoYou’re probably not wrong. I’ve gone from being essentially destitute as a child to what people would call “well-off” and having the context of both experiences is…eye opening. I have moneyed acquaintances now that I never would have had before. For some of them the mere hint of their income being reduced in any way is enough to send them into spasms. These are people with enough money for their next 3 generations to live off of. Luxuriously. I just don’t get it.
- bluefirebrand 2mo agoI had a similar trajectory to you. Not destitute as a child but my family was lower class. Pretty well off now though I have a rough idea of how much it would cost me to retire immediately and maintain my life in a way I'm happy until I am 100 if I lived that long I see executives get bonus packages yearly that are more than that number would be for me. Their bonus nevermind their actual salaries. And yet they act like their lives are hard and their jobs are hard. I don't get it either
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- boshalfoshal 2mo agoTo the surprise of who, exactly? Sometimes it feels like HN has never used an AI model past ChatGPT in 2022. Modern AI is so capable nowadays that it _does_ obviate most of the work you'd normally give an entry level person. Im mostly speaking about software engineering, but the "juniors" I've seen be hired now are basically the equivalent of mid (maybe even low senior) levels of yesteryear. AI is most certainly raising the bar.
- fny 2mo agoThe implosion in junior quality exacerbates this. The cohort that started during COVID were first knee-capped by remote classes and exams, and then they lobotomized themselves with ChatGPT.
- bpavuk 2mo agoI consider myself a high-quality junior, rivaling my senior industry peers on flexibility, systems thinking, low-level engineering, and understanding of user experience. yet all I found this year was a place I got fired from 2 weeks after getting hired. the reason? I called Claude Code "a decent search engine" on a meeting. perhaps I would have been fired anyway because the heatwave was building in Ukraine and I had absolutely nothing but a basement (where I can't move my desktop to) to cool off.
- theredsix 2mo agoIf you're getting fired in 2 weeks, it's likely not because of a single comment.
- bpavuk 2mo agothis was literally the reason pointed out in chat. devs liked how I worked, had zero questions on review, and that's despite me seeing their tech stack second time in my entire life
- preg_match 2mo agoIf you’re ever gonna get fired for a single comment, it would be at 2 weeks. I have seen people get fired that early on for a single poor-taste comment to the wrong person. It’s wild, but at 2 weeks you’re completely expendable.
- harvey9 2mo agoSome percentage of engineering is actually people and politics. The more power (or alternative options) you have, the more you can speak your mind. But if you need the job then argue your case just to the boss, discreetly.
- 1970-01-01 2mo agoWhen do we declare this status-quo? It was expected for several years, and new data is just piling up with the same conclusions from the last study.
- jiaosdjf 2mo agoRobots will be the real status-quo changer. Information/office jobs have never really felt real to society, we are all living in a bubble of corporate daycare. Half the jobs being replaced are jobs that didn't exist a decade or two ago that the average person on the street doesn't even know exist. The rest of society unfortunately have to work "real" jobs where they have to turn up early to do things like stocking, cleaning, cooking, harvesting, assembling. When a robot can be a drop-in replacement hire for these roles it's apocalypse time. It is coming.
- 1970-01-01 2mo agoFull self driving is next. Gig delivery jobs such as Doordasher and Lyft have single digit years remaining.
- r_lee 2mo agosaw an article about former Lyft drivers now cleaning Waymos it really is something
- commandlinefan 2mo agoI remember when I was in 2nd grade or so (so, around 1982 or so), our teacher read us a passage from a book predicting the future: "and in the future, robots will do all the work so that people don't have to!" Even at 8 years old, I could see the problem with that: who decides who gets to live in the big house at the top of the hill and who has to live where I live?
- jiaosdjf 1mo ago> who decides who gets to live in the big house I don't see this _fundamentally_ changing when robots do all the work, it will simply be a case that the individual labour value that most of us relied on will become less valuable and you will instead need to own a business or be a landlord if you want more. Yes the percentage of people on welfare or UBI-only will increase, and those people will be vulnerable to the generosity of the state, who will certainly not be giving the big houses away. On the other hand, imagine the average life potential when robots do everything: - Even poorer neighbourhoods can be kept relatively clean and maintained - Building materials and methods no longer revolve around limited human builders - Manufacturing optimised for scale can now be optimised for personal requirements - Home grown food, healthier food thats still convenient, no commuting etc I believe humans should spend their lives with friends and family, improving their home and community, working on projects that fulfil them, raising their kids etc. This world we have built has become a corporate nightmare dystopia where we live to work.
- dver 2mo agoIt's brutal, my son with a CS degree hasn't been able to get to single live interview ina year. A couple of screens has been it. I've reached out to my network, and the reply is always we're not hiring any juniors.
- georgeburdell 2mo agoI don’t understand this logic. If I’m being honest, the most productive people with AI on my team are the two youngest. They don’t have product wisdom, yes, but the gap is so noticeable that I pushed my manager to forego the full-time work experience requirement that we have always had so that new hires don’t even know the old way of working and can just reframe the field in terms of AI. AI is the biggest threat in over a generation to seniors who aren’t investing in keeping up. Managers without an instinct for AI are an endangered species as well.
- asdfman123 2mo agoBut the AI transition is different than old technological changes in that you don't really have to learn anything. You don't have to memorize keywords and new concepts like you'd have to for, say, a new JavaScript framework. If you don't know something about AI, you can just ask it and it will tell you. Basically the only hard part for old people is getting USED to using AI. Some haven't, but it only takes a few weeks to do. After that, experience and taste really comes in handy and that can't be developed overnight.
- throw849494499 2mo ago[flagged]
- darth_avocado 2mo agoWhy not use your actual account instead of creating a throwaway one if you feel so comfortable saying this?
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2mo ago
- heathrow83829 2mo agoi remember seeing the stats presented on moonshots podcast about 3 months ago. they said every quarter, the percentage of CS fresh grads decreased their placement roughly 10% or so and it was down to about 19% at last count and entry level salaries down from 96K to 61k, if i recall.
- ghaff 2mo agoSo revert to more of a mean for white collar work in other words.
- AnimalMuppet 2mo agoThat's going to put placement at 0% in two more quarters.
- brid 2mo agoNo, not AI. AI isn't hitting entry level jobs hardest. People and Businesses are by having "AI substituting for labor". If we do not pursue the common good of humanity with AI, we will destroy humanity with AI.
- cynicalsecurity 2mo agoSoft people learn that the world is harsh and you either adapt or die.
- asdfman123 2mo ago*Bane voice*
- greenowl 2mo agoThe plus side of all this is that entry level software development jobs are typically pursued by recent college graduates. They are young. While it sucks to have blown a lot of money and accept they've been duped to get a degree in something that is now "worth" a small fraction of what it once was, time is on their side. There is plenty of time to go back to school, or apprentice, or learn a trade or go to trade school in something else with better long term career prospects. On the opposite side of this, senior level devs should (hopefully) be on target financially and theoretically should be fine, especially if they make adjustments now (lower COL, layoff preparation, prepare for accelerated retirement timeline). The folks who are really going to suffer are those early to mid level developers. Not as much of a network, not enough traditional expertise, not enough savings, not as much time to invest and pull the trigger on a career change.
- armcat 2mo agoIt's interesting because a study here in Sweden [1] produces identical results. To quote from the study: "An event study documents an accelerating decline in employment of 22–25-year-olds in high-AI-exposure occupations, reaching 5.5 per cent by early 2025 relative to less exposed occupations within the same employers" [1] Same Storm, Different Boats: Generative AI and the Age Gradient in Hiring, Lodefalk et al, https://www.oru.se/globalassets/oru-sv/institutioner/hh/workingpapers/workingpapers2026/wp-2-2026.pdf https://www.oru.se/globalassets/oru-sv/institutioner/hh/work...
- deadbabe 2mo agoIt’s not just juniors in CS. If you lose your job, you’re not getting another one. You better not quit your job without having a new one lined up. Many have had to retire early.
- throwayay4929 2mo ago1. The papers author's never claim causality. 2. There are other large macro forces at play, like firm consolidation, proliferation of NDAs, interest rates*, lack of growth (without Nvidia, the US economy would basically be in a recession?) and probably many more that are putting the job market into a low hire/low fire state. Consider how we're actually not seeing much layoffs (some, but not much). So what were seeing in tech specifically is more like hiring freeze, so people with experience or in jobs aren't feeling much of the pressure, but new grads are hitting a wall. Im posting this to resist the "ai is taking away people's jobs" narrative. It's definitely a factor but it's probably one of many and it's sloppy thinking to point fingers at ai and not other probably bigger factors. * To their credit, the papers author's try to factor for zirp.
- lotsofpulp 2mo ago> 1. The papers author's never claim causality. 2. There are other large macro forces at play, like firm consolidation, proliferation of NDAs, interest rates*, lack of growth (without Nvidia, the US economy would basically be in a recession?) and probably many more that are putting the job market into a low hire/low fire state. And the backdrop of an aging population that needs asset prices to keep rising to meet benefit and retirement obligations, so stagflation it is.
- nguwi 2mo ago[flagged]
- jambalaya8 2mo agoMost of these jobs were already essentially taken away by outsourcing. It is so disturbing that countries like Australia only offer work visas for jobs that are difficult to fill, and only in certain locations as needed, but America actually encourages the ouster of skilled local talent for immigrants.
- kcexn 2mo agoAustralia's bar for skilled employment is pretty low and deflates wages as well. That's before we get into the prevalence of exploiting working holiday visas for practically slave wages.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- remotedreamer 2mo agoSadly, this is just the beginning.. As AI models improve in performance and cost, each technical job level will be replaced until it's just C-suites managing a bunch of ai agents.
- danans 2mo agoAnother impact that doesn't get discussed as much when the primary discussion is around job elimination is the downward pressure on software engineering salaries. Of course it's a different scenario if you are working at a frontier AI company, but outside of that, software engineers are becoming cheaper (relative to inflation) while they simultaneously get more productive due to LLMS.
- cheesecakegood 2mo agoI feel like we need to take a page from the past. Apprenticeships with lock-in. Sponsorships. And so on. Imagine if even one billionaire dedicated themselves to be a modern “patron of the arts” on a more down-to-earth level. Imagine if people started to run “adopt-a-student” type frameworks for individuals. If fresh grads found it easy to get “grants” for things. And so on. The first job is often a bit “take a chance on me” in its paradigm, but companies these days don’t want bets, they want sure things. Unfortunately this is to some extent unrealistic, but also it’s true that cutting out entry level roles entirely does cut down on uncertainty. It cuts down on upside too, but that’s more invisible.
- gen220 2mo agoIt's challenging to disentangle the effects from AI from the cyclical supply and demand cycle of junior engineers in a post-ZIRP world. People who are currently junior engineers (i.e. graduating class of 2024+) chose their majors in a ZIRP economy (2021 and earlier) that could not hire enough engineers fast enough, but graduated into an economy that was post-ZIRP and is still actively trimming software engineers from the work force (2024 and beyond). LLMs only became a factor in hiring in the summer of 2025. But by then there was already a massive oversupply (relative to demand) of fresh CS graduates. My personal opinion is that the market is not (yet) rough because of AI, it's actually mostly just rough because we're not in ZIRP anymore. AI is maybe making it worse on the margin, and is a convenient excuse, insofar as AI is both easier to scapegoat and reason about. [1]: Software dev job postings on indeed in the US. Peaked in 2021, before falling off a cliff. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE [2]: % of CS grads relative to all college enrollments; which peaked in class of 2026 (enrollment as of '22). https://www.reveliolabs.com/news/social/computer-science-has-hit-its-high-water-mark https://www.reveliolabs.com/news/social/computer-science-has...
- ChiperSoft 2mo agoFor those who don't know the acronym: ZIRP = Zero Interest Rate Policy And yes, when I saw the headline my first thought was "it's not AI, nobody is expanding their staff". When interest rates are high, companies and investors don't take out loans, which means no capital for new projects.
- citrin_ru 2mo ago> When interest rates are high, companies and investors don't take out loans And yet companies borrowing for AI capex like never before - total amount of debt is staggering. And it’s not only likes of OpenAI/Anthropic, companies which had positive cash flow for many years started to borrow too.
- insane_dreamer 2mo agoI'm advising my kids not to major in CS.
- unified101 2mo agoWe need to give juniors a way in, and in the AI world honestly the only way i can think of is to maek CS a minimum wage job at the 0 yoe level. Let it ramp to full pay in 6 years. This way students will make the choice for the longer term, and opportunies will be easy to find for them.