- Big Tech: New grads now account for just 7% of hires, with new hires down 25% from 2023 and over 50% from pre-pandemic levels in 2019.
- Startups: New grads make up under 6% of hires, with new hires down 11% from 2023 and over 30% from pre-pandemic levels in 2019.
Complaints of labour shortages in 5…4…
Can’t eventually have senior engineers without giving junior engineers a chance, so good luck with that. I’ve got nearly 2 decades under my belt and I’m ready to leave.
This is definitely a problem in sectors that are boom/bust. You have senior engineers ready to retire and nobody is ready to move up into their positions because there just aren’t any intermediate level engineers in the industry.
Tech execs when the shortage hits: I just had a brilliant idea! Let’s just give untrained junior vibe-coding engineers the power of senior engineers, and even more AI tools. Problem solved forever, bonus please!
There’s inevitably going to be some rebounding from this. It’s probably true that the large language models these companies are betting their businesses on can do some of the things entry-level grads do, but we’ve already seen several of them fail because their MBAs didn’t realize that just barfing out code is only one part of what developers do.
Source: Am developer, currently working with LLMs and related tech, none of which would be able to get anywhere without someone like me doing the work.
The even bigger issue is probably the lack of senior devs in 10 years because they never got hired in the first place.
Great news! All the high skilled service economy jobs will be outsourced to the developing world for slave wages and we will be incinerated to power AI art.
What kind of low risk tasks is a startup doing? I predict a lot of companies that are never going to generate value.
Bullshit, I don’t believe it
He said:
Bullshit, I don't believe itWhat he meant to say:
Please, don't be true.I believe that hiring is down but I have yet to see any evidence that it’s due to AI adoption. This is a narrative pushed by the media because they REALLY REALLY want it to be true. I consider interest rates to be a more likely culprit. The source you posted is an AI VC fund, they squeal with glee at the idea of people becoming economically displaced
Yeah, tech firms that are trying to hype their AI products as the next big thing are trying to spin the narrative that they are suffering economically. As someone who was a junior sw dev in the past, I can tell you that AI written code is 100% not good enough to do that job. It might be utilized to do that work faster - but then any sensible business wouldn’t lay off their juniors, but instead would simply have them produce more output in order to sell more product and make more money.
Who would have predicted it would come for its own first.
