A new sign that AI is competing with college grads?

https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/04/job-market-youth/682641/

by Bluestein • 1 year ago

74 87 1 year ago

dboreham• 1 year ago

It's tempting to connect "AI is kind of like having an always-awake intern" with "nobody is hiring interns" but I'm skeptical. I think this is more about the decline of the corporate enterprise model in general. Exponential growth can't continue forever. Management is trying to force the curve to be exponential by no longer hiring anyone who isn't clearly going to improve profits in the short term.

mmooss4• 1 year ago

the decline of the corporate enterprise model in general. Exponential growth can't continue forever.

People have been saying things like that probably since the creating of the corporate model. (Exponential is too much, but I'll take that as exaggeration to make the point.)

Nevermark• 1 year ago

Corporate models seek to grow exponentially, with hit and miss results. Not sure where there are any signs of that stopping.

More widely:

Businesses, economies, and natural ecosystems, are all full of both exponential drivers and limitations. Since the first life form.

It isn’t a model that is going away. Or that can go away. Unless there are no new opportunities for new things, which seems unlikely anytime soon, there will always be new pockets of exponential growth.

bawolff2• 1 year ago

I feel like the more obvious explanation is that we live in a time of economic uncertainty (cough tarrifs) so companies are cutting back hiring until things become more certain.

drivebyhooting• 1 year ago

Was happening last year too for SWE.

deepsun2• 1 year ago

Job market got issues way before tariffs, somewhere in the pandemic times.

I believe it's WFH. It taught companies remote work, and it's a small next step to offshore work.

lolinder2• 1 year ago

The job market crash didn't correlate at all with WFH, it correlated with the end of WFH and (more importantly) exactly lined up with the end of ZIRP.

Money was free, so a lot of people were paid out of thin air. When money stopped being free salaries actually had to come from somewhere, and there weren't enough somewheres to go around.

surgical_fire• 1 year ago

Offshore is nothing new. Has been tried with multiple degrees of failure for decades.

Hell, my first job decades ago was as cheap labor in an IT project offshored from the US.

Bluestein• 1 year ago

Maybe - also to all the below comments - it's "overdetermined", ie., an "all of the above" situation, with AI some part of that mix.-

mmooss4• 1 year ago

That would seem to at least have a major impact that needs to be accounted for. A couple more I'd add:

First, the Trump administration's economic impact is much more than tariffs - which are highly significant - but unprecedented interference in the free market and private business; destruction of the regulatory and other institutions that a stable economy depends on (e.g., democracy, the courts, the rule of law, bank regulation); disrupting the stability of international relations, possibly leading to highly destructive things like wars.

Also, the recent trend of business to switch from (broadly speaking) innovation and productivity to rent-seeking, epitomized by private equity: cut workforces, other investment, and product to the bone and squeeze as much as possible out of the asset - leaving a dead, dry carcass.

bawolff2• 1 year ago

The biggest thing with trump is nobody knows what he is going to do next. Businesses more than anything need to be able to make long term plans. Stability is important and that is out the window.

Ekaros• 1 year ago

At least in Europe I feel there has been general slowdown for a while and this was before tariffs. If there is uncertainty and maybe even drop in revenue companies really start considering if hiring makes sense in the moment unless it is absolutely mandatory.

franktankbank• 1 year ago

It's the economy and outsourcing. Why is everyone hell bent to say AI is killing jobs? I think its a because its a great scapegoat to blame a machine rather than foreigners and shithead management. Its crazy too because not only are you out a job you wind up getting shittier products and services at unreasonable prices, a double whammy!

rco87863• 1 year ago

Do you have some data to show that outsourcing is the culprit? It seems just as easy to blame "foreigners" as it is to blame "AI", especially considering your blanket followup statement about those foreigners always making "shittier" products.

horns4lyfe• 1 year ago

It’s obvious, you just have to look around. Please don’t tell us not to believe our eyes because we don’t have a double blind study.

happytoexplain5• 1 year ago

You can ask for data without trying to make people sound like assholes for having an opinion based on observation, which would be an unrealistic blanket restriction for humans talking to each other.

rglover• 1 year ago

Here's some backup to that claim [1], though, offshoring is only part of it.

In reality, it's likely several factors:

- Offshoring/outsourcing

- Businesses running out of ZIRP cash/returns

- Software replacing a lot of "paper" jobs (AI being a sliver of this)

- Older people needing and not vacating jobs like past generations

- Higher CoL expenses meaning lower-paying jobs that would/could be occupied by a recent graduate aren't.

- General market sentiment being cautious/conservative due to the whiplash of the last 17 years.

As with most things, it's not one convenient scapegoat, it's many problems compounding into one big clusterf*ck.

[1] https://archive.ph/8Zda3

wing-_-nuts• 1 year ago

I don't have data, but I can tell you that covid taught my company how to 'work remotely' and having learned that lesson, they seem to have pivoted away from a 30 / 70 mix of direct hires and onshore h1-b contractors, and have heavily utilized 'near shore' folks in LATAM.

I would not be surprised at all if other companies have quietly done the same while touting 'the future of AI', because as a society we seem to grudgingly accept automation far more readily than we accept offshoring.

mmooss4• 1 year ago

Why is everyone hell bent to say AI is killing jobs? I think its a because its a great scapegoat to blame a machine rather than foreigners and shithead management.

Why is everyone hell bent on blaming foreigners, rather than the management that actually makes these decisions, and domestic elected officials who actually are responsible for and make decisions that affect the economy.

happytoexplain5• 1 year ago

The parent blames management.

spacemadness3• 1 year ago

It’s interesting, and completely in character, that for all the noise the GOP makes about America being for Americans(tm), they don’t care at all about American companies firing their American employees to exploit cheaper labor from outside the country.

roarcher• 1 year ago

Don't they? As ill advised as these tariff wars may be, their stated purpose is to bring jobs back to the United States. Lately all the complaints of the form "Product X will cost $Y if made in the USA" have been coming from the other side of the aisle.

citrin_ru• 1 year ago

Isn’t a new wave of outsourcing is a result of high interest rates?

sleepyguy• 1 year ago

http://archive.today/AUizz

lolinder2• 1 year ago

Every one of these posts wants to blame AI because that's the vogue explanation, but every time we see a shift like this there are better explanations.

The wave of tech layoffs a few years ago were blamed on AI but were so obviously attributable to interest rates and changing tax policies that the idea that the proto-AI tools we had at the time were responsible was laughable.

This shift we at least have better AI tools to blame (though I'd argue they're still not good enough), but we also have a US President who has straight up said that he wants to cause a global recession and has been doing everything in his power to make that happen.

Given that the impact of someone running a bulldozer through the economy like this is well-studied and that we'd predict exactly what were seeing here, attributing the damage to AI is silly verging on responsible. Place the blame where it belongs!

area51org• 1 year ago

"Journalism" is now often just a euphemism for shock porn and clickbait.

At the end of this Atlantic article, the author admits:

Luckily for humans, though, skepticism of the strong interpretation is warranted. For one thing, supercharged productivity growth, which an intelligence explosion would likely produce, is hard to find in the data. For another, a New York Fed survey of firms released last year found that AI was having a negligible effect on hiring.

In other words: did we scare ya? Good, because it got you to read this far. Nothing to actually see here.

mistrial9• 1 year ago

AI are lying machines, and also enable the lying that is convenient to executive management?

mark_l_watson• 1 year ago

Sure we have seen fantastic gains in AI capability, but until we have more AI tech diffusion into products, industrial processes, etc., AI’s effect on the economy may be much smaller that what people anticipate.

incomingpain• 1 year ago

There has been a longterm negative trend for recent grad employment.

Even those who do get employed, they tend to be underemployed with low wages.

The old excuse was 'automation' was killing jobs.

The lesser old excuse was offshoring.

Now it's AI?

How about we stop inventing excuses and perhaps look at root cause of the 'recent grad' factor. That perhaps requiring university degrees that arent worth anything for jobs that dont need them is the problem?

bilbo0s• 1 year ago

perhaps requiring university degrees that arent worth anything for jobs that dont need them is the problem?

I don't know?

Kind of sounds like the problem is more fundamental than that. It sounds like the job is not actually there in the first place. Doesn't matter how qualified you are if there's no money to pay you.

kelsey978126• 1 year ago

I would rather have somebody with life experience than somebody with an education right now. It's just like how we complain that the AI leaderboards are not representative of real AI skill, it's the exact same for academic benchmarks of whatever institution minted you a diploma. I don't need an overfitted worker just like i don't need an overfitted AI agent.

mmaunder• 1 year ago

AI isn't replacing many jobs yet. But it is causing customers to hold off on certain purchases, like dev services, due to uncertainty. And the shills are amplifying the effect. I'm seeing layoffs caused by this.

causal• 1 year ago

Yeah I can only think of 3 ways AI is causing unemployment-

1) Hype, as you said, leading to delayed hiring.

2) Offshore workers using AI becoming more competitive.

3) Reallocation of capital to AI projects, which skews demand towards data scientists at the expense of, say, front-end devs (who ironically might have provided better return).

None of these are actually reducing the amount of human workers needed, but the social and economic impact is real.

ohgr• 1 year ago

AI is only killing jobs because people are killing jobs and blaming it on AI.

gitroom• 1 year ago

Been chewing on versions of this debate for years - blame keeps shifting but not much really changes. Honestly, everyone points fingers but the fixes always seem out of reach. Kinda sucks, but that's how it goes.

dtnewman• 1 year ago

The article is talking about new grads generally, but I think there's an issue with AI that isn't talked about enough. It's not that it's taking away jobs [1], it's that it is taking away skills.

Even if you are the biggest critic of AI, it's hard to deny that the frontier models are quite good at the sort of stuff that you learn in school. Write a binary tree in C? Check. Implement radix sort in Python? check. An A* implementation? check.

Once upon a time, I had to struggle through these. My code wouldn't run properly because I forgot to release a variable from memory or I was off-by-one on a recursive algorithm. But the struggling is what ultimately helped me actually learn the material [2]. If I could just type out "build a hash table in C" and then shuffle a few things around to make it look like my own, I'd have never really understood the underlying work.

At the same time, LLMs are often useful, but still fail quite frequently in real world work. I'm not trusting cursor to do a database migration in production unless I myself understand and check each line of code that it writes.

Now, as a hiring manager, what am I supposed to do with new grads?

[1] which I think it might be to some extent in some companies, by making existing engineers more productive, but that's a different point

[2] to the inevitable responses that say "well I actually learn things better now because the LLM explains it to me", that's great, but what's relevant here is that a large chunk of people learn by struggling

bumby9• 1 year ago

I'm seeing something similar. LLMs have helped me tremendously, especially in tasks like translating from one language to another.

But I've also witnessed interns using them as a crutch. They can churn out code faster that I did at an equivalent stage in my career but they really struggle debugging. Often, it seems like they just throw up their hands and pivot to something else (language, task, model) instead of troubleshooting. It almost seems like they are being conditioned to think implementation should always be easy. I often wonder if this is just "old curmudgeons" attitude or if it belies something more systemic about the craft.

hcarvalhoalves• 1 year ago

Even if you are the biggest critic of AI, it's hard to deny that the frontier models are quite good at the sort of stuff that you learn in school. Write a binary tree in C? Check. Implement radix sort in Python? check. An A* implementation? check.

I don't feel this is a strong argument, since these are the sort of things that one could easily lookup on stackoverflow, github, and so on for a while now. What "AI" did was being a more convenient code search tool + text manipulation abilities.

But you still need to know the fundamentals, otherwise won't even know what to ask. I recently used GPT to get a quick code sample for a linear programming solution, and it saved me time looking up the API for scipy... but I knew what to ask for in the first place. I doubt GPT would suggest that as a solution if I described the problem in too high level.

bb88• 1 year ago

Don't forget there were lots of things that are in standard libraries now that didn't use to exist back when I was coding in C in the 1990's. Nobody really writes their own sorting algorithm anymore -- and nobody should write their own A* algorithm either.

Honestly though, I recently asked Claude 3.7 Sonnet to write a python script to upload ssh keys to a mikrotik router, to prompt for the username and password -- etc. And it did it. I wouldn't say I loved the code -- but it worked. Code was written in more of a golang format, but okay. It's fine and readable enough. Hiring a contractor from our usual sources would have taken a week at least, probably by the time you add up the back and forth with code reviews and bugs.

I think for a lot of entry level positions (particularly in devops automation say), AI can effectively replace them. You'd still have someone supervise their code and do code reviews, but now the human just supervises an AI. And that human + AI combo replaces 3 other humans.

xracy• 1 year ago

Stackoverflow could help answer specifically targeted questions about how thigns worked, or suggest areas of debugging. They couldn't/wouldn't take a direct question from an assignment and provide a fully working answer to it.

sn9• 1 year ago

Those are the sorts of things you're supposed to struggle with in school though.

If students are using AI now, that is indeed the same thing as looking up solutions on Stack Overflow or elsewhere. It's cheating for a grade at the expense of never developing your skills.

masterj7• 1 year ago

Calculators have been available forever, but have not eliminated math education. Even algebra systems that can solve equations, do integrals and derivations have been available forever, but people understand that if they don't learn how it actually works they are robbing themselves. By the same token, if you need to do this stuff professionally, you are relying on computers to do it for you.

Write a binary tree in C? Check. Implement radix sort in Python? check. An A* implementation? check.

You can look up any of these and find dozens of implementations to crib from if that's what you want.

Computers can now do more, but I'm not (yet) sure it's all that different.

bumby9• 1 year ago

I agree with you, but just to steelman the other side: how do you know when you are robbing yourself and when you are just being pragmatic?

When I change the spark plugs in my car, am I robbing myself if I'm not learning the intricacies of electrode design, materials science, combustion efficiency, etc.? Or am I just trying to be practical enough to get a needed job done?

To the OPs point, I think you are robbing yourself if the "black box" approach doesn't allow you to get the job done. In other words, in the edge cases alluded to, you may need to understand what's going on under the hood to implement it appropriately.

jf222• 1 year ago

There are still schools where you can learn to shoe a horse...

Root_Denied• 1 year ago

I think you have a good point, but I think the paradigm shift here is that people are chasing careers and money using LLM tools in a way that wasn't possible with calculators, and enforced differently within well-paying, white collar engineering professions.

For example, there's actual liability (legal and financial) involved in building a bridge that subsequently falls apart - not so with small bits of code block. Similarly there's a level of academic rigor involved in the certification process for structural/mechanical/etc. engineers that doesn't (and maybe can't?) exist within software engineering.

TYPE_FASTER• 1 year ago

You still have to understand what's happening and why I think.

I remember going to a cloud meetup in the early days of AWS. Somebody said "you won't need DBAs because the database is hosted in the cloud." Well, no. You need somebody with a thorough understanding of SQL in general and your specific database stack to successfully scale. They might not have the title "DBA," but you need that knowledge and experience to do things like design a schema, write performant queries, and review a query plan to figure out why something is slow.

I'm starting to understand that you can use a LLM to both do things and teach you. I say that as somebody who definitely has learned by struggling, but realizes that struggling is not the most efficient way to learn.

If I want to keep up, I have to adapt, not just by learning how to use tools that are powered by LLMs, but by changing how I learn, how I work, and how I view my role.

emorning3• 1 year ago

> [2] to the inevitable responses that say "well I actually learn things better now because the LLM explains it to me", that's great, but what's relevant here is that a large chunk of people learn by struggling <<

I'm using AI to explain things to me.

And I'm still struggling, I'm just struggling less.

That's progress I think.

UncleOxidant• 1 year ago

Isn't the simplest explanation that the economy is slowing and new college grads generally tend to have trouble getting hired during recessions?

robofanatic• 1 year ago

Isn't outsourcing has been happening for decades?

StefanBatory• 1 year ago

For me as a fresh graduate in Poland, the job market doesn't even exist for juniors rn. And I live in a big city. Even internships are but a dream.

paleotrope• 1 year ago

"Even newly minted M.B.A.s from elite programs are struggling to find work."

I was worried at first but this is an elite journalism product for elites who are facing economic insecurity and not AI

philsquared_• 1 year ago

I don’t think it’s any of the reasons listed in the article or the ones mentioned here either.

I’ll be blunt, people don’t want to hire Gen Z because of bad past experiences with that generation.

When 1 in 6 companies are "hesitant to hire Gen Z workers," then yeah, obviously unemployment is going to be higher for them. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/1-6-us-companies-reluctant-10...

That’s just one article, but there are plenty more. Do a basic search for "not hiring Gen Z" or something similar and you’ll find tons of examples. It’s easier for people to believe AI is to blame rather than take the answer straight from the hiring managers mouths.

They don’t want to hire Gen Z because they see them as more hassle than they’re worth. I’m not saying whether that’s true or not, but that’s how a lot of managers and business owners feel right now, and you don’t have to look very hard to figure that out.

mediumsmart• 1 year ago

it's that it is taking away skills.

And for some it is giving away skills.

a give and take tool on a need to know basis

A new sign that AI is competing with college grads?

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