Generative AI as Seniority-Biased Technological Change

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5425555

by zeuch • 10 months ago

218 188 10 months ago

papers.ssrn.com

zeuch4• 10 months ago

New Harvard's study (62M workers, 285k firms) shows firms adopting generative AI cut junior hiring sharply while continuing to grow senior roles — eroding the bottom rungs of career ladders and reshaping how careers start.

FrustratedMonky2• 10 months ago

In 10 years where do the senior dev's come from? Real question. Seems like with lower entry level jobs now, in 10 years there won't be seniors to hire.

cubefox• 10 months ago

In 10 years a lot of the senior developers might be cut as well due to strongly improved AI.

candiddevmike3• 10 months ago

I think a large chunk of people are naively assuming exponential growth and no longer needing senior devs in 10 years.

thw_9a83c8• 10 months ago

I suppose the idea is that those junior developers who weren't hired will spend 10 years doing intensive, unpaid self-study so that they can knock on the door as experienced seniors by that time.

softwaredoug• 10 months ago

Junior devs eventually will have been brought up with agentic coding, etc. Hopefully whatever the "new way" becomes is how they'll be taught.

Currently part of the problem is the taboo using AI coding in undergrad CS programs. And I don't know the answer. But someone will find the right way to teach new/better ways of working with and without generative AI. It may just become second nature to everyone.

rs999gti• 10 months ago

In 10 years where do the senior dev's come from?

From company interns. Internships won't go away, there will just be less of them. For example, some companies will turn down interns because they do not have the time to train them due to project load.

With AI, now employed developers can be picky on whether or not to take on interns.

throwawayoldie• 10 months ago

In 10 years, the management (or "leadership" if you like the taste of boot) responsible for doing the cutting will have moved on to something else, with no consequences for them.

neutronicus4• 10 months ago

From the bread line, after they've all been displaced by AI, if you happen to need one for God knows what reason, the CEOs are hoping

ModernMech• 10 months ago

They will be promoted but they won't have the requisite experience. We'll have people in the highest positions with the usual titles, but they will be severely underqualified. Enshitification will ensue.

gruez3• 10 months ago

Even if we grant this is going to be a problem, it makes no sense for any individual company to do anything about it. Why take on the cost of training a junior when they can bail in a few years? This is especially true if you're not a big tech company, which puts you at risk of having your junior-turned-senior employees poached by big tech.

JustExAWS5• 10 months ago

Seniors that are 30 years old will still be around and now then they will make more money.

pdntspa3• 10 months ago

There will still be plenty of seniors, they will be in the 40s and 50s. The problem you speak of is much further out, once those seniors retire.

oinfoalgo• 10 months ago

10 years is Hassabis current AGI projection.

I think this is the gambit that we have already committed to.

rd• 10 months ago

What was the incentive for companies to train juniors into seniors in the past, post job-hopping era? Curious to know if that incentive has warped in the past two decades or so as someone who's starting their career now.

hackable_sand3• 10 months ago

Companies are organisms

bix6• 10 months ago

There is no incentive now because the social contract is broken and there is too much mobility. Best you can do is find a supportive boss / a company that provides training opportunities.

zapnuk• 10 months ago

Same as always?

Cheap labor. It doesn't take that much to train someone to be somewhat useful, in mmany cases. The main educators are universities and trade schools. Not companies.

And if they want more loyalty the can always provide more incentives for juniors to stay longer.

At least in my bubble it's astonishing how it's almost never worth it to stay at a company. You'd likely get overlooked for promotions and salary rises are almost insultingly low.

TuringNYC2• 10 months ago

> What was the incentive for companies to train juniors into seniors in the past, post job-hopping era?

You get a lot in the interim!!! I started at Andersen Consulting (now Accenture.) The annual attrition was ~20%, but they still invested over a year of training into me.

But it worked:

- They needed grunt work in early years (me, working 75hr billable weeks). Not sure how much of this is viable now given LLMs

- They had great margins on the other four years. Not sure how much of this is viable now, as margins have shrunk in the past 25yrs as there is more way competition

- They used me to train the next cohort in years 4/5

- I appreciated the training and give them 60hr billable weeks on average for five years

It was a brutal and exhausing five years but i'm forever thankful to AndersenConsulting/Accenture for the experience.

zeuch4• 10 months ago

If entry-level roles are shrinking, how should companies rethink talent development? Without the traditional “bottom rungs,” how do we grow future seniors if fewer juniors ever get the chance to start?

red-iron-pine• 10 months ago

presumably this also means the relative value of seniors is now increasing, as the pipeline to replace them is smaller.

its like how the generic "we take anyone" online security degree has poisoned that market -- nothing but hoards of entry level goobers, but no real heavy hitters on the mid-to-high end. put another way, the market is tight but there are still reasonable options for seniors.

then again we live under capitalism

zeuch4• 10 months ago

Agree, increased value and demand for seniors. But how will the market solve the generation of new seniors if juniors are getting less opportunities?

Take the software development sector as example: if we replace junior devs by AI coding agents and put senior devs to review the agent's work, how will we produce more seniors (with wide experience in the sector) if the juniors are not coding anymore?

candiddevmike3• 10 months ago

When were companies ever thinking about talent development, especially for SWE? We had some loose "mentorship" roles but IME most folks are left to their own devices or just learn by bandwagoning things from reddit.

gota• 10 months ago

I think open source contributions/projects will still be a way to gain verifiable experience.

Other than that, I guess developing software in some capacity while doing a non-strictly software job - say, in accounting, marketing, healtcare, etc. This might not be a relevant number of people if 'vibe coding' takes hold and the fundamentals are not learned/ignored by these accountants, marketers, healthcare workers, etc.

If that is the case, we'd have a lot of 'informed beginners' with 10+ years of experience tangentially related to software.

Edit: As a result of the above, we might see an un-ironic return to the 'learn to code' mantra in the following years. Perhaps now qualified 'learn to -actually- code'? I'd wager a dollar on that discourse popping up in ~5 years time if the trend of not hiring junior devs continues.

registeredcorn• 10 months ago

I'm looking forward for the weird inflective trend of "organic" programs, "humane" dev treatment, and software development taking a long time being seen as a mark of quality rather than stagnation or worry. :)

I'm half-joking, but I wouldn't be surprised to see all sorts of counterpoint marketing come into play. Maybe throw in a weird traditional bent to it?

(Pretentious, douche company): Free-range programming, the way programming was meant to be done; with the human touch!

All-in-all, I already feel severely grossed out any time a business I interact with introduces any kind of LLM chatbot shtick and I have to move away from their services; I could genuinely see people deriving a greater disdain for the fad than there already is.

RodgerTheGreat• 10 months ago

That's much longer than a quarterly earnings report away, which makes it "somebody else's problem" for the executives pushing these policies. There's no reason to expect these people to have a long-term strategy in mind as long as their short-term strategy gives them a golden parachute.

throwawaysleep• 10 months ago

That’s a problem years away, so… don’t think about it?

DebtDeflation• 10 months ago

The plan seems to be to hope that AI will be able to replace the senior ICs in the near future. They're certainly gutting the ranks of management today in a way that presupposes there will be far fewer ICs of all levels to manage soon.

numpad0• 10 months ago

Job market is not obligated to ensure sustained supply of talented individuals, so, I think, short term they'd just keep chasing unicorns. Long term, governments will be forced to financially incentivize young hires. Or something terrible happens and everything rolls back to 1945.

lukev• 10 months ago

It's pretty clear this is happening.

The question is... is this based on existing capability of LLMs to do these jobs? Or are companies doing this on the expectation that AI is advanced enough to pick up the slack?

I have observed a disconnect in which management is typically far more optimistic about AI being capable of performing a specific task than are the workers who currently perform that task.

And to what extent is AI-related job cutting just an excuse for what management would want to do anyway?

0_____0• 10 months ago

This was close to my first thought as well. I don't think we're far enough along the LLM adoption curve to actually know how it will affect the business case and thus employment long term. In the last couple of years of LLM/AI honeymoon, the changes to accommodate the technology may obscure direct and second order effects.

elevatortrim• 10 months ago

I do not see anything in this study that accounts for the decline in economic activity. Is it AI replacing the jobs, or is it that companies are not optimistically hiring, which disproportionally impacts entry level jobs?

spacephysics• 10 months ago

Agree, I think the high cost of full time hires for entry level software jobs (total comp + onboarding + mentoring) vs investing in AI and seeing if that gap can be filled is a far less risky choice at the current economic state.

6-12 months in, the AI bet doesnt pay off, then just stop spending money in it. cancel/dont renew contracts and move some teams around.

For full time entry hires, we typically dont see meaningful positive productivity (their cost is less than what they produce) for 6-8 months. Additionally, entry level takes time away from senior folks reducing their productivity. And if you need to cut payroll cost, its far more complicated, and worse for morale than just cutting AI spend.

So given the above, plus economy seemingly pre-recession (or have been according to some leading indicators) seems best to wait or hire very cautiously for next 6-8 months at least.

pydry• 10 months ago

Exactly this. 2023Q1 was when the interest rate hike from the previous year really kicked in with full force. It was the first hiring market I ever saw in well over a decade where the employers were firmly in the drivers seat even for seniors.

I can imagine that there were a decent number of execs who tried chatgpt, made some outlandish predictions and based some hiring decisions upon those predictions though.

This paper looks kinda trashy - confusing correlation with causation and clickbaity.

avbanks• 10 months ago

A lot of big tech companies are being very opportunistic and reducing hiring/laying-off under the guise of A.I. but really it's weak economy.

PKop• 10 months ago

Or H1B / outsourcing replacement. There are data points showing tech companies hiring thousands of foreign workers while layout off domestic employees. It should factor in to these analyses of displaced junior developers.

rafaelero• 10 months ago

It compares AI-adopting companies with non-adopting firms, so that should account for the overall economic scenario.

westurner• 10 months ago

Did tech reduce hiring after Section 174 R&D tax policy changes?

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45131866 :

In 2017 Trump made businesses have to amortize these [R&D] expenses over 5 years instead of deducting them, starting in 2022 (it is common for an administration to write laws that will only have a negative effect after they're gone). This move wrecked the R&D tax credit. Many US businesses stopped claiming R&D tax credits entirely as a result. Others had surprise tax bills.

Then companies bought their own stock instead of investing in labor:

"S&P 500 Buybacks Now Outpace All R&D Spending in the US" (2019) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21762582

People just want the same R&D tax incentives back:

"Tell HN: Help restore the tax deduction for software dev in the US (Section 174)" (2025 (2439 points)) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44226145

roxolotl• 10 months ago

This is the big question. It could be any combination of the following and it likely depends on the company/position too:

- Generative AI is genuinely capable enough to replace entry level workers at a lower cost.

- The hype around Generative AI is convincing people who make hiring decisions that it is capable enough to replace entry level workers at a lower cost.

- The hype around Generative AI is being used as an excuse to not hire during an economic downturn.

Could even still be other things too.

mind-blight• 10 months ago

One issue we're running into at my job: we're struggling to find entry-level candidates whoaren't lying about what they know by using an LLM.

For the tech side, we've reduced behavioral questions and created an interview that allows people to use cursor, LLMs, etc. in the interview - that way, it's impossible to cheat.

We have folks build a feature on a fake code base. Unfortunately, more junior folks now seem to struggle a lot more with this problem

floren2• 10 months ago

We came up with some simple coding exercises (about 20 minutes total to implement, max) and asked candidates to submit their responses when applying. Turns out one of the questions regularly causes hallucinated APIs in LLM responses, so we've been able to weed out a large percentage of cheaters who didn't even bother to test the code before submitting.

The other part is that you can absolutely tell during a live interview when someone is using an LLM to answer.

OkayPhysicist• 10 months ago

The thing about entry-level candidates is that we expect them to know relatively little, anyway. When I've been delegated to participate in interviewing new candidates, a question I really like is "What's your favorite project you've worked on lately? What was interesting about it? Run into any tricky problems along the way? It can be anything: for work, school, a hobby project. Doesn't even need to software".

It slices through the bullshit fast. Either the person I'm interviewing is a passionate problem solver, and will be tripping over themselves to describe whatever oddball thing they've been working on, or they're either a charlatan or simply not cut out for the work. My sneaking suspicion is that we could achieve similar levels of success in hiring for entry level positions at my current company if we cut out literally the entirety of the rest of the interviews, asked that one question, and hired the first person to answer well.

jparishy• 10 months ago

to me it is just market pressure to exploit the high stress on laborers atm. the level of uncertainty today is only a problem if you don't have a ton of existing capital, which everyone in charge does. so they are insulated and can treat people poorly without repercussions. in a market that prefers short term profits, they will then do this in order to make more money right now.

companies must do this, 'cause if they don't then their competition will (i.e. the pressure)

of course, we can collectively decide to equally value labor and profit, as a symbiotic relationship that incentivizes long term prosperity. but where's the memes in that

TuringNYC2• 10 months ago

How about an alternative potential explanation -- AI is great at bits and pieces but not great at everything, and definitely not good at stitching together all the various pieces. So you need someone experienced to fill in the gaps and integrate all the vibe-coded bits.

This is what I see, but want to hear others' experiences.

hackable_sand3• 10 months ago

Is it happening?

trod12342• 10 months ago

The question of reasoning doesn't really matter once you show its happening.

When you constrict the market like they have done, you naturally get distortions, and the adversarial nature of the market fails to perform economic calculation potentially leading to grave consequences. Even at this point, whipsaws would be quite destructive. I know people who have abandoned their careers due to lack of job availability for the foreseeable future. They were searching for years with no recovery.

When you destroy a pipeline of career development for short-term profit which is possible because of the decoupled nature of money-printing/credit facility, decisions made are psychologically sticky. When there is no economic benefit for competency, the smart people leave for a market where this is possible.

The smart people I know right now are quietly preparing for socio-economic collapse as a result of runaway money-printing. When you have a runaway dangerous machine, you can either step back and let it destroy itself (isolating yourself), or you can accelerate the breakdown of its dependent cycles. Many choose the former, since the latter carries existential risk for no real benefit in the short-term but the latter would result in the least amount of causalties.

70% of the economy covers the white-collar market, which will be gone soon, not because the jobs can be replaced by AI, but because the business leaders in consolidated industry all decide to replace workers becoming the instrument of their own demise through deflationary economics.

sk5t• 10 months ago

How does one concretely prepare for socio-economic collapse, beyond taking a long position in canned goods?

dclowd9901• 10 months ago

I've yet to see any company show actual factual revenue increase from employing AI. So I doubt they have created the internal analysis structures to ensure what exactly they're using AI for.

ACCount372• 10 months ago

"Revenue" is the wrong metric to track.

Even if a company has somehow managed to successfully replace all human labor with AI and fire 100% of its human workforce, the revenue wouldn't necessarily spike.

cornholio• 10 months ago

An alternate explanation is that, even if AI does not have any chance of entirely replacing an employee, not even junior hires, in the hands of competent seniors AI does substantially improve their productivity and eliminates whole classes of tasks that were traditionally where juniors cut their teeth.

So companies reduce junior hiring because their work is relatively less valuable, and they can meet their goals by shuffling existing resources. When they can't do that, they go for seniors since the immediate bang for the buck is higher (ofc, while depleting the global pipeline that actually produces seniors in the long run, in a typical tragedy of the commons)

apercu• 10 months ago

There are a lot of people who only care about how much leveraging AI will net them personally, very little thought is being given to the efficacy of current LLMs beyond this for many folks.

giantg23• 10 months ago

"Or are companies doing this on the expectation that AI is advanced enough to pick up the slack?"

I think it's the expectation. We have some publicized examples of needing to hire people back. My company isn't laying off, but they also aren't hiring much, especially at the entry level. They're also trying to force attrition with PIPs and stuff. If it was a right now thing, they'd just layoff.

Also, just because coding gets 30% faster (say some studies), doesn't mean that's a 30% reduction in headcount since many tasks are about design and stuff. This seems to further point to a lack of hiring being anticipatory in my estimation.

danielheath• 10 months ago

At least for developers, AI can absolutely do the same quality work as most fresh graduates - and the business case for hiring fresh graduates was already pretty shaky; IME they take 6+ months to become a net positive (usually more like two years).

I have always kept that latter point to myself at work - the next generation have to learn somewhere, and training them can be a pleasure (depending on the person) - but even quite good folk with 4-5 years of experience need (what feels like) a lot of assistance to understand/follow the architecture laid out for them.

I don’t use AI to help me code because IME it’s no better than an enthusiastic junior dev who doesn’t learn, and helping them learn is the main reason I might want to work with such a dev.

bobafett-99022• 10 months ago

Mark Sullivan wrote a great piece covering the summarized sentiment of a few: The vibe coding hangover is upon us https://www.fastcompany.com/91398622/the-vibe-coding-hangove...

smokedetector1• 10 months ago

Interesting. However just because this is true right now doesn't mean it will be true going forward. Unique to the current moment is that there are simultaneously (1) high interest rates and a challenging economy (2) a narrative that AI adoption should enable cutting junior roles. This could lead to companies that would anyway be doing layoffs choosing to lay off or not hire juniors, and replace with AI adoption.

To really test the implied theory that using AI enables cutting junior hiring, we need to see it in a better economy, in otherwise growing companies, or with some kind of control (though not sure how this would really be possible).

greyb• 10 months ago

Unique to the current moment is that there are simultaneously (1) high interest rates and a challenging economy (2) a narrative that AI adoption should enable cutting junior roles.

I'm not disputing your point, but I'm curious: given that the main headline measures that we tend to see about the US economy right now involve the labour market. How do you establish the counterfactual?

goalieca• 10 months ago

When there are downturns in tech, companies squeeze out junior people. This happens often. After 2008 a whole cohort of top talent from software engineering schools were lucky to get lower paying QA jobs and only a few landed software development positions. There were chief economists for banks writing about the underemployed generation (generalized to all white collar) and how they can’t get started or have the same opportunities.

I think we might be seeing this now but headlines get more clicks with AI taking our jobs.

dboreham2• 10 months ago

Interest rates are not high. High-er than the post 2008 era yes. Not historically high though.

cheschire• 10 months ago

Why do people keep saying this? Sure interest rates were high a long time ago but right now today there are a crap load of people with low interest rate mortgages effectively trapped in their houses.

When more than half of the population has a 5% or higher mortgage rate then you can start to say it’s not that high.

https://calculatedrisk.substack.com/p/fhfas-national-mortgag...

osigurdson4• 10 months ago

What happens when companies refuse to hire, even though there is an obvious need? It has to lead to reduced growth. If the majority of companies do this, I would think it would lead to a severe deflationary cycle.

toomuchtodo3• 10 months ago

They burn out employees until a failure mode is reached.

osigurdson4• 10 months ago

If a few companies do this it is probably fine, but more interesting if most companies do this. It seems that it would be akin to a self inflicted depression with severe deflation.

pmg101• 10 months ago

Won't the lunch of the companies that refuse to hire/grow be eaten by other companies that don't?

PolicyPhantom6• 10 months ago

Generative AI may automate some entry-level tasks, but young professionals are not just “replaceable labor.” They bring growth potential, adaptation, and social learning. Without frameworks to manage AI’s role, we risk undermining the very training grounds that prepare the next generation of experts.

JustExAWS5• 10 months ago

How do they bring more “growth potential” than a mid level developer with 3-5 years of experience? The average tenure of a developer is 2-3 years. I expect that to increase going forward slightly as the job market continues to suck. But why would I care about the growth of the company when my promotion criteria is based on delivering quarterly or yearly goals? Those goals can much more easily be met by paying slightly more for a mid level developer who doesn’t do negative work both directly and by taking time away from the existing team?

PolicyPhantom6• 10 months ago

You’re absolutely right that mid-level hires buy immediate productivity. But “growth potential” isn’t just romanticism — it’s an investable trajectory. With the right project design, feedback loops, and domain exposure, juniors can grow into “multipliers” — people who combine technical skills with adaptability or domain expertise. That’s a kind of return you rarely get from simply adding another mid-level hire. In practice, resilient organizations balance both: mid-levels for immediate throughput, and juniors for long-term strength.

jexe• 10 months ago

That's a lot to invest in someone at a large comparative loss, in a world where employees don't last more than a couple years before job hopping.

PolicyPhantom6• 10 months ago

I agree that high turnover is a real constraint. That’s why the answer isn’t “10 years of apprenticeship” but designing scaffolds that combine learning with contribution in a shorter timeframe. Things like short rotations, micro-credentials, or mentorship stipends let juniors add value while they’re still on the job. Even if they leave after a few years, the investment isn’t wasted — both sides still capture meaningful returns.

Andrex• 10 months ago

Maybe this is unpopular, but what if 5/10-year long contracts started getting traction?

I guess you'd need to trust the company, which is hard to come by.

esafak• 10 months ago

The tragedy of the commons: companies acting in their self interest at the expense of the industry by drying up the workforce pipeline. The next generation will pay, like when America stopped producing hardware.

This is cause for government intervention.

ileonichwiesz• 10 months ago

It should be, but the government loves AI - incidentally it’s also the one thing currently propping up the economy.

carlosjobim4• 10 months ago

It has been like this for decades by now, and your precious government loves this because they also consist of old people who hate the younger generations. Any and every time the government intervenes it is to stomp down on the youth and nothing else.

nitwit005• 10 months ago

Unfortunately, the government intervention will, if anything, probably just be to increase the number of Visas granted. It's the easiest and fastest fix.

thw_9a83c8• 10 months ago

In the future, there will be two kinds of companies:

  1. Those that encourage people to use AI agents aggressively to increase productivity.
  2. Those that encourage people to use AI agents aggressively to be more productive while still hiring young people.

Which type of company will be more innovative, productive, and successful in the long run?

dayvid• 10 months ago

Any job that doesn't creatively generate revenue will be systematized and automated as soon as possible. AI agents are just an acceleration factor for this

koakuma-chan2• 10 months ago

I don't understand how you want innovation and productivity in a world with rapidly increasing population. We need less and less people while producing more and more people. Where am I wrong?

thw_9a83c8• 10 months ago

I don't see developed countries to have a "rapidly increasing population" problem.

zdragnar• 10 months ago

Recently there was a splash in the news about the US death rate projected to exceed the birth rate by 2031.

Many of the largest countries are experiencing similar declines, with fewer and fewer countries maintaining large birth rates.

triceratops• 10 months ago

in a world with rapidly increasing population

That world was 30 years ago. In 2025 world average total fertility rate is 2.2, which is a shade above replacement rate (2.1). And 2.2 is a 10% drop since 2017 alone (when it was 2.46).

Because life expectancy is higher, the population will continue to increase. But not "rapidly".

gampleman2• 10 months ago

Depends what kind of people you need. For innovation you generally need exceptional people, and the probability of finding such a person is proportional to the total number of people available.

neutronicus4• 10 months ago

The ones in group 2 that also aggressively prune expensive, complacent seniors might even win in the short run!

Young people are cheap and they love AI!

JustExAWS5• 10 months ago

How much cheaper are younger developers overall? If you look at the delta between junior and mid level developers in most industries - ie enterprise dev not BigTech or adjacent - it’s really not that much

candiddevmike3• 10 months ago

Source?

MDGeist• 10 months ago

Kinda feels like a lot of companies think they can be option 1 because someone else will be option 2, and then they'll hire the young people away after they become experienced.

thw_9a83c8• 10 months ago

...I was afraid someone would point out this potentially slimy scenario.

jonathanrmumm• 10 months ago

3. Young people who realize this dynamic and start their own companies because old people are less energetic toward picking up new tools / learning new tricks and run circles around them.

HellDunkel• 10 months ago

I can‘t believe we are really calling things „ai agents“ these days…

gwbas1c• 10 months ago

Entry-level jobs are also hard to get when there is a hiring slowdown; and in the US there is a hiring slowdown.

Is this a case of "correlation does not imply causation?"

petcat• 10 months ago

We had some marketing folks give us a company-wide demo of Chat GPT and some other Gen AI tools and showed us how cool it is and how quick they can make stylish and sophisticated pitch decks and marketing materials now.

And the entire time I'm watching this I'm just thinking that they don't realize that they are only demonstrating the tools that are going to replace their own jobs. Kinda sad, really. Demand for soft skills and creatives is going to continue to decline.

Dev jobs too.

johnrob• 10 months ago

LLMs are good at creating single use documents, like a pitch deck used for one prospective customer (never to be used again). But for long lived documents, on which future work builds atop, the bar is higher and the value of LLMs is more grey.

mingus88• 10 months ago

I have the opposite expectation actually

In the late 90s you weee considered a prodigy if you understood how to use a search engine. I had so many opportunities simply because I could find and retain information.

So LLMs have solved this. Knowing a framework or being able to create apps is not a marketable skill any longer. What are we supposed to do now?

It’s the soft skills that matter now. Being well liked has always been more important in a job than being the best at it. We all know that engineer who knows they are hot shit but everyone avoids because they are insufferable.

Those marketing people don’t need to spend a week on their deck any longer. They can work the customer relationship now.

Knowing how to iterate with an LLM to give the customer exactly what they need is the valuable skill now.

octo888• 10 months ago

Experienced that too. They're basically forced to give those demos

bobafett-99022• 10 months ago

but i guess to me the question is: if you're management, do you expect your workers to do more/work faster (like a TAS in a way)? or do you expect to replace your workers entirely?

I personally think we're still a ways from the latter...

skapadia• 10 months ago

I expect less time spent on boilerplate and documentation, and more time spent on iterating, experimenting, and increasing customer satisfaction. I also wouldn't accept "I don't know how to do that" as an answer. Instead, I'd encourage "I don't know how to do that, but I can use AI to learn faster, and also seek out someone with experience to help review my work".

AlexandrB• 10 months ago

And then the customers use gen AI to summarize the same pitch decks/marketing materials so they don't have to look at them. Let's cut out the middle man and just send the prompt instead.

simianwords• 10 months ago

Developers always automate themselves out of a job

dboreham2• 10 months ago

Those marketing people may also be engaging in small talk about sports teams on the phone with customers, doing sushi and karaoke with customers, procuring coke and hookers for customers... LLMs can't yet do that. Unless the customer is also an LLM of course.

apwell23• 10 months ago

These studies would be more meaningful if this was a time of economic boom.

Entry-level jobs get "hollowed out" in a stagnant economy regardless of "AI".

AI = not hiring because no new work but spin as a "AI" . Markets are hungry of any utterance of the the word AI from the CEO.

so ridiculous. but we've collectively decided to ignore BS as long as we can scam each other and pray you are not the last one holding the bag.

haijo25• 10 months ago

Pretty much lol.

You have to somehow have the discipline to avoid getting caught up in the noise until the hype starts to fade away.

Devasta• 10 months ago

The economic turmoil in the US is hollowing out the entry level jobs, AI is just the cover companies are using. The constant tariff changing means that companies have to be very pessimistic in their long term planning, as any assumptions they make can be turned on their head with no notice.

ivape• 10 months ago

Another way to look at it is that legacy jobs have no future therefore there is no point bringing in the next generation into a dying system.

Another way to look at it is that hiring is fine, and that the vain entitled generation we all suspected was going to emerge feels that a job should absolutely be available to them, and immediately.

Another way to look at it is that journalism has been dead for quite a while, and writing about the same fear-based topics like “omg hiring apocalypse” is what makes these people predictable money (along with other topics).

Another way to look at it is that we raised a generation of narcissistic parents and children that have been going “omg grades”, “omg good college”, “omg internship”, “omg job” for so long that that these lamentations feel normalized. A healthy dose of stfu was never given to them. Neurotic motherfuckers.

haijo25• 10 months ago

The second point has some truth to it from what I've been hearing from talking to senior folks, taking on new grads within the finance sector.

reb• 10 months ago

The pessimistic reading is well-represented, so here's another: AI changes the definition of "entry-level", but it doesn't eliminate the class of professional labor that experienced workers would rather not do.

Until AI can do literally everything we can, that class of work will continue to exist, and it'll continue to be handed to the least experienced workers as a way for them to learn, get oriented, and earn access to more interesting problems and/or higher pay while experienced folks rest on their laurels or push the state of the art.

tropicalfruit• 10 months ago

soon there will be entire new industries of "Bullshit Jobs" to keep the masses occupied

they rather pay people to sit in a room pressing a button every hour than have them loitering around on UBI

either that or in the pod

Krssst• 10 months ago

Would the entire tracking, advertisement and general enshittification industry already count as bullshit jobs?

cryoshon• 10 months ago

Today they're admitting AI is hollowing out entry-level jobs. The reality is that it can and will replace mid-level and eventually even quite senior jobs.

Why?

It's already doing a lot of the loadbearing work in those mid-level roles too now, it's just a bit awkward for management to admit it. One common current mode of work is people using AI to accomplish their work tasks very quickly, and then loafing a bit more with the extra time. So leaders refrain from hiring, pocket the savings, and keep a tight lid on compensation for those who remain.

At some point they'll probably try to squeeze the workforce for some additional productivity, and cut those who don't deliver it. Note that the "ease" of using AI for work tasks will be a rationale for why additional compensation is not warranted for those who remain.

haijo25• 10 months ago

Lol this is so far from reality. Where have you actually seen this fella?

Im tired of reading all these claims with no primary evidence to support it.

ForHackernews• 10 months ago

the largest effects in wholesale and retail trade

Hard for me to believe that AI in its current state is hollowing out junior shop assistant and salesperson roles. Either those jobs were already vulnerable to "dumb" touchscreen kiosks or they require emotional intelligence and embodied presence that LLMs lack.

axpy906• 10 months ago

It’s really hard to adjust for economic factors here. I am in agreement with skepticism in this thread as job numbers got revised downward heavily in both 2024 and 2025 (too negatives in some months) indicating a poor economic situation.

addicted• 10 months ago

Would similar research in other countries also return similar results?

The US is going through a lot of upheaval, which whether you think is positive or negative, is unique, and a confounding factor for any such research.

clusterhacks2• 10 months ago

I am confused about how to feel about the data the paper is based on. If you look at the paper, the data description is:

"Our primary data source is a detailed LinkedIn-based resume dataset provided by Revelio Labs ...

We complement the worker resume data with Revelio’s database of job postings, which tracks recruitment activity by the firms since 2021 ...

The final sample consists of 284,974 U.S. firms that were successfully matched to both employee position data and job postings and that were actively hiring between January 2021 and March 2025.3 For these firms, we observe 156,765,776 positions dating back to 2015 and 245,838,118 job postings since 2021, of which 198,773,384 successfully matched with their raw text description."

They identified 245 million job postings from 2021 forward in the United States? I mean the U.S. population is like 236 million for the 18-65 age group (based on wikipedia, 64.9% of 342 total population).

And they find a very small percentage of firms using generative AI:

"Our approach allows us to capture firms that have actively begun integrating generative AI into their operations. By this measure, 10,599 firms, about 3.7 percent of our sample, adopted generative AI during the study period."

Maybe I am wildly underestimating just how much LinkedIn is used worldwide for recruiting? As a tech person, I'm also very used to seeing the same job listing re-listed by what seems to be a large number of low-effort "recruiting" firms on LinkedIn.

I think for trying to figure out how generative AI is affecting entry-level jobs, I would have been much more interested in some case studies. Something like find three to five companies (larger than startups? 100+ employees? 500+?) that have decided to hire fewer entry-level employees by adding generative AI into their work as a matter of policy. Then maybe circling back from the case studies to this larger LinkedIn dataset and tied the case study information into the LinkedIn data somehow.

squigz2• 10 months ago

For these firms, we observe 156,765,776 positions dating back to 2015 and 245,838,118 job postings since 2021, of which 198,773,384 successfully matched with their raw text description."

I'm obviously misreading this somehow. How do you have 156m positions dating back to 2015, but far more than that number in a smaller timeframe?

clusterhacks2• 10 months ago

I think it is just poorly worded. From another point in the paper:

"Our analysis draws on a new dataset that combines LinkedIn resume and job-posting data from Revelio Labs. The dataset covers nearly 285,000 U.S. firms, more than 150 million employment spells from roughly 62 million unique workers between 2015 and 2025, and over 245 million job postings."

I guess we can read that as saying the authors identified 62 million workers who held 150 million positions over the 2015-2025 time window.

I'm still deeply skeptical about the underlying data. The 62 million represents a huge percentage of employed people in the U.S. in any of the years 2015-2025. This source shows 148 million/yr to 164 million/yr employed over that timeframe:

  https://www.statista.com/statistics/269959/employment-in-the-united-states/

On the other hand, I also saw estimates saying LinkedIn has approximately 30% of the U.S. workforce with a profile on the platform. Which is wild to me.

legacynl• 10 months ago

You're misreading, 156m positions, and 245m job postings. A single position can have multiple job postings created for it.

pluc• 10 months ago

The new career path for devs has them start with prompt engineering. I can't wait for the chickens to come home to roost.

wnc3141• 10 months ago

I heard an argument that the valuation of AI/ AI-adjacent firms only makes sense if 1) companies grow their aggregate top-line revenues by multiple trillion dollars of 2) this amounts to the potential savings from gutting knowledge-based employment across an economy.

Of course in the long run a chronically underemployed economy will have little demand for products and services, but that is beyond the scope of companies who, in general, are focused on winning short term and zero-sum market capture. However I believe that while a billion dollar valuation is a market and strategy problem, a trillion dollar valuation is a political problem - and I would hope that a mandate of broad gainful employment translates to political action - although this remains to be seen.

m3kw9• 10 months ago

What if, new entry level jobs are just more about using AI.

wonderwonder• 10 months ago

Salary wise, we are in a race to the bottom. Massive outsourcing of jobs to India and similar where wages are much lower than comparable US employees coupled with Ai replacing entry level roles.

On a longer time scale you have humanoid robots potentially coming as well. Self driving cars and trucks are going to torpedo trucking and low pay positions such as Uber // taxi driver. The wealth is getting centralized amongst a couple dozen high tech companies.

All in all I am pretty negative on the prospects for young people as they enter the workforce and additionally for older tech people as they are currently operating in an environment where losing your job very possibly means the end of the road.

budoso• 10 months ago

I wonder how these findings would hold up if the analysis could control for the widespread corporate strategy of replacing domestic junior roles with dedicated offshore teams?

jopsen• 10 months ago

Isn't this just economic uncertainty, after math of the hiring spree following covid, macro economic conditions (interest rate, etc).

It still feels too early to predict the outcome, winds may change again.

dudeinjapan• 10 months ago

"Seniority-bias" is the wrong word. It's "skill-bias", or better yet, "tacit-knowledge bias".

The reason why old hands (who have been in the game long enough to be promoted to something approximating "Senior") are so deadly with AI is because they know all the traps/pitfalls to watch out for. Sure, the AIs may become good enough in 5-10 years to have learned all these pitfalls, but make hay while the sun is shining!

"Senior EMs" who are pure HR managers/non-coders will be priced-out of their jobs in an AI agentic world, as (surprise!) you can't report AI agents to HR. Juniors who can use AI effectively will thrive and climbs the ranks rapidly.

j45• 10 months ago

It is strange to read an article that is not about ageism in tech as it normally has been.

Maybe people will learn to learn from each other and together moving forward.

keeda• 10 months ago

Interestingly, the authors do at least acknowledge the alternative hypotheses that we wonder about (including this thread) in studies like this:

Some observers have also linked AI to recent labor market trends: since late 2022, unemployment among recent college graduates has risen sharply, even as the unemploy-ment rate for young workers overall has remained steady (Appendix Figure A.1). Others, however, question the importance of AI in these developments, pointing to alternative factors such as economic uncertainty, post-Covid retrenchment, and increased offshoring (e.g., Financial Times, 2025).

(No mention of ZIRP. Also, they used LLMs to classify data, so there's that.)

I only had a quick look, and IANAE, but while the study does not discuss these factors any further, their methodology may implicitly account for them. Briefly, the study looks at employment of junior employees vs senior employees over the last 2 years across a bunch of companies that it categorizes as AI adopters vs non-adopters (based on an admittedly very narrow definition of "adoption".)

It finds that starting in 2023 Q1, the hiring of juniors dropped sharply while that of seniors kept growing in firms that adopted AI compared to non-adopters. Given this approach, maybe those confounding factors cancel out? Like, why would economic uncertainty, offshoring, ZIRP or whatever impact only firms adopting AI and not others within the same sector?

Some other interesting findings:

- Juniors who do get hired, get promoted more quickly, likely due to lower competition. Could be yet another mechanism that increases the gap between the haves and the have-nots.

- The biggest effects are in the wholesale / retail trade sector, which is surprising because offhand, I would not have thought this sector to be much impacted by AI.

I follow some labor economists and these findings align a lot with what they've been saying about the job reports over the years.

Another very interesting finding is that graduates of mid-tier colleges are impacted the most, whereas elite and "less selective" institutions are least affected. Something to consider when evaluating the ROI of tuition for a given college...

golemotron• 10 months ago

Isn't every advanced technology is seniority-biased?

andro_dev• 10 months ago

It’s nice and dandy, but most job postings are fake or ghost jobs.

PeterStuer• 10 months ago

I bet those youngsters still have a much easier time than a seasoned 60+ yo with proven AI skills in landing a new job.

zeuch4• 10 months ago

Reading through this thread, it feels like there are two main camps:

1. Those who see this as mostly macroeconomics + hype (high interest rates, weak economy, AI as a convenient excuse).

2. Those who believe AI is genuinely reshaping the work structure (seniors + AI can cover more ground, making juniors less necessary).

Maybe it’s both. The economy explains why companies are cautious now, but AI explains where they are cutting first — the “bottom rungs.”

The bigger question, then, is: even if AI isn’t the sole cause, what happens when a whole generation of juniors doesn’t get trained? That’s not just a company-level problem, it’s an industry-wide pipeline issue.

How do we avoid a tragedy of the commons here — where everyone optimizes short-term and we end up with fewer capable seniors in 10 years?

Generative AI as Seniority-Biased Technological Change

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