AI is wrecking a fragile job market for college graduates | Hacker News Reader

AI is wrecking a fragile job market for college graduates

wsj.com

57 pointsalephnerd81 comments

This will create what I am calling a “seniority crunch”. Entry level jobs are hard to get, humans aren’t learning the deeper aspects and reasoning parts of knowledge work. Gap created for people with this knowledge. Senior IC jobs demand goes up. Fewer with xp to fill it. LLMs don’t reason well. They can’t do that and likely never will be coaxed into it. Just one scenario I think is plausible.

No, this is the likely path. LLMs are hitting a wall. They’ll get better, much better, but high context “brownfield” tasks are going to remain difficult and require human handholding.

The industry is cutting itself off at the knees.

Or it will lead to demand for massive government job programs, huge tax increases to pay for, free enterprise being smothered, everything being run by government bureaucrats.

All thanks to AI entrepreneurs, such a great achievement. Just like AirBnB destroying the historical centers nowadays, disruption at its best - just a different disruption from what they claim.

It's not like juniors roles will go away. More and more - it's looking like there's a higher bar for high compensation that was the norm. It seems like juniors SWEs will have to toil more to reach higher level of skills, become valuable to their teams, before they "make" it. I'm seeing this trend across the engg leaders I speak with.

And who's gonna pay them while doing this ramp up? Years and years of getting skills? What are the eng leaders saying about it, if anything?

Of course engineers will be paid, just that entry level pay has come down. (Pay at entry level has fallen at least 40% in the mid-size product sector).

Or it will require college students to complete one or more internships which use AI to show they have already learned to be productive using AI before they graduate.

I think this is the most likely outcome. It'll drive salaries up in 5-10 years when there's a serious talent pipeline shortage and the demand for senior talent isn't satisfied by a dry pipeline.

It's not an AI issue. It's that in 4 years of a CS degree, CS students never touch a single kubectl command or barely build one functional web application in one software engineering related course. It's the failure of CS programs that is causing job market issues for college graduates.

It's just that when money was easy, companies could pay for training interns and recent grads things they should have learned in school. Now money is tight, so we see these job market problems. I am hopeful that colleges will adapt their curriculums based on the changing job market.

A gap between graduate skills and industry requirements did exist before AI.

The pandemic likely also caused further changes in industry and their requirements.

What you're advocating for are applied vocational studies, not computer science.

Whey he’s advocating for is that people don’t want to get in tens of thousands of debt without expecting to get a job because they need money to survive and pay off said debt

There is a middle ground between both.

If teaching fundamentals, then force students to utilize these fundamentals to build into applied or industry usecases.

For example - leveraging the K8s thread - force students in their OS class to understand HOW to apply data structures to manage scalability problems AND forcing students to understand Linux kernel internals like cgroups.

Most universities don't offer course to connect these fundamentals together - not even my Ivy League alma mater based on my own survey of curricula.

Everyone is incentivized to understand the bare minimum, overindex on Leetcode, and skim over harder fundamental courses. On top of that, ime at my alma mater, most CS faculty was essentially applied math nerds who could see beauty in a well formatted inductive proof but would glaze out when pushed on implementing Paxos using best practices around kernel or system performance. And vice versa for the system nerds.

In a world where AI/ML can increasingly automate away boiler plate work and even conduct limited reasoning, understanding how fundamentals and (shudder) first principles are connected into become a product or solution is what matters.

And thus, this becomes a critical thinking problem, which just cannot be learnt without experimentation and getting into the weeds.

Can you tell that to the entire world?

Why not both?

But seriously, it's both.

Also, CS? That's not a degree for building apps, right? If it is, there's definitely a failure to make that clear.

This has not been the case the last 10 years in most of the top 50 programs. Capstone projects and senior seminar classes often touched upon more "serious" topics. I've seen classes focusing on projects related to distributed/cloud computing, complex web apps, or then often hot-topic of the year technologies (game AI, computer vision, machine learning)

> It's the failure of CS programs that is causing job market issues for college graduates.

Definitely not. These failures have existed for decades. But it ultimately doesn't matter. You have the capacity to learn or you don't. CS programs are a waste of time, sure, but they have nothing to do with the job market.

I'd go so far as to say your comment is a perfect example of the problem. "kubectl" doesn't mean jack shit to being a good engineer. It's a technology we will use for a few years and then move onto something else.

Absolutely nobody is cutting junior positions because they don't know "kubectl"

The problem is developers are now DevOps, QA, PMs, Customer Support, and everything else.

Well being a good engineer doesn’t mean “Jack shit” if you’re homeless and hungry because no one will hire you to exchange money for labor to support your addictions to food and shelter.

If I have to explain everything in detail and check behind your work as a junior dev snd wait for you to get up to speed, I might as well just use ChatGPT.

If I do need a perdón, why would I hire a junior engineer when I can just recruit an underpaid mid level developer more whose already proven himself and gotten up to speed especially if I can hire someone cheaply living in MiddleOfNowhere Nebraska who is willing to work for less than I made over a decade ago?

> The problem is developers are now DevOps, QA, PMs, Customer Support, and everything else.

As long as the hour expectations are reasonable I actually like this. This teaches you so many more skills than being pigeon-holed into software engineering. Granted, I like the idea of one day founding a business so I may need to be able to do all of these rolls some day.

CS programs teach fundamentals, though not necessarily the most popular tools in the industry. Those skills help regardless of whatever specific tools you end up using. I don’t think it’s a waste of time.

> "kubectl" doesn't mean jack shit

I think you may be taking the parent comment too literally. Kubectl itself doesn't matter, replace it with anything you want - it represents the lack of the graduates ability to do anything useful in the real world.

Is doesn't make much sense to spend four years preparing for a job (market) and be completely unprepared at the end of it.

Universities are research oriented, kubernetes is a practical skills which you'd expect to learn at a trade school no different to learning fluid dynamics vs plumbing

I have never met a single human being in person who did not believe that a crucial part of acquiring practical skills in software (not "trades") for young people is to go to university. Maybe people shouldn't theoretically expect this, but there is theory, and then there is reality. We need to make them match, in whichever direction.

Yes I'm sure people say that but that's because they don't think before they speak

You wouldn't expect the same from a doctor, lawyer, engineer, the problem is that everyday people aren't aware that there is a difference between software development and computer science...

Implicit in this is an assumption that the purpose of a higher education is to give graduates the skills demanded by the businesses. What if it (the purpose of a higher education) was something else? What if it had always been something else, and only in the last few decades did a certain segment of the population try to convince us that the only reason higher education existed was to churn out workers that could slot straight into entry-level jobs without businesses having to invest in any training first?

I can guarantee you that the only people who went to college to be “better citizens of the world” were those who were privileged enough to have parents who could afford to subsidize their living.

I went to university to become a better citizen of the world. My parents are as middle class as they come. Sorry but you’re wrong.

And if you didn’t get a job right out of school would you have been homeless and hungry or could you just have moved back in with your parents? If you hadn’t gotten a job 5 years out of school that would have allowed you to support yourself would you be homeless or hungry?

I told both of my sons that I wouldn’t pay for a degree that would be less likely to lead to a decent paying job. When my youngest graduated from high school, I was working for BigTeh but I made it abundantly clear that a colleges sole purpose was to be gainfully employed.

> I made it abundantly clear that a colleges sole purpose was to be gainfully employed.

That's not true at all, though. An education has loads to offer beyond a bump in your wages. Do you really think knowledge is worthless unless you can make money with it?

Do you need to get in tens of thousands of debt to gain that knowledge?

You'll earn the money back with the increased wages a university degree affords you.

I never said knowledge was the only purpose of a degree—that'd be as ridiculous as saying "gainful employment" was the only purpose. It has multiple uses. This should be obvious.

The parent is not wrong unless you uncharitably pounce on their use of the word "only" as absolutely literal. As you have.

So, “only” was figurative? Why was it used? The entire sentence would have been better without it. Or you’re wrong. Somewhere in there.

That's completely untrue. I paid my way through school off student loans & the wages from my internships. I got a degree in computer science, but I took a wide variety of electives outside my program because I wanted to get a broad education.

Taking a course in macroeconomics is good for you; it makes you smarter. Sociology makes you smarter, pure math makes you smarter, english lit makes you smarter, miocrobiology, philosophy, and history all make you smarter. There's a lot of value in a liberal education. I certainly wouldn't have traded mine away for a primer on kubernetes or whatever.

As soon as I needed k8s on the job, I skimmed through the O'Reilly book and that was all I needed. The least valuable thing school can give you is an explanation for how to use a tool which is already well-documented.

All colleges have electives. I also took business classes with my computer science degree and while I am an MBA drop out, learning about business helped me talk my way into a lot of opportunities over the years. Of course learning how to write and communicate is actually part of the leveling guidelines to get to be a senior at every tech company.

And math classes are essential to understand machine learning algorithms and how to apply them and have been way behind the recent AI craze.

But I bet you would think different if you were a junior in today’s market…

> All colleges have electives. I also took business classes [which] helped me talk my way into a lot of opportunities over the years. [...] And math classes are essential to understand machine learning algorithms [and get a job related to] the recent AI craze.

These are exactly the sort of career-focused courses I wasn't talking about.

> But I bet you would think different if you were a junior in today’s market…

No. A k8s crash course from my alma mater wouldn't be any more use to me now than when I was entering the job market.

Machine learning algorithms is not a “new craze”, using computers to predict outcomes was a thing when I was in grad school in 2001.

You explicitly mentioned pure math and macroeconomics. Those are definitely helpful in a career. I was a math double major and I just recently started studying the latest in ML (not just gen AI) and my math background definitely helped.

And does history and philology make you “smarter”? Maybe at cocktail parties but it doesn’t help me better at exchanging labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter and I definitely didn’t need to pay thousands of dollars for it.

Your anecdote does not make it "completely untrue". Only "not absolutely true", which isn't compelling in the face of the overwhelming other experiences.

> Only "not absolutely true", which isn't compelling in the face of the overwhelming other experiences.

Which is to say, yes, the person I was replying to was incorrect. But you liked the vibe of what they were saying, so now you're going to play with language to suggest that their statement might be true in some "non-absolute" sense where it doesn't matter whether the thing they said is correct or not.

Most people pursue higher education for multiple reasons. A lot of people just want the "campus experience." A lot of people enjoy learning. Many people just feel like it's expected of them. Any degree is associated with a boost in wages, so most people expect their loans to pay for themselves in time, especially at a cheaper institution. So the idea that middle-class people don't go to university to become better-read is patently silly.

If you are a “middle class” person that means if you don’t get a degree or don’t get a job you probably have parents to fall back on or at least go home. That means your parents can “subsidize your living” just like I said even if it’s just letting you stay rent free.

And there are plenty of degrees with negative ROI

https://freopp.org/whitepapers/does-college-pay-off-a-compre...

Much of my generation (hitting their twenties in the 1980s) went to university if they had the interest and Tertiary admissions scores over the threshold.

University was free, rent was cheap, particularly in shared houses, and part time work abounded (I worked three months of the year in mining or agriculture).

Many of those at the time were idealistic to a degree, almost all wanted to better themselves in some way or another.

Well, my still living parents grew up in the segregated South in the 40s-50s. There was no “idealism” about why my mom and her 3 sisters went to college and her brother went to trade school. They knew that college was the only way out, their parents were already struggling and they had no choice but to go to a “Black” college (now HBCU) because they were not allowed to go anywhere else.

On the other hand, I grew up as an only child with my mom a teacher and my dad a factory worker. While I knew I wasn’t going to be homeless or hungry or put undue burden on my parents, college was solely a means (dual degree in computer science and mathematics) to be employable even though by the time I went to college I had already been programming in 65C02 assembly and some BASIC for six years and was learning 68K assembly on my Mac my freshman year.

But knowing C and how to bit twiddle definitely helped me get a job straight out of college - a week after I graduated.

It would seem that some benefit flowed from the pragmatic idealism of the likes of Alexander Crummell and others that worked and fought hard to establish HBCU's.

I went to university while a number of kids I played football with didn't \1, the kind of event that prompted many to study law \2 and parallel that with art \3

\1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_John_Pat

\2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UKu3bCbFck

\3 https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/may/10/this-is...

This is exactly what I wanted to say, but phrased more nicely than I think I would've managed. So, thanks.

College is a massive time and monetary commitment. The reason the vast majority of people go through it is because employment opportunities are gated away behind a degree. Without one, finding the job you want can be extremely difficult, and at times even impossible.

It always bothered me how colleges hold someone's future career hostage like this, forcing them to go through them, and then they pretend it's not the case and that college is simply intellectual enrichment.

The gating that colleges do also makes it much more difficult to change careers than it should be. The whole system does the task it's given extremely poorly, and pretends that it's not even responsible for the task. Great, fine. Let's work on alternative ways to handle job credentialing then.

>It always bothered me how colleges hold someone's future career hostage like this, forcing them to go through them, and then they pretend it's not the case and that college is simply intellectual enrichment.

>The gating that colleges do

It feels weird to me to blame colleges for job description requirements that they didn't write. Colleges aren't gatekeeping you, people requiring a degree and refusing to train employees are.

It's not a "certain segment" that changed their mind. It's the reality of what's happening to our country (countries). We can no longer, at large, afford the luxury of spending so much money ONLY to "learn to think". We also need practical education more than before. That's the undeniable nature of what has happened to the economy, especially in software.

Careful about your labels! I went to brown in the late 90s and considered a cs degree before moving to math.

Even then among academic programs brown was considered a bit low brow in that it spent a fair amount of time on software and systems engineering: this was all part of the cs department, but it wasn’t science per se.

Today most cs programs are in fact software engineering programs; well and good, but they give themselves the same name as the original meaning which was, while engaged in engineering, more theoretical.

I can think of so many counter examples to what I just wrote I’m sort of excited for the comments, but tldr: in the late 90s, if you wanted engineering skills you hired MIT, Caltech, not Harvard. (Stanford alums didn’t move east and even then were not generally hirable for cash)

I’ll note my current perspective is probably aligned with your complaint - we need more engineers and quality engineers than we do theoretical cs undergrads by at least two orders of magnitude. The best schools taught their engineers theory, and I think that goes with the history of the discipline - most of the greats were tinkerers at least, more usually engaged in real engineering work while working on theory. The other way: getting theorists to become great coders - seems less common.

And in fact my era at brown produced a number of influential engineering folks like brian cantrill, so despite its non exalted status, it did the world some good!

Aside from a few exceptionally awful periods like 2009, when did fresh CS graduates struggle to find tech jobs? We all went through similar curriculums and picked up industry knowledge perfectly fine.

And thank goodness we don't teach kubectl and never will.

Knowledge at the level of kubectl is worthless to the vast majority of grads. It's also extremely time-limited. In 5 years everything will have moved on.

Web apps? What fraction of our grads build web apps? How much will the technology for doing so change in 5 years? 10 years?

Universities are not vocational schools. We teach people to think. Then they learn what the details are on the job. This has always been the role of universities.

If you want something else, go to a coding bootcamp.

You mean the job they can’t get because companies rather hire someone with experience for a little more money?

This isn't viable. This isn't a normal vocational job - it's too abstract/overwhelming for everybody to learn all of it on the job to the needed degree. We need to stop tricking kids into this path. Either CS needs to teach practical skills (I understand things evolve fast, but you're exaggerating, and regardless, an education in the current thing is absolutely invaluable, and also prepares you for learning the next thing on your own), or we need to make it much more clear that another education path is better. Also, boot camps are worthless for this.

And yet if you flip the paradigm entirely, you pretty much get coding bootcamps, which certainly don't have a great track record either. The answer is probably some more ideal balance between theory and practice, like Waterloo's CS program.

Is it really? or is it just a very good excuse for layoffs and "do more with less" policies?

Is that different?

Yep, it is different.

If AI is really wrecking the job market structurally due to new efficiencies, one would hope those effects will be permanent (i.e we won't need juniors anymore because AI will fill those spaces permanently, with or without human intervention; and thats not going to change because AI is only going to get better, blabla, yada, yada).

If it is not, it would be a matter of eventually reaching AI winter status and/or just finding a new thing to hype and the tech job market will open its gates again.

Of course there is some nuance to it, both things can happen at the same time with different intensities.

I just haven't seen this. Not at all. AI is a useful tool, but it is nowhere close to replacing humans, except where companies want to be bastards by forcing customers to use an AI instead of a person. It's going to be quite a while until an AI actually takes a full job.

https://archive.ph/nlnr2

Teaching fundamentals only is a footgun. People need to learn how to ship shit, while also learning fundamentals

AI is doing no such thing. Money is tight, we can’t afford to just hire the way we used to, and now there’s more college graduates than ever it seems.

They are not, but if AI is doing the thing they are advertised as, it will be.

>Money is tight

...say the businesses pulling in record revenue and profit numbers.

Do the people who say things like "money is tight" think most of the rest of us are stupid? Based on how many people parrot those lines despite all evidence, maybe we are communally that stupid.

Money is tight for humans. While the sea level has gone down for everybody over the decades, businesses have not shared a proportional level of financial suffering compared to humans, by a long shot.

See also, from a number of versions of this story around a few months ago:

For Some Recent Graduates, the A.I. Job Apocalypse May Already Be Here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44146650

And conversely:

The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44136117

soon there will be no job market

Actually...

where is the non-paywall link?

Looks like there isn't one, so we need to bury the submission. If anyone knows of a way to read the article without a subscription, please reply here or email us at hn@ycombinator.com and we'll restore it.

Honestly college grads esp tech and finance are well overpaid, I feel the new generation has crazy expectations of earning FAANG salaries. Hopefully the current economy will continue to increase wages of the blue collar workers and bring down the high end to more normal salaries.

Yeah and then they can enjoy a future where the previous generation earned twice as much money which was itself worth twice as much. Have fun buying a house kids!

I actually worked in the 90s and 2000s and software was not a popular career because it didn't pay much. Programmers were nerds who did it for the tech, not the money. Ir you say they earned twice as much you have no idea, I had room mates until I was mid thirties.

Software wasn't paying astronomical salaries back then but it was paying at least as much as any other engineering discipline. Sometime in the 2000s, engineering salaries stayed normal and software salaries skyrocketed.

It was the first dotcom boom and VC money that caused the inflation of developer salaries.

Prior to that, software development was just another cost center office job like accounting for most companies.

I worked in B2B companies from 2000 to 2020 across 5 out of the 6 companies there was a direct line between our work and net new revenue.

The one job I did have during they time period where I was a cost c center was when I was an architect over integrating acquired companies systems as part of a PE rollup strategy (never again).

Those other 5 weren’t anything glamorous - bill processing, fleet management with ruggedized mobile devices, railroad train car repair software and two health care related companies.

I knew to stay away from cost center jobs after my first job out of college when looking for my second job in 1999. Cost center jobs hardly ever pay well. That’s one reason I run away from any company that is run by PE companies that are more interested in “efficiencies” than growth and I’ve been offered a couple of jobs as an architect for those companies.

Since 2020 I have worked in consulting companies where there was a direct line from my billable hours to revenue and indirect attributions from “enablement” projects 6)/4 influenced the company.

I entered the job market in 1996. By 2001 doing regular old enterprise dev, I was making $70k in Atlanta GA. The median income then was $44K nationwide.

I was able to get a 2500 square foot house built the next year for $170K.

With how profitable these businesses are, they're clearly worth it. What, should all the money just go to the 1% owning class?

No its going to regular hourly workers who are seeing the largest pay rises in this market.

Citation very much needed.

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-...

Everyone is pushing trade school and blue collar work. You think their wages are going to increase with new supply? No. I feel like the powers that be said “learn to code” to increase supply. Now it’s “learn to weld” and once the supply increases they’ll bust their unions.

I'd gladly do this for $50,000/yr given the chance. I have not been given the chance.

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