AI is wiping out entry-level jobs | Hacker News Reader

AI is wiping out entry-level jobs

fortune.com

41 pointsBrajeshwar82 comments

"At its core, the goal of education is to prepare individuals for employment and advancement"

No. It should help a person develop into a free, thoughtful, well-rounded human being. Training narrowly for current market demands can become obsolete quickly. The question should not be: Should education have economic value? But rather: Should economic value be the highest or only value of education?

Of course, engineering etc might have more immediately applicable skills but there is so much value in the Humboldtian ideal of education that merely focusing on economic output is intellectually short-sighted and ultimately impoverishes both individuals and society.

> a free, thoughtful, well-rounded human being

What do these words even mean, and why should taxpayers pay for that? Is there any institution today that teaches you to be a “well-rounded human being?” Do students graduate being able to hunt for food, grow crops, or build a house?

There might be great value in whatever type of “education” you’re talking about. But “education” as a public, taxpayer supported activity is about the economy.

The main focus of education as a taxpayer supported activity is about the perpetuation of the state. The fact that a healthy state relies on a healthy economy is a constraint that helps shape the aims of public education. Other constraints are about culture, values, and understanding the government to the degree that the government can count on having a future generation of legislature.

One of my favorites on this topic, the 1963 "A Talk to Teachers", by James Baldwin.

https://www.zinnedproject.org/materials/baldwin-talk-to-teac...

Whose culture, whose values, and whose understanding of the government? You’re describing the function of public education in a place like China, or the U.S. before the 1960s. Yeah, the Puritans invented public schools to make sure students learned the bible. But it’s not 1635 anymore. In a multicultural society, school only has an economic function.

I would have guessed that a very large fraction of the US's decisionmakers still want education to prepare young people for citizenship, not just labor-force participation.

“Citizenship” is an empty label that we use out of habit. It’s not attached to any substantive concepts that schools can meaningfully socialize into children. Where “citizenship” is a paper label and defined mainly in terms of economic relations and pop culture references, what “preparation” is there for schools to do?

I’m reminded of Joe Biden delivering a word salad response to a similar question: https://www.c-span.org/clip/white-house-event/user-clip-bide.... This isn’t a criticism of Biden. There’s not a meaningful answer.

If instead of "prepare young people for citizenship", I had written, "teach young people things useful for maintaining and improving their community and their country", would your reply be essentially the same?

Think about it on a micro level. Do you work better when your coworkers are thoughtful, or when they're thoughtless?

Now multiply that by a billion, and that's why it's good for the economy.

All of my thoughtless coworkers are still university educated though

My guess is thoughtfulness is either something you're born with, or it's something you learn much younger than university

That’s the other function of the university system, and perhaps the primary one - the admissions system designates incoming students as talented, bright, etc. Whatever happens in class is a secondary matter.

It’s imperfect of course. But “we produce great graduates” should mostly be understood as “we pick great incoming students.”

Beautifully said. Well rounded, thoughtful people improve life for all of us. Of course, we also need practical skills to make a living. But we can have both, they are not mutually exclusive.

The expected a priori utility of any social intervention is strictly negative… even if “more thoughtful” does check out in reality for higher ed, $700 billion and 15million man years yearly is rather expensive.

What does “thoughtful” mean? If you think that includes telling flattering lies—“everyone is beautiful, everyone is smart”—then I would say that makes things a lot less efficient. It’s much more valuable to have coworkers who are brutally honest and realistic.

>But “education” as a public, taxpayer supported activity is about the economy

It sounds harsh and maybe a bit gauche, but it's true. A literate and numerate citizenry helps the nation advance. That's the selling point for widespread public education. Airy ideals sound great, but that's also how ideology slides into the public school.

> What do these words even mean, and why should taxpayers pay for that?

Yeah why would you want your neighbours to be smart and well rounded when they can be dumb and obedient corporate drones instead.

We're already seeing the effect of this "nothing is useful unless it makes ME money" mentality, I personally don't want more of it

> What do these words even mean, and why should taxpayers pay for that?

Let's close social security, healthcare, pensions, it's expensive and a net negative to the economy. All we need is AI and defense actually!

> smart and well rounded

Smart is something you’re born with, and “well rounded” is a meaningful nonce phrase.

Society has an interest in its citizens not being single minded sociopathic worker drones. A democracy especially functions best when its citizens know history, philosophy, literature, art... The kinds of things that help us understand and make sense of each other.

> No. It should help a person develop into a free, thoughtful, well-rounded human being.

That was the goal maybe in the past when only rich people could afford an education.

I think the March of Capitalism has been (at least in part) to make the luxuries of yore become commodified middle-class must-haves.

150 years ago, only the lords could afford a wash-up man, a laundry man, a cook, a tailor, a night out at the theater. Now we have airfryers, instant pots, fast fashion, washing machines, dishwashers and Netflix.

What does that look like for a Humboldtian education?

Labor became too expensive to afford than technology obsoleting household labor. They can find better opportunities. Currently labor is too cheap due to the housing crisis and poor urban planning. Paradoxically labor will become more expensive once structural issues are fixed.

how many people are going to have to suffer greatly, and for how long, before those structural issues are fixed?

Do not confuse the purpose of higher education with trade schools, and do not assume that trade schools are merely for blue-collar jobs.

Don't worry, we're fast approaching that again.

Why should that not be the goal for everyone, rich and poor?

And why are so few rich and so many poor?

Because how you spend your time is different when you need to work for a living and when you do not. If that's not transparent, this can't really be discussed. Spending 4 years and $300,000 is "fine" if you have a trust fund and "extremely stupid without a return-on-investment" if you don't.

Uhm, why does the individual pay $300,000, sounds extremely backwards?

That’s not a fact everywhere.

Because the poor will suffer tremendously if they are ill equipped for the job market. If we want to have education have a strong humanistic focus then we should start by changing society in other places. Or we'll get unemployed and suffering well rounded human beings.

Regardless, at the moment education does not seem to be doing great on either the humanistic or "pragmatic" axis.

Whats the goal now

Sounds nice but resources are limited for many people. Getting an employment focused education using their limited resources is the more likely way to put them in stable orbit so that maybe theyll be able to broaden with less employment focused education later.

I actually had this very same discussion/argument with my mother on Mother’s Day regarding my young child. I want a well rounded, full childhood of experiences of all sorts, exposing them to a vast variety of things in an attempt to establish a broad understanding while allowing their interests to flourish broadly rather than singularly focusing their “Primary” talents with a narrower focus.

Her argument is to capitalize on their primary gift(s) while I, while recognizing those particular gifts, want to expose them to a vast variety of experiences and challenges in a broad way. The world changes fast and most recently I have found that the broader experiences and different challenges I have faced in my life give me a distinct advantage over others in my ability to think critically.

Now, there is a bit of truth to pushing a student sometimes, and a parent/guardian will need to understand when those instances are called for, but I see too many parent pushing certain academics or the obvious one - sports - to the point that life is not experienced to a detriment

Kids go through changes in how they perceive their engagement with activities. At a very young age, they have little self-consciousness and will happily spend lots of time engaging with things they cannot do well. As they get older, frustration sets in sometimes when they cannot do something perfectly the first time they try it. I think some of the music programs, like Suzuki, try to take advantage of this by getting kids up-to-speed on the violin (or whatever) before they enter the phase where frustration dulls their interest. No parent really wants their kid to enter the cycle of repeatedly trying and quitting activities because of frustration. It eventually leads to a sort of apathy and lack of willingness to engage with things they perceive might be frustrating. This is a hard line to walk sometimes. I guess I'm just saying that you sometimes need to "push" them to remain engaged so that they can work past the frustration. It is a skill to learn that you have the ability to overcome the difficult initial learning curve of a lot of activities, sports, etc. If you can help imbue them with that skill, it can lead them to have a love for learning -- or a least not a fear of trying new things, which ultimately is the skill that can enable them to "flourish broadly," in my opinion.

It might be a false choice. Why not find a way to balance, as best you can, both broad experiences and diving deeply into their primary gifts?

I mean this is a nice sentiment but it's both not only unrealistic for the vast majority of people, it's something that only a privilege few can actually achieve.

People go to school because they want a better life, the only path to a truly better life in the USA is money. It's really hard to blame students when they've been brought up in a society that has been extremely rotten for their entire lives.

Maybe. Maybe education should be about focusing you in a field, at least the higher you go. But you can focusing on the field learning about how to operate there, of just getting the skills needed to work.

When I was at university (and the years after) some people where saying that university should give you the skills to hold a job, mostly talking about programming in that case (computer engineering degree).

But as AI has shown us those skills (programming) are the first to stop being useful. Learning engineering, architecture, how to think programmatically, ... all these skills are the ones that will survive the culling.

Trade schools. Done. Higher education should remain higher education. Wanting to turn higher education into trade schools is silly when we already have trade schools.

Sorry, but that’s some ivory tower wishful thinking.

> No. It should help a person develop into a free, thoughtful, well-rounded human being.

This is the goal of a primary education.

But society need us to hand down collective knowledge. Economic output is one way to measure that. But more generally, if everyone only consumed education for their personal edification, we'd lose the ability to financially support education in the first place.

This is a solved problem already.

We already have trade schools. Do not assume they are merely for blue-collar jobs.

>No. It should help a person develop into a free, thoughtful, well-rounded human being.

That's been the refrain for longer than either of us have been alive. But free, thoughtful, well-rounded humans tend to starve when they can't find gainful employment and start paying rent. If your first concern isn't practical, no one should even listen to you.

>But rather: Should economic value be the highest or only value of education?

Allow me to translate: I'm rich enough that I don't personally have to be concerned with earning a living, so why don't you enroll in advanced underwater basket-weaving with me at $3400/credit-hour? You can get a student loan for it, and since you'll pay it back it doesn't really matter that it's not dischargeable in bankruptcy.

No, it should help a person achieve their purpose and be happy.

The level of pushback you're receiving to this honestly makes me weep for the society we find ourselves in.

I grew up expecting the future would be much like what Captain Jean-Luc Picard described in First Contact: "The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity."

Somehow, that vision of the future seems farther away than ever. We're actively becoming LESS Federation, more Ferengi. That's not a world which holds any appeal for me.

I also got quite a few upvotes and agreeable comments. So it's not all black :)

Remember that in Star Trek, before the starfleet, there was the eugenics war/third world war/great war. Maybe we could skip that one.

We've been through this before. The GFC in 2008 wiped out entry-level jobs for millenials who did everything "right" (or, at least, what they were told to do) by going to college and accumulating student debt [1].

Those graduates ended up doing lower-paid and often non-career jobs like service works. The cliche in the early 2010s was college grads being baristas for a reason.

Those jobs never came back. And it's essentially destroyed that generation who are under crippling debt with no security and no prospects. People in tech did well in the 2010s. Nobody else did. So, on HN a lot of people didn't see this because HN skews towards tech but this was really destructive for society as a whole. We're still feeling the affects of it. It was a key factor in the 2016 election.

It's going to get worse. What people should really understand that there's, so far, only one product for AI and that is labor displacement and wage suppression when we already have historically low savings rate (ie a buffer) [2] and an affordability crisis that is also only going to get worse. How do we have a functioning economy if nobody has any money?

[1]: https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:...

[2]: https://usafacts.org/articles/why-arent-americans-saving-as-...

Back to the barter system

It is funny I was a dishwasher for a while $20K income somehow living on that. Then get into tech 5x it and now more poor/in a lot more debt, my own dumb decisions but yeah.

Like the people that win the lottery and end up broke that's me.

> if nobody has any money?

This is clearly false, the K shaped economy framing does ring true to me and you are describing the lower half of the K. Those millenials (and younger) with crippling student loans, no savings, and unmarketable skills are a major voting block and will definitely have an impact on policy. The size of the impact will be determined by their level of anger and ability to essentially convince the upper half of the K to go along with wealth transfers (traditionally not easy to do).

I don’t think it was a key factor in the 2016 election. It’s mostly older people (older than millennials in 2016) who vote.

Not a problem, LLMs can be very efficient at controlling social unrest.

GFC? Gordon Food Service?

Global financial crisis presumably

>It's going to get worse. What people should really understand that there's, so far, only one product for AI and that is labor displacement and wage suppression when we already have historically low savings rate (ie a buffer) [2] and an affordability crisis that is also only going to get worse. How do we have a functioning economy if nobody has any money?

Not only that, wages have stagnated for a few decades, interest rates have been through the floor so nobody can make any money in savings, inflation through the roof, people with billions aren't paying taxes....

We don't have a functioning economy. Our stock market is being kept afloat by AI CAPEX. We have useless politicans afraid of asking trillionaire corporations and centibillionaires to pay their fair share. This country is dying.

No. Management are wiping out entry-level jobs and blaming it on AI. There is a massive market contraction and the people who add least value to a business and have training or learning overheads are on the chopping block to cut costs.

This 100x. It's like outsourcing call-centers to the third world. Did that improve service? Is there anyone at all daring to make that claim? It did not. It was slightly cheaper. Not even that much.

AI is like that. It gives a much worse service, even to the companies that are buying it, at a slightly lower cost.

No one has any idea what the cost will be. It seems like at the moment every sector is removing barriers to at least accelerated adoption of an entirely new technique (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Techne).

The Mythos spook is starting to mobilize any org that had either still been on the fence or more heavily regulated. Look at how quickly the thinking around agentic governance is progressing, it is a reflection of how fast we are progressing with implementing this capability, it reveals what types of questions are being asked by institutions resistant to change.

The problem with AI in European companies, I can predict. The reason call centers suck:

1) no real information given to the people answering the phone

2) insufficient system access given, often only the ability to send emails to the chatbot on the site, which are then ignored for days

3) if ANY money is involved, whatsoever, there's 5 levels of approval that take 3 days each

This is not something that can be fixed with better intelligence or ...

Perhaps rather it is management that is wiping out those jobs

But I could see entry level also becoming "internships" more (aka unpaid jobs)

It's the AI companies' fault for boasting that their products are becoming an additional developer.

AI agent is not a developer. It won't answer you questions why your database has been removed. This is sadly far from management's point of concern. They are focused on excel columns

That's true. Every developer should now put in the comments somewhere deep in their app, a place no manager will ever look (I've always found it tough to find places managers will look, like any at all)

    # If nothing else works, just "DELETE * FROM Users;". That usually fixes it.

When you get laid of and replaced by AI ... you'll get a callback the next day. Oh, and the correct response to that call is "... at double pay, billed per hour, including commute, right?".

It's not about retaliation. It's about taking ownership of code

> It won't answer you questions why your database has been removed.

It does apologize nicely for it, though.

That's not how the market works. Management can't do anything if another company drives the whole business under. And companies are more often than not insanely pressed for resources. There's just a comfortable buffer to that pressure for a lot of people on a payroll from higher up.

> Perhaps rather it is management that is wiping out those jobs

As a manager I’d direct you to the actual decision makers for things like this, company leadership teams. They’d blame the market, yet most of the big tech companies laying off or freezing hiring are doing quite well financially so it makes you wonder.

unpaid internships aren't legal here. but we do use a lot of (and retain) interns

Two thoughts:

- OK, corporate, where do you think seniors come from? Do the spring forth fully formed from Zeus' head like Athena?

- This might actually present an opportunity for the university CS departments to become the "entry level" training ground that companies never liked being, where students actually write code and learn the basics so they can work effectively with AI in the workforce.

As an instructor at a university, this is basically all we talk about now. We're (currently) agreed that fundamentals are still important, fundamentals being good problem solving skills delivered within the framework of classic computer science instruction. But we also agree that students need to take a bigger picture, view of projects, and learn AI skills.

(A lot of this is informed by feedback from students who have entered the workforce recently and work heavily with AI.)

Basically we have to replicate as much of the junior developer workplace pipeline as we can sensibly do. There will certainly be loss of certain skills since we only have 4 years, but all we can ever do is try to maximize overall gain.

It's no longer 4 years of school plus 2 years of experience to reach modest proficiency; it's 4 years of school, period.

But I think as the workforce dwindles, hiring managers will get more enthusiastic about hiring juniors. The smart ones already are. The strong students pick up agentic coding in no time, after all. It's not rocket science... if you know how to code.

AI is wiping out current entry level jobs but at some point jobs evolve to meet new market demands. There will be new entry level jobs in areas where AI and automation hasn't reached yet and then the cycle will start again. This is normal but it does suck whenever it gets to a trough.

>but at some point jobs evolve to meet new market demands.

Possibly. If you believe in the economic equivalent of directed evolution, then no matter what humans do, the economy will tip itself towards creating employment opportunities within the broader circumstances.

But if AI plays out the way some hope (and there's no reason to suppose this is impossible), then it will become a substitute (and likely a cheaper one) for every human employment there is. The economy will not evolve to make more jobs "somehow". We actually see this in evolution too, where some species or another without seeing any particular catastrophe just sort of withers away because bad evolutionary decisions made previously make it impossible to reach new environmental niches which might support the population. The so called "path dependence".

I love this article!

It puts in stark, unabashed terms the perspectives of the “Robber Baron” class of US “thought leaders” and offers a detailed outline of the roadmap desired by such power players.

It is, without question, the most useful citation for the coming societal unrest which is fomenting. Remember the attacks on Sam Altman? The biggest media driven message from that was “tone down the rhetoric” and this absolutely amps it up past 11, as Spinal Tap would describe it.

It’s incredible and for those with a worthwhile education - myself being one - I’m glad it exists. During incarceration on a bogus Felony charge, I lucked into a copy of “The Red and the Black” by Stendhal. It prompted me to do a bit more study of the French Revolution after release. This article makes me laugh out loud. There is no better explanation for why the pitchforks and torches are a tool of the oppressed with little to no functional voice in their utility or worth or dignity in society.

Great job Mikey!

>Michael Hansen is CEO of Cengage, the global edtech company. He was previously CEO of Elsevier Health Services and held senior positions at Bertelsmann, Proxicom and BCG.

>Colleges Must Redesign

I'd say colleges are even more screwed than entry level jobs. Wouldn't count on them saving the day here

Embed experience directly into the curriculum

I think this is called "work study" and it is already available.

https://studentaid.gov/articles/8-things-federal-work-study/

5 years from now, we are going to see management lamenting that there are no seniors to scale new products, because they never hired juniors to grow the seniors from.

I don't complain, I think current seniors are going to be showered with money just to come work for company XY.

https://www.reddit.com/r/MMORPG/comments/1rfga08/is_there_a_...

1. AI wipes out entery level jobs. Cost of tokens used will make you spend more especially overtime. Keep in mind, right now we're probably in the era of cheap tokens

2. We rehire base employees at lower wages. Move AI to hire level tasks. AI is now doing the work we said humans will do. Talent drains to other compaines. AI can do certain things every well but can't put it together. Start rehiring talent at lower wages

3. In the end, AI turns out to really be artificial wage competition designed to drive worke salaries down. All of this is subsidized by the government, fund managers and the environment. Billionaires leave earth in spaceship.

PS I love AI, but it's whose hands AI is in that determines its use and benefits.

is that not the goal? I mean, its not even suppose to stop at entry level.

One week ago, the same publication covered the opposite argument from a16z, stating that "The AI job apocalypse is ‘unhelpful marketing, bad economics and worse history" - it's too early to declare which way this is going. https://fortune.com/2026/05/07/ai-job-apocalypse-unhelpful-m...

Whatever gets them clicks

Exactly, this is the real purpose of news and media. They are for-profit businesses. If anyone treats any of them as neutral altruist sources of real information then they're deluding themselves.

"remember the Maine"

> A long time ago, a client and a friend were both subjects of some inaccurate speculation in a Gawker story. One of them emailed Mr. Daulerio to deny it and was told by a surprisingly honest Mr. Daulerio that he “could give a fuck” about the actual truth of the story—and that my client and friend were welcome to cover their asses how they liked. And then he dropped a line that now drips with irony considering how things have ended up. “I don’t know, man,“ he said, “It’s all professional wrestling.”

https://observer.com/2016/03/goodbye-and-good-riddance-gawke...

> Be a pre-AI engineer

> Watch industry stop hiring entry-level jobs

> Wait 20 years for AI slop to reach tipping point, civilization collapsing

> Be only one left that knows how to debug.

-> Profit.

The whole article feels like AI slop.

No it doesn’t. Judging by a few of your other comments, you probably just don’t like the flavor of this particular kool-aid. This kind of low-effort, ad hominem comment is typical human-generated slop.

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