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AI is hitting entry-level jobs hardest, Stanford study finds

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/08/ai-is-hitting-entry-level-jobs-hardest-stanford-study-finds/
47•Brajeshwar•1h ago

Comments

joey9prints•1h ago
I built a digital internship for this very reason, to help the pre-entry level interns get work experience. Given ai has mostly replaced their admin work load. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48914589
jdw64•49m ago
I wish there were studies on when this situation will normalize. Will the lost jobs ever come back? Or not?
nemomarx•37m ago
What kind of study could predict the future like this? Every technological change is different each time, I think.

For example - at first ATMs created more jobs in banking because employees could move to more complex services. But banks are back to downsizing after further advancements streamlined those services too, aiui.

vineyardmike•30m ago
Those jobs aren’t coming back as-is, because AI isn’t going anywhere. Job markets change over time.

I’ve just started transitioning my career closer to management, so I develop/manage roughly 50/50. At this point, if I had to manage a tight budget, I’d rather have an entry level salary as tokens for a senior engineer.

We’ll need a way, as a society, to help new adults transitions from education to productive employee. But individual companies don’t have aligned incentives.

bcjdjsndon•24m ago
> But individual companies don’t have aligned incentives.

Be realistic. Would you start a business and risk it's viability giving away free training to the public? No, and neither would anyone else.

dominotw•22m ago
are you incharge of making those decisions at work?

maybe govt can tax ai companies and use that money to prearm juniors with tokens that only they can use.

augment_me•29m ago
You have market theory saying that at some point, you will not have enough seniors because no juniors were trained. So seniors will become more and more expensive due to lack of supply. At some point, it will be cheaper to take the risk and train the junior entry person again, and things will stabilize out. The sad part is that there will be a generation of 10 years or so of lost juniors while seniors are abundant.
bcjdjsndon•26m ago
Did horse and cart operators ever get their jobs back?
drop_star•25m ago
Ask the people that worked on printing presses
jeremyw•47m ago
Direct link: https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/publication/canaries-in-...
Zigurd•46m ago
The article assumes that jobs that can be automated are vulnerable. But in the postmortem of the AI driven layoffs so far, it's more that expectations about AI and productivity are driving the job cuts.

In other words shareholders and senior management are being shown the appearance of expectations about AI being met, whether or not it's working. Entry-level jobs are an obvious place to look things that can be cut to create an AI budget.

jordanb•41m ago
Yep if a hiring manager wants to open a req for a junior, before AI he'd get praise for being tight with budget and hiring someone cheap and trainable.

Now he gets asked: if a junior can do the work why aren't you using AI? So instead of opening the req he says to the team "we need to figure out how to make AI do more."

bcjdjsndon•21m ago
> Entry-level jobs are an obvious place to look things that can be cut to create an AI budget.

Kitchen potwasher, day labourer, apprentice welder etc none of these entry level jobs are affected by an LLM. But nobody on HN works in those industries.... connection maybe?

tfrancisl•14m ago
It's not what the article or study are about. Theyre about entry level white collar jobs.
bluefirebrand•13m ago
I think "junior software engineer" is more like the entry level job that people on HN care about
suriyaG•36m ago
this is a super non-popular take on HN.

but the entry-level job market has always been tough.

with AI, outside the big tech world, it is hard to justify hiring entry level engineers as the time to train them ( 1 year+ ) to be productive enough is such a drag on the seniors, when the agents deliver things more care and more edge cases.

cosmic_cheese•8m ago
From personal experience, back in the 2010s it was particularly harsh for those with a non-standard background. What few "opportunities" that existed were a handful of unpaid or grossly underpaid internships which were closed off to those who weren't students or recent graduates. Everybody wanted employees who were ready to start pumping out code with little or no training.

That's not to diminish how much more difficult it's become since then but breaking into the industry has never been easy.

CBLT•4m ago
I've been telling people the same thing. The tech industry has been cargo-culting "scaling the organization" where people are rewarded for org size. That zeitgeist has ended, and we've not even overcorrected much the other way.
d_burfoot•30m ago
Partly this is because the big companies are diverting vast amounts of money towards building data centers, instead of hiring new grads. I expect young people who learn AI skills will be fine, once the data center spending binge is over.
dominotw•26m ago
they really dont need to divert. They are sitting on historical unfathomable amounts of money.
boshalfoshal•4m ago
What does "learning AI skills" even mean? You're typing into a prompt box. You are not applying any skill, the model is. At best, the skill you need is discernment about _what_ to type in this magical box. But if that gets cheaper and the output of your company doesn't necessarily scale horizontally that well. Why would I need as many people as before?
Alien1Being•15m ago
AI VENDOR HYPE
ofjcihen•15m ago
So we have a crunch of expiring/retiring workers on the senior end and a cutoff of the flow of new talent from the junior end.

They’d better pray that we see automation gains above and beyond what we’ve seen so far or else we’ll be paying the price in a single generation.

bluefirebrand•4m ago
My really big worry is that the people making these choices just do not care about a single thing beyond this single generation

Not a psychologist but my take on most of the wealthy people in the world is they are essentially narcissistic hedonists. They only care about growing wealth as a means to the end of maximizing the amount of fun they can have and to keep their egos happy that they have the most.

They don't seem to care about the future at all

boshalfoshal•7m ago
To the surprise of who, exactly? Sometimes it feels like HN has never used an AI model past ChatGPT in 2022. Modern AI is so capable nowadays that it _does_ obviate most of the work you'd normally give an entry level person.

Im mostly speaking about software engineering, but the "juniors" I've seen be hired now are basically the equivalent of mid (maybe even low senior) levels of yesteryear. AI is most certainly raising the bar.

fny•7m ago
The implosion in junior quality exacerbates this.

The cohort that started during COVID were first knee-capped by remote classes and exams, and then they lobotomized themselves with ChatGPT.

1970-01-01•3m ago
When do we declare this status-quo? It was expected for several years, and new data is just piling up with the same conclusions from the last study.

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