At the company where I work (one of the FAANGs), there is suddenly a large number of junior IC roles opening up. This despite the trend of the last few years to only hire L5 and above.
My read of the situation:
- junior level jobs were sacrificed as cost cutting measures, to allow larger investment in AI
- some analysts read this as “the junior levels are being automated! Evidence: there is some AI stuff, and there are no junior roles!”
- but it was never true, and now the tide is turning.
I’m not sure I ever heard anybody in my company claim that the dearth of junior openings was due to to “we are going to automate the juniors”. I think all of that narrative was external analysts trying to read the tea leaves too hard. And, wannabes like Marc Benioff pretending to be tech leaders, but that’s a helpful reminder that Benioff is simply “not serious people”.
ChrisbyMe 57 minutes ago [-]
Agree, the death of the junior SWE is greatly exaggerated. (At least in FAANG)
Maybe there was some idea that if AI actually solved software engineering in a few years you wouldn't need any more SWEs. Industry is moving away from that idea this year.
groos 43 minutes ago [-]
The death, maybe, but not the lack of hiring. At $BIGCORP, where I work, I haven't seen an externally hired junior dev in at least 2 years in an extended team of ~100 people.
Ifkaluva 35 minutes ago [-]
My prediction is that you will see that trend reverse soon. Have the teams become top-heavy?
dragonwriter 28 minutes ago [-]
My prediction is that you won't see it reverse too soon, but that AI has nothing to do with it. It's just (for now, until the AI bubble itself bursts) a convenient scapegoat for people who haven't come to grips with the broad economic malaise outside of, but not caused by, AI.
scuff3d 13 minutes ago [-]
In addition the industry has been going through a massive correction post Covid, and all the free money drying up. Any impact AI is having is all mixed up with that.
The expectations for juniors, and how seniors work with them, will certainly change, but it's way too early to be making doomsday predictions.
Of course, that's easy for me to say when I'm not the one who just spent thousands of dollars and 4 years of their to land in an environment where getting a job is going to be challenging to say the least.
thinkingtoilet 16 minutes ago [-]
At my company, we're actively lowering our off-shore dev count in favor or on-shore devs. We're small but we're growing so we're hiring about one junior dev a year. This alone doesn't mean anything, but adding another data point to the conversation.
jajuuka 22 minutes ago [-]
That narrative never sat right with me. That all these companies decided that AI was going to replace humans suddenly? Just an obvious pit to fall in to and one that conveniently feeds the AI is taking your job meme. Your read makes MUCH more sense.
Interesting. At least some of this has to be the bullwhip effect modeled with employers as retail, universities as suppliers, and graduating students as further back suppliers. The 4 year lead time in production of employable labour causes a whip crack backwards through the supply chain when there is a sudden shift at the retail end.
It's true that a lot of things which were once junior contributor things are now things I'd rather do, but my scarce resource is attention. And humans have a sufficiently large context window and self-agentic behaviour that they're still superior to a machine.
papichulo4 6 minutes ago [-]
Saying that "we're firing to use AI" makes you look like you have ROI on your AI investments and you're keeping up.
In fact there are possibly other macro-economic effects at play:
1. The inability to deduct engineering for tax purposes in the year they were spent: "Under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) from 2017, the law requires companies to amortize (spread out) all domestic R&D expenses, including software development costs, over five years, starting in tax years after December 31, 2021, instead of deducting them immediately. This means if you spend $100,000 on software development in 2023, you can only deduct 1/5th (or $20,000) each year over five years"
2. End of zero-interest rates.
3. Pandemic era hiring bloat - let's be honest we hired too many non-technical people, companies are still letting attrition take place (~10%/yr where I am) instead of firing.
4. Strong dollar. My company is moving seats to Canada, Ireland, and India instead of hiring in the US. Getting 1.5-2 engineers in Ireland instead of 1 senior on the US west coast.
Otherwise AI is an accelerator to make more money, increase profits and efficiency. Yes it has a high cost, but so does/did Cloud, every SaaS product we've bought/integrated.
viccis 1 hours ago [-]
It doesn't help that a lot of the graduates I've talked to or interviewed seemed to treat a compsci degree as nothing more than a piece of paper they needed to get to be handed a high paying tech job. If you're motivated enough to learn enough job skills to be useful on your own then I guess you can treat your degree that way. But if you got through 4 years through cheating and minmaxing the easiest route possible and wound up with no retained skills to show for it? Congrats, you played yourself and fell for the "college is useless" meme. Coulda just skipped the student loans and bombed interviews without the 4 year degree.
worldsavior 28 minutes ago [-]
> Coulda just skipped the student loans and bombed interviews without the 4 year degree.
I think college is useless for the ones out there whom already know how to code, collaborate and other skills the industry is looking for. Many out there are developing high level projects on GitHub and other places without having any degree.
Also, most of the stuff you learn in college has absolutely no relation to what you will do in the industry.
trhway 48 minutes ago [-]
It has happened several times - junior web devs can't find jobs, junior Java devs can't find jobs, etc... usually after a surge wave in the related tech area. We had large overall surge in tech around Covid time, and as usually there is some adjustment now.
ivape 33 minutes ago [-]
The dotcom bubble had comp sci lecture halls with students overflowing into the hallway. I don’t blame people, it’s migratory. Jobs and resources are there, so, go there.
Then we blame the other group of students for not going there and picking majors where the jobs aren’t.
We need some kind of apprenticeship program honestly, or AI will solve the thing entirely and let people follow their honest desires and live reasonably in the world.
tsycho 2 minutes ago [-]
Evidence I can give in support of the article:
- very few teams have headcount, or expecting to grow
- the number of interview requests get has dropped off a cliff.
So BigTech is definitely hiring less IMHO.
That said, I am not sure if it's only or even primarily due to replacement by AI. I think there's generally a lot of uncertainty about the future, and the AI investment bubble popping, and hence companies are being extra cautious about costs that repeat (employees) vs costs that can be stopped whenever they want (buying more GPUs).
And in parallel, they are hoping that "agents" will reduce some of the junior hiring need, but this hasn't happened at scale in practice, yet.
I would expect junior SWE hiring to slowly rebound, but likely stabilize at a slower pace than in the pre-layoff years.
llmslave 1 hours ago [-]
My senior SWE job at FAANG has essentially turned into prompting Opus 4.5.
There is almost no reason to delegate the work, especially low level grunt work.
People disputing this are either in denial, or lacking the skill set to leverage AI.
One or two more Opus releases from anthropic and this field is cooked
drivebyhooting 38 minutes ago [-]
What kind of work do you do that is simple enough that can be accomplished solely through prompting?
llmslave 23 minutes ago [-]
distributed systems, log diving, deployments, etc
ivape 26 minutes ago [-]
The golden handcuff type where you update documentation with new UI elements.
llmslave 22 minutes ago [-]
: )
petersellers 35 minutes ago [-]
username checks out
bojan 38 minutes ago [-]
It seems you've registered this account a couple of months ago only to basically repeat this opinion over and over (sprinkled with some anti-science opinions on top).
Really weird.
trhway 25 minutes ago [-]
great engineering effort was spent to make software at FAANG built on clear service oriented modular architectures, and thus easy to develop for. Add to that good organization of process where engineers spend most of their time doing actual dev work.
Enterprise software is different beast - large fragile [quasi]monoliths, good luck for [current] AI to make a meaningful fixes and/or feature development in it. And even if AI manages to speed up actual development multiple times, the impact would be still small as actual development takes relatively small share of overall work in enterprise software. Of course it will come here too, just somewhat later than at places like FAANG.
causal 1 hours ago [-]
No it's not. There is no shortage of tech problems to solve and there are no tech jobs that AI can do alone.
AI is sucking up investment and AI hype is making executives stupid. Hundreds of billions of dollars that used to go towards hiring is now going towards data centers. But AI is not doing tech jobs.
These headlines do nothing but increase the hype by pointing towards the wrong cause entirely.
It might be a question of where the seniors put their time: coaching juniors or working with AI tools.
dkobia 12 minutes ago [-]
I had the privilege of working with a great SWE intern this year. Their fresh ideas and strong work ethic made a real impact. Experienced engineers need this kind of energy.
Yes many over-rely on LLMs, but new engineers see possibilities we've stopped noticing and ask the questions we've stopped asking. Experience is invaluable, but it can quietly calcify into 'this is just how things are done.'
rgreeko42 16 minutes ago [-]
Outsourcing, end of ZIRP, end of R&D tax credit.
Macro-economic conditions are pushing companies to do more with fewer people. AI might be helping with this, but it's pure marketing BS to blame it for the state of tech employment.
techblueberry 2 hours ago [-]
Not that like I think one should put too much stock in head lines. But "Wiping Out"
seems to translate to a 6.1% unemployment rate and 16.5% underemployment rate?
Computer science is not getting wiped out by AI. Entry level jobs exist, though people may need to reset their expectations (note that median job being $80k) from getting a $150k job out of college - that was always the exception rather than the average.
There are average jobs out there that people with a "want to be on the coast and $150k" or "must be remote so I don't relocate" are thumbing their nose at.
gruez 2 hours ago [-]
>I think the numbers you are arguing with here are for all employees, not just fresh graduates.
If you click through to new york fed's website, the unemployment figures are 4.8% for "recent college graduates (aged 22-27)", 2.7% for all college graduates, and 4.0% for all workers. That's elevated, but hardly "wiping out".
causal 1 hours ago [-]
It would be justified if AI were actually the cause, but this article does nothing to prove that. The only "tech jobs" that can even demonstrate direct replacement are call-center type roles. Everything else is just loosely blamed on AI, which is a convenient scapegoat as billions of dollars of investment are redirected from hiring to building data centers.
griffzhowl 1 hours ago [-]
The article refers to this article from May, which claims a 50% reduction in graduate tech hiring since pre-pandemic levels, 25% reduction since 2023
The 'recent graduates' quoted in this article all seem to be from (for lack of a better description) 'developing countries' hoping to get a (again, generalizing) 'high-paying FAANG job'.
My initial reaction would be that these people, unfortunately, got scammed, and that the scammers-promising-abundant-high-paying-jobs have now found a convenient scapegoat?
AI has done nothing so far to reduce the backlog of junior developer positions from where I can see, but, yeah, that's all in "Europoor" and "EU residency required" territory, so what do I know...
Kolonie 1 hours ago [-]
For the last few decades its been offshoring that filled the management agenda in the way AI does today so it doesn't seem surprising to me that the first gap would be in the places you might offshore a testing department to, etc.
ZeroConcerns 1 hours ago [-]
Offshoring has the exact same benefits/problems that AI has (i.e: it's cheap, yet you have to specify everything in excruciating detail) and has not been a significant factor in junior hiring, like, ever, in my experience.
squidbeak 58 minutes ago [-]
> AI has done nothing so far to reduce the backlog of junior developer positions from where I can see
"This article was amended on 26 June 2025 to clarify that the link between AI and the decline in graduate jobs is something suggested by analysts, rather than documented by statistics"
Plus, that decline seems specious anyway (as in: just-about visible when you only observe the top-5% of the chart), plus, the UK job market has always been very different from the EU-they-left-behind.
wredcoll 56 minutes ago [-]
Am I reading this article correctly: the job market was worse in 2017?
Was Ai also responsible for that market? This seems a bit unsupported.
squidbeak 54 minutes ago [-]
Consider what happened in the UK in 2016.
TrainedMonkey 57 minutes ago [-]
Currently helping with hiring and can't help but reflect on how it changed over past couple of years. We are now filtering for much stronger candidates across all experience levels, but junior side of the scale had been affected much more. Where previously we would take top 5% of junior applicants that made it past first phone screen, now it's below 2%.
hamdingers 1 hours ago [-]
And, as usual, no mention of the massive shortsighted overhiring during the post-covid bull market.
ZeroConcerns 1 hours ago [-]
Again, in my experience, that simply never happened, at least not with regard to junior positions.
During COVID we were struggling to retain good developers that just couldn't deal with the full-remote situation[1], and afterwards, there was a lull in recent graduates.
Again, this is from a EU perspective.
[1] While others absolutely thrived, and, yeah, we left them alone after the pandemic restrictions ended...
hamdingers 54 minutes ago [-]
Huh. It sounds like your perspective isn't just EU focused but N=1, based solely on your company.
The post-pandemic tech hiring boom was well documented both at the time and retrospectively. Lots of resources on it available with a quick web search.
ZeroConcerns 47 minutes ago [-]
I never claimed a broad perspective. But I've yet to see a "post-pandemic hiring boom" anywhere in junior-level-IT jobs in the EU, and a quick trip to Google with those exact words turned up nothing either.
So, please elaborate?
Bender 2 hours ago [-]
What happens when there are no more entry-level humans to be promoted to mid-level, and so on?
palmotea 1 hours ago [-]
> What happens when there are no more entry-level humans to be promoted to mid-level, and so on?
No business cares about that question, just like the Onceler didn't care how many Truffula trees were left. It's not their problem. Business is business, and business must grow, regardless of crummies in tummies, you know.
doctorwho42 1 hours ago [-]
It even has a name, tragedy of the commons. I have been saying it constantly for the last few years with all this AI hype over LLM's going on. But with business focus really narrowing down to short time frames, what do you expect
azemetre 48 minutes ago [-]
Well looked at what has always happened in society when young people have no hope for the future: massive societal disruption mostly in the forms of revolution + violence.
Since this isn't the 1800s anymore there won't be any major revolutions but I expect way more societal violence going forward. If you have no hope for the future it's not hard to go to very dark paths quickly, usually through no fault of your own sadly.
Now add how easy it is for malicious actors to get an audience and how LLM tech makes this even easier to do. Nice recipe for a powder keg.
r_lee 33 minutes ago [-]
Well I have an idea:
what if we all just blame the youth?
I think that might fix the situation
rs999gti 34 minutes ago [-]
In the cobol world, lots of highly paid senior consultants, who come in and out of retirement to support systems.
Other than that, I am guessing junior roles will move offshore to supply the body shops where the corporate IT work has been going.
alexgotoi 1 hours ago [-]
Everyone loves blaming AI for entry-level woes, but check the numbers: CS grads hit 6.1% unemployment while nursing sits at 1.4%. That's not "wiping out" jobs, that's oversupply meeting picky hiring after years of "learn to code" hype.
AI is eating the boring tasks juniors used to grind: data cleaning, basic fixes, report drafts. Companies save cash, skip the ramp-up, and wonder why their mid-level pipeline is drying up. Sarcastic bonus: great for margins, sucks for growing actual talent.
Long term though, this forces everyone to level up faster. Juniors who grok AI oversight instead of rote coding will thrive when the real systems engineering kicks in. Short term pain, massive upside if you adapt.
Basic coding to solve simple problems is something that high schoolers and even bright middle schoolers can do. By the time I was in college I had been coding for most of a decade. Part of the issue is that many of the folks coming out of school started learning this stuff WAY too late.
It's like if you waited until college to start learning to play piano, and wonder why you can't get a job when you graduate. You need a lot of time at the keyboard (pun intended) to build those skills.
random9749832 6 minutes ago [-]
Maybe rather than telling everyone to "learn to code" we could have told them to do jobs they are more suited to doing: serving food, nursing, construction etc. all which have tangible benefits to society.
When I went to Japan, it felt like all kinds of people were doing all kinds of jobs many hours into the day, whether it is managing an arcade, selling tickets at the station, working at a konbini or whatever small job. Maybe we need to not give such lofty ideas to the new generation and represent blue collar jobs as "foreigner" or "failure" jobs.
devnullbrain 1 hours ago [-]
This article asserts 7 times that jobs are being replaced by AI and the only data to substantiate it is a link to an EY report that is paywalled, doesn't hold up to the text of the link, and doesn't hold up to what contemporary journalists wrote about the report.
Bad article. Hope a human didn't write it.
sharemywin 3 hours ago [-]
what if cool new tech is just slowing down and AI is masking it.
18 minutes ago [-]
cratermoon 2 hours ago [-]
Not a "what if".
Can you name 3 new cool technologies that have come out in the last 5 years?
dlivingston 1 hours ago [-]
1. Copilot for Microsoft PowerPoint
2. Copilot for Windows Notepad
3. Copilot for Windows 11 Start Menu
Ifkaluva 30 minutes ago [-]
Nah man, I’m still waiting for Copilot for vim.
kylehotchkiss 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah. Where are all the great new Mac native apps putting electron to shame, avalanche of new JS frameworks, and affordable SaaS to automate more of life? AI can write decent code, why am I not benefiting from that a consumer?
ynavigator 1 hours ago [-]
Well, if you're a consumer of code, then technically you benefit. Otherwise, you probably won't notice it as much.
giancarlostoro 2 hours ago [-]
Neura Link, Quantum computers are making interesting milestones with Microsoft releasing a processor chip for Quantum computing. Green steel is another interesting one, though not as 'sexy' as the previous two.
zzleeper 35 minutes ago [-]
Wait so quantum is going to actually deliver something useful within the next 10-20 years??
stuckinhell 1 hours ago [-]
didn't believe the quantum stuff, so I googled it. I'm shocked how far its come. Even China has some kind of photonic quantum chips now.
ar_lan 1 hours ago [-]
LLMs, Apple Silicon, self-driving cars just off the top of my head without really thinking about it.
AlotOfReading 38 minutes ago [-]
GPT-2 was 6 years ago, the first Apple silicon (though not branded as such at the time) was 15 years ago, and the first public riders in autonomous vehicles happened around 10 years ago. Also, 2/3 of those are "AI".
jajuuka 15 minutes ago [-]
1 year is being pedantic. Apple Silicon is clearly referring to the M series chips which have disrupted and transformed the desktop/laptop market. Self driving also refers to the recent boom and ubiquity of self driving vehicles.
reshlo 44 minutes ago [-]
All of those things are more than 5 years old.
ericmcer 2 hours ago [-]
Uhhh, LLMs? The shit computers can do now is absurd compared to 2020. If you showed engineers from 2020 Claude, Cursor, and Stable Diffusion and didn't tell them how they worked their minds would be fucking exploding.
kylehotchkiss 2 hours ago [-]
So LLMs exist therefore nothing else is worth the time? That’s sort of the gist of HN these past few years
phantasmish 1 hours ago [-]
Moreover: people’ve been crowing about LLM-enabled productivity for longer than it took a tiny team to conceive and build goddamn Doom. In a cave! With a box of scraps!
Isn’t the sales pitch that they greatly expand accessibility and reduce cost of a variety of valuable work? Ok, so where’s the output? Where’s the fucking beef? Shit’s looking all-bun at the moment, unless you’re into running scams, astroturfing, spammy blogs, or want to make ELIZA your waifu.
ericmcer 39 minutes ago [-]
No I was just skeptical of the GPs assertion that tech hasn't produced anything "cool" in the last 5 years when it has been a nonstop barrage of insane shit that people are achieving with LLMs.
Like the ability for computers to generate images/videos/songs so reliably that we are debating if it is going to ruin human artists... whether you think that is terrible or good it would be dumb to say "nothing is happening in tech".
The xkcd comic is from 11 years ago (September 2014).
manicennui 1 hours ago [-]
Surely you have realized by now that a large portion of the HN userbase is here for get rich quick schemes.
kylehotchkiss 33 minutes ago [-]
ahh brings me back to the blockchain days, and the many excuses people tried to use them instead of a SQL database for whatever reason
solumunus 2 hours ago [-]
It’s really incredible how quickly people take things for granted.
saubeidl 2 hours ago [-]
LLMs are one, granted. GP asked for three, though.
FloorEgg 2 hours ago [-]
GGPs question doesn't make sense though. What does it mean for a technology to "come out".
Also what does three prove? Is three supposed to be a benchmark of some kind?
I would wager every year there are dozens, probably hundreds, of novel technologies being successfully commercialized. The rate is exponentially increasing.
New procedural generation methods for designing parking garages.
New manufacturing approaches for fuselage assembly of aircraft.
New cold-rolled steel shaping and folding methods.
New solid state battery assembly methods.
New drug discovery and testing methods.
New mineral refinement processes.
New logistics routing software.
New heat pump designs.
New robotics actuators.
See what I mean?
potbelly83 52 minutes ago [-]
Great list, and most of those don't involve big tech. I think what your list illustrates is that progress is being made, but it requires deep domain expertise.
spwa4 1 hours ago [-]
Entry level jobs have been getting wiped out for at least 5 years, including tech jobs, which includes 2 years that not even ChatGPT 3.5 was available. That was the first version that would reasonably respond to any useful question. And if you're being honest, other entry level jobs are far worse of than tech jobs. Entry-level bakers ... outright don't really exist anymore.
Even agentic computing (ie. an AI doing anything on it's own accord for tech-savy users, never mind average users) is new from this year. I would argue it's still pretty far from widespread. Neither my wife nor my kids, despite my explaining repeatedly, even know what that is, never mind caring.
I'm repeating the mantra from before, and I get that it's not useful. But no, it's not AI wiping out entry-level jobs. It's governments failing to prop up the economy.
On the plus side, this means it can be fixed. However, I very much doubt the current morons in charge are going to ...
phantasmish 59 minutes ago [-]
I’d go farther and guess that the tech job market would be even worse today without every company with at least 500 headcount (and many smaller than that), whether a tech company or not, putting money into “AI initiatives”.
I don’t think we’ve seen any amount of a net drop in tech jobs on account of LLMs (yet). I actually think they’re (spending on projects using them, that is) countering a drop that was going to happen anyway due to other factors (tightening credit being a huge one; business investment hesitation due to things like batshit crazy and chaotic handling of tariffs; consumer sentiment; et c)
devwastaken 2 hours ago [-]
Big tech are doing it on purpose with h1b’s and exportation of labor to capture the market in India and non-china asia. they are desperate and afraid.
The U.S has a national security interest in completely stopping all of it. They dont, because every administration is paid not to.
Regulate tech, ban labor export, ban labor import, protect your countries from the sellout.
stuffn 53 minutes ago [-]
I don't see why you're being downvoted. Aside from being a little inflammatory your premise is correct.
It's not a secret companies do not want to hire Americans. Americans are expensive, demand too many benefits like fair pay, healthcare, and vacations. They also are (mostly) at-will. H1B solves all these problem. When that doesn't work, there's 400 Infosys-likes available to export that labor cheaply. We have seen this with several industries, the last most prominent one being auto manufacture.
All that matters is that the next quarters earnings are more than the last. No one hates the American worker more than Americans. Other countries have far better worker protections than us.
I see no reason H1B couldn't be solved by having an high barrier to entry (500k one time fee) and maintenance (100k per year). Then, force them to be paid at the highest bracket in their field. If H1Bs are what it's proponents say - necessary for rare talent not found else where - then this fee should be pennies on the value they provide. I also see no reason we can't tax exported labor in a similarly extreme manner. If the labor truly can't be found in America the high price of the labor on tax and fee terms should be dwarfed by their added value.
If it is not the case that high fees and taxes on H1B and exported labor make sense then the only conclusion is the vast majority of H1Bs and exported labor are not "rare talent" and thus aren't necessary. They can come through the normal immigration routes and integrate into the workforce as a naturalized American.
garbawarb 26 minutes ago [-]
What exactly are the normal immigration routes? Employment-based immigration (H1B) is the only avenue that makes sense for a skilled worker. And usually skilled immigrants are the ones a country wants to attract.
PKop 1 hours ago [-]
H1B and foreign worker visas are, AI is political cover and it's a lie.
nine_zeros 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
irishmanlondon 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 20:13:47 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
At the company where I work (one of the FAANGs), there is suddenly a large number of junior IC roles opening up. This despite the trend of the last few years to only hire L5 and above.
My read of the situation:
- junior level jobs were sacrificed as cost cutting measures, to allow larger investment in AI
- some analysts read this as “the junior levels are being automated! Evidence: there is some AI stuff, and there are no junior roles!”
- but it was never true, and now the tide is turning.
I’m not sure I ever heard anybody in my company claim that the dearth of junior openings was due to to “we are going to automate the juniors”. I think all of that narrative was external analysts trying to read the tea leaves too hard. And, wannabes like Marc Benioff pretending to be tech leaders, but that’s a helpful reminder that Benioff is simply “not serious people”.
Maybe there was some idea that if AI actually solved software engineering in a few years you wouldn't need any more SWEs. Industry is moving away from that idea this year.
The expectations for juniors, and how seniors work with them, will certainly change, but it's way too early to be making doomsday predictions.
Of course, that's easy for me to say when I'm not the one who just spent thousands of dollars and 4 years of their to land in an environment where getting a job is going to be challenging to say the least.
"Over $50 billion in under 24 hours: Why Big Tech is doubling down on investing in India" https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/11/big-tech-microsoft-amazon-go...
It's true that a lot of things which were once junior contributor things are now things I'd rather do, but my scarce resource is attention. And humans have a sufficiently large context window and self-agentic behaviour that they're still superior to a machine.
In fact there are possibly other macro-economic effects at play:
1. The inability to deduct engineering for tax purposes in the year they were spent: "Under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) from 2017, the law requires companies to amortize (spread out) all domestic R&D expenses, including software development costs, over five years, starting in tax years after December 31, 2021, instead of deducting them immediately. This means if you spend $100,000 on software development in 2023, you can only deduct 1/5th (or $20,000) each year over five years"
2. End of zero-interest rates.
3. Pandemic era hiring bloat - let's be honest we hired too many non-technical people, companies are still letting attrition take place (~10%/yr where I am) instead of firing.
4. Strong dollar. My company is moving seats to Canada, Ireland, and India instead of hiring in the US. Getting 1.5-2 engineers in Ireland instead of 1 senior on the US west coast.
Otherwise AI is an accelerator to make more money, increase profits and efficiency. Yes it has a high cost, but so does/did Cloud, every SaaS product we've bought/integrated.
I think college is useless for the ones out there whom already know how to code, collaborate and other skills the industry is looking for. Many out there are developing high level projects on GitHub and other places without having any degree.
Also, most of the stuff you learn in college has absolutely no relation to what you will do in the industry.
Then we blame the other group of students for not going there and picking majors where the jobs aren’t.
We need some kind of apprenticeship program honestly, or AI will solve the thing entirely and let people follow their honest desires and live reasonably in the world.
- very few teams have headcount, or expecting to grow - the number of interview requests get has dropped off a cliff.
So BigTech is definitely hiring less IMHO.
That said, I am not sure if it's only or even primarily due to replacement by AI. I think there's generally a lot of uncertainty about the future, and the AI investment bubble popping, and hence companies are being extra cautious about costs that repeat (employees) vs costs that can be stopped whenever they want (buying more GPUs).
And in parallel, they are hoping that "agents" will reduce some of the junior hiring need, but this hasn't happened at scale in practice, yet.
I would expect junior SWE hiring to slowly rebound, but likely stabilize at a slower pace than in the pre-layoff years.
There is almost no reason to delegate the work, especially low level grunt work.
People disputing this are either in denial, or lacking the skill set to leverage AI.
One or two more Opus releases from anthropic and this field is cooked
Really weird.
Enterprise software is different beast - large fragile [quasi]monoliths, good luck for [current] AI to make a meaningful fixes and/or feature development in it. And even if AI manages to speed up actual development multiple times, the impact would be still small as actual development takes relatively small share of overall work in enterprise software. Of course it will come here too, just somewhat later than at places like FAANG.
AI is sucking up investment and AI hype is making executives stupid. Hundreds of billions of dollars that used to go towards hiring is now going towards data centers. But AI is not doing tech jobs.
These headlines do nothing but increase the hype by pointing towards the wrong cause entirely.
Edit: You cannot square these headlines https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46289160
Yes many over-rely on LLMs, but new engineers see possibilities we've stopped noticing and ask the questions we've stopped asking. Experience is invaluable, but it can quietly calcify into 'this is just how things are done.'
seems to translate to a 6.1% unemployment rate and 16.5% underemployment rate?
https://www.finalroundai.com/blog/computer-science-graduates...
Blame the article for using suboptimal numbers, but the "wiping out" part is definitely justified when talking about jobs for graduates
https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:...
Computer Science is tied for fourth lowest underemployment and is the 7th highest unemployment... and is also the highest early career median wage.
That needs to be compared to the underemployment chart https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:... and the unemployment chart https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:... (and make sure to compare that with 2009).
Computer science is not getting wiped out by AI. Entry level jobs exist, though people may need to reset their expectations (note that median job being $80k) from getting a $150k job out of college - that was always the exception rather than the average.
There are average jobs out there that people with a "want to be on the coast and $150k" or "must be remote so I don't relocate" are thumbing their nose at.
If you click through to new york fed's website, the unemployment figures are 4.8% for "recent college graduates (aged 22-27)", 2.7% for all college graduates, and 4.0% for all workers. That's elevated, but hardly "wiping out".
https://www.signalfire.com/blog/signalfire-state-of-talent-r...
My initial reaction would be that these people, unfortunately, got scammed, and that the scammers-promising-abundant-high-paying-jobs have now found a convenient scapegoat?
AI has done nothing so far to reduce the backlog of junior developer positions from where I can see, but, yeah, that's all in "Europoor" and "EU residency required" territory, so what do I know...
Job openings for graduates are significantly down in at least one developed nation: https://www.theguardian.com/money/2025/jun/25/uk-university-...
Plus, that decline seems specious anyway (as in: just-about visible when you only observe the top-5% of the chart), plus, the UK job market has always been very different from the EU-they-left-behind.
Was Ai also responsible for that market? This seems a bit unsupported.
During COVID we were struggling to retain good developers that just couldn't deal with the full-remote situation[1], and afterwards, there was a lull in recent graduates.
Again, this is from a EU perspective.
[1] While others absolutely thrived, and, yeah, we left them alone after the pandemic restrictions ended...
The post-pandemic tech hiring boom was well documented both at the time and retrospectively. Lots of resources on it available with a quick web search.
So, please elaborate?
No business cares about that question, just like the Onceler didn't care how many Truffula trees were left. It's not their problem. Business is business, and business must grow, regardless of crummies in tummies, you know.
Since this isn't the 1800s anymore there won't be any major revolutions but I expect way more societal violence going forward. If you have no hope for the future it's not hard to go to very dark paths quickly, usually through no fault of your own sadly.
Now add how easy it is for malicious actors to get an audience and how LLM tech makes this even easier to do. Nice recipe for a powder keg.
what if we all just blame the youth?
I think that might fix the situation
Other than that, I am guessing junior roles will move offshore to supply the body shops where the corporate IT work has been going.
AI is eating the boring tasks juniors used to grind: data cleaning, basic fixes, report drafts. Companies save cash, skip the ramp-up, and wonder why their mid-level pipeline is drying up. Sarcastic bonus: great for margins, sucks for growing actual talent.
Long term though, this forces everyone to level up faster. Juniors who grok AI oversight instead of rote coding will thrive when the real systems engineering kicks in. Short term pain, massive upside if you adapt.
I will include this thread in the https://hackernewsai.com/ newsletter.
It's like if you waited until college to start learning to play piano, and wonder why you can't get a job when you graduate. You need a lot of time at the keyboard (pun intended) to build those skills.
When I went to Japan, it felt like all kinds of people were doing all kinds of jobs many hours into the day, whether it is managing an arcade, selling tickets at the station, working at a konbini or whatever small job. Maybe we need to not give such lofty ideas to the new generation and represent blue collar jobs as "foreigner" or "failure" jobs.
Bad article. Hope a human didn't write it.
2. Copilot for Windows Notepad
3. Copilot for Windows 11 Start Menu
Isn’t the sales pitch that they greatly expand accessibility and reduce cost of a variety of valuable work? Ok, so where’s the output? Where’s the fucking beef? Shit’s looking all-bun at the moment, unless you’re into running scams, astroturfing, spammy blogs, or want to make ELIZA your waifu.
Like the ability for computers to generate images/videos/songs so reliably that we are debating if it is going to ruin human artists... whether you think that is terrible or good it would be dumb to say "nothing is happening in tech".
https://www.danshapiro.com/blog/2025/12/i-made-the-xkcd-impo...
The xkcd comic is from 11 years ago (September 2014).
Also what does three prove? Is three supposed to be a benchmark of some kind?
I would wager every year there are dozens, probably hundreds, of novel technologies being successfully commercialized. The rate is exponentially increasing.
New procedural generation methods for designing parking garages.
New manufacturing approaches for fuselage assembly of aircraft.
New cold-rolled steel shaping and folding methods.
New solid state battery assembly methods.
New drug discovery and testing methods.
New mineral refinement processes.
New logistics routing software.
New heat pump designs.
New robotics actuators.
See what I mean?
Even agentic computing (ie. an AI doing anything on it's own accord for tech-savy users, never mind average users) is new from this year. I would argue it's still pretty far from widespread. Neither my wife nor my kids, despite my explaining repeatedly, even know what that is, never mind caring.
I'm repeating the mantra from before, and I get that it's not useful. But no, it's not AI wiping out entry-level jobs. It's governments failing to prop up the economy.
On the plus side, this means it can be fixed. However, I very much doubt the current morons in charge are going to ...
I don’t think we’ve seen any amount of a net drop in tech jobs on account of LLMs (yet). I actually think they’re (spending on projects using them, that is) countering a drop that was going to happen anyway due to other factors (tightening credit being a huge one; business investment hesitation due to things like batshit crazy and chaotic handling of tariffs; consumer sentiment; et c)
The U.S has a national security interest in completely stopping all of it. They dont, because every administration is paid not to.
Regulate tech, ban labor export, ban labor import, protect your countries from the sellout.
It's not a secret companies do not want to hire Americans. Americans are expensive, demand too many benefits like fair pay, healthcare, and vacations. They also are (mostly) at-will. H1B solves all these problem. When that doesn't work, there's 400 Infosys-likes available to export that labor cheaply. We have seen this with several industries, the last most prominent one being auto manufacture.
All that matters is that the next quarters earnings are more than the last. No one hates the American worker more than Americans. Other countries have far better worker protections than us.
I see no reason H1B couldn't be solved by having an high barrier to entry (500k one time fee) and maintenance (100k per year). Then, force them to be paid at the highest bracket in their field. If H1Bs are what it's proponents say - necessary for rare talent not found else where - then this fee should be pennies on the value they provide. I also see no reason we can't tax exported labor in a similarly extreme manner. If the labor truly can't be found in America the high price of the labor on tax and fee terms should be dwarfed by their added value.
If it is not the case that high fees and taxes on H1B and exported labor make sense then the only conclusion is the vast majority of H1Bs and exported labor are not "rare talent" and thus aren't necessary. They can come through the normal immigration routes and integrate into the workforce as a naturalized American.