- I’m not sure if this is true.
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”.
- 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.
- AI? Ah, India.
"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...
- 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.
- 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.
Edit: You cannot square these headlines https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46289160
- 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
- Unfortunately if it takes you 4 years to significantly upskill in tech, you are learning way too slow to survive in this industry. Most of the major innovators I know are dropouts, because they realized college is suited to train you to work in academia, where very few jobs exist, almost no one worth working for cares about degrees anymore, and the debt only makes surviving harder.
IMO the best education and credentials come from picking interesting projects you have no idea how to do, then learn everything in your way to ship them as open source so potential employers can see your work.
If you can get a degree on a scholarship for free, wonderful, but college should be viewed as more of a hobby or a way to network, rather than a way of obtaining marketable technical skills.
- Reminds me of that comic where the dog runs a ball up to his owner with the thought bubble "Throw!" When the owner goes to take the ball, the dog steps back, thinking, "No take! Only throw!"
So in the glorious future, well only need senior devs to manage AI. No juniors! Only seniors!
- 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.
- 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?
https://www.finalroundai.com/blog/computer-science-graduates...
- What happens when there are no more entry-level humans to be promoted to mid-level, and so on?
- 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.
- 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...
- what if cool new tech is just slowing down and AI is masking it.
- I am not a hiring manager. But if there is more supply of non-junior workers. Doesn't it make sense to actually hire those if compensation might even be lower than before? You hire juniors to support them, or because experienced devs are too expensive or there simply aren't enough of them. If there are enough of them on market for more reasonable price wouldn't actually choosing from that cohort make more sense?
- 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.
- 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.'
- 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.
I will include this thread in the https://hackernewsai.com/ newsletter.
- Youth unemployment is up and among new hires in general bc of the uncertain and deteriorating business conditions.
- We have new grads, they could not be replaced by AI. If you have new grads AI can replace I’m not sure why it required a college degree.
- My personal experience is that it's not AI wiping out jobs, it's offshoring.
- 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.
- 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 ...
- If only there were some kind of tool that junior engineers could use to build portfolio pieces to differentiate themselves.
And if only there were some kind of tool that junior engineers could use to upskill themselves to mid-level.
Sadly we’ll have to wait until at least 2022 for that.
- 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.
- 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.
- H1B and foreign worker visas are, AI is political cover and it's a lie.