AI Is Wrecking Young Americans' Job Prospects (opens in new tab)

I believe you mean 21% of University of Maryland’s bachelor degreees were CS.

The current phrasing makes it sound like they’re a diploma mill producing 21% of all bachelor degrees in the country.

> companies are just now trending towards running leaner vs hiring every good engineer available during ZIRP

This sounds more like overproduction of entry-level computer scientists than anything AI or hiring managers are up to.

100%, I'm shocked how many articles / doom sayers ignore the explosion in CS grads over the last decade.

I really believe it's just for the headlines.

On a related note, we had another popular thread in HN earlier this week - (AWS CEO says using AI to replace junior staff is 'Dumbest thing I've ever heard' ) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44972151 which is quite the opposite of this original post.

> GenAI will never produce what they want

What's your argument supporting this? Ten years ago GenAI couldn't produce two coherent sentences. We've come a long way, what makes you think it won't go further?

That is what my company does except we basically hire out of high school. After the founders, 100% of our employees (including myself) were hired directly as high school interns, kept for years during college, and got offers after graduation.

I wrote about this a bit. I wish we could hire more. I am kind of shocked how few companies do it. There are a LOT of smart kids who would love a summer programming job.

https://simonsarris.com/p/growing-software-developers

The issue with hiring many juniors is, when there is another dev boom, all the juniors that were hired, now mids or seniors, are going to jump ship to whoever is going to pay them the most. So, the company can either grow talent and then pay them market rate or hire at market rates from other companies that grew them. Hiring juniors, while good for the industry in the long run, doesn't really benefit an individual company. It is game theory and it is still why senior developers make a lot of money despite there being an oversupply of juniors.

> This could be the next iteration of stealing talent to prevent others from owning the market. An actually intelligent investor could dominate by bucking the trend and hire lots of smart, eager junior candidates.

First, they'd have to identify them, which the interview process at most companies is terrible at.

Maybe, just maybe, the reason is that the economy is moving towards the dumps and nobody is hiring or firing, because they know the future is gloomy.

But it makes it much nicer to say its AI that's stealing jobs to create even more hype.

IRC section 174 was recently reversed. Its original removal was one of the big reasons for the layoffs in tech along with ZIRP ending.

Previously discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44226145

computer job market is a huge misallocation of skills and resources, so no it's not that simple. Given how much tech debt/backlog there is, there should be enough work for everyone, just paid less. The fact that it isn't so just shows that there are bottlenecks elsewhere - HR, companies stuck in office only mode (so there's a high floor on salaries).

Currently all I see is a mix of very highly paid do it all types with rather lowly paid outsourced talent but no sensible middle and of course no way to realistically learn on the job - the bar to get in is very high.

Interest rates really aren't that high. Lowering them 3% just means you get a few more years before shit goes tits up.

Fundamentals are the problem, if there's no new avenues for economic growth, then there is no way to pay down the debt.

Doubt the bootcamps made a measurable difference in the tech hiring market.

I don’t know if it’s that simple. The 1800s to mid 1900s were rife with labor disputes and real blood was spilled before any gains were distributed down the chain, and even then labor gains only lasted a couple decades

I suspect for the already wealthy this will happen, but I think the average person will largely get handed an empty basket of promises and not much else

Farming mechanization and the loom automated so much that 97% of society used to be agrarian and now it's the opposite (only 3% are farmers in developed societies), and we are much better off despite the growing pains they had. Though, it does make me nervous how fast AI automation is hitting.

> If AI automates away half of all jobs

This is a big if!

The industrial revolution provided jobs before it took them away. The tractors that took jobs from farmhands had to be built in factories with millions of people.

I think AI is going to end up more like the late 20th century automation push. It's going to hollow out whole communities.

Just like, collectively, me and bill gates are billionaires. Clearly this will fix societal issues

I don't think AI is the cause, but it was a hell of a lot stronger 3-4 years ago.

I'm only half way through the paper but it looks like from their numbers junior level software engineering employment has returned to 2021 levels and is declining towards perhaps 2019 levels. I can't help but wonder if they have made a mistake in controlling for the hiring boom around the pandemic shift to eCommerce. It looks like they tried to eliminate factors like that, but I'm not deep enough into the study yet.

Just ask GPT 5, Sam Altman said it has PhD level intelligence

> hammer time

Internet gave me a more wicked explanation of this phrase, thus the internet is superior to AI.

> immigration up

"In January 2025, 53.3 million immigrants lived in the United States – the largest number ever recorded. In the ensuing months, however, more immigrants left the country or were deported than arrived. By June, the country’s foreign-born population had shrunk by more than a million people, marking its first decline since the 1960s" [1].

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/08/21/key-findi...

They aren't just looking at tech jobs in the study but all job in the data set that they've coded as being AI exposed.

> We use two different approaches for measuring occupational exposure to AI. The first uses exposure measures from Eloundou et al. (2024). Eloundou et al. (2024) estimate AI exposure by ONET task using ChatGPT validated with human labeling. They then construct occupational exposure measures by aggregating the task data to the 2018 SOC code level. We focus on the GPT-4 based β exposure measures from their paper.

>The second primary approach we take uses data on generative AI usage from the Anthropic Economic Index (Handa et al., 2025). This index reports the estimated share of queries pertaining to each ONET task based on a sample of several million conversations with Claude, Anthropic’s generative AI model. It then aggregates the data to the occupational level based on these task shares. One feature of the Anthropic Economic Index is that for each task it also reports estimates of the share of queries pertaining to that task that are “automative,” “augmentative,” or none of the above. We use this information as an estimate of whether usage of AI for an occupation is primarily complementary or substitutable with labor.14

> fresh college grads are competing with foreign visa holders that have years of experience

Are there more H1Bs per recent college graduate today than previously?

Not sure why you're getting downvoted (maybe by h1bs). Big companies abusing h1b has been all over the news. Heck a Walmart manager was just arrested for taking kickbacks related to h1bs (from the country of his origin)...

https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/us-news/walmart-h-...

Given a long enough timeframe, I think you're right. But I don't think that's a 'near future' state, but probably a 'in a few decades' state. More generally, I believe that eventually we'll reach a 'post-work society' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-work_society).

And that'll be interesting for humanity, as we derive at least some identity from the work we're doing.

When AI takes all the jobs, it better start ordering junk from Amazon, have a Costco membership, order in Tacos on Tuesday and watch Instagram reels all day on its brand new iPhone because all the jobless people won’t be able to.