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The article is talking about new grads generally, but I think there's an issue with AI that isn't talked about enough. It's not that it's taking away jobs [1], it's that it is taking away skills.

Even if you are the biggest critic of AI, it's hard to deny that the frontier models are quite good at the sort of stuff that you learn in school. Write a binary tree in C? Check. Implement radix sort in Python? check. An A* implementation? check.

Once upon a time, I had to struggle through these. My code wouldn't run properly because I forgot to release a variable from memory or I was off-by-one on a recursive algorithm. But the struggling is what ultimately helped me actually learn the material [2]. If I could just type out "build a hash table in C" and then shuffle a few things around to make it look like my own, I'd have never really understood the underlying work.

At the same time, LLMs are often useful, but still fail quite frequently in real world work. I'm not trusting cursor to do a database migration in production unless I myself understand and check each line of code that it writes.

Now, as a hiring manager, what am I supposed to do with new grads?

[1] which I think it might be to some extent in some companies, by making existing engineers more productive, but that's a different point

[2] to the inevitable responses that say "well I actually learn things better now because the LLM explains it to me", that's great, but what's relevant here is that a large chunk of people learn by struggling

It's the economy and outsourcing. Why is everyone hell bent to say AI is killing jobs? I think its a because its a great scapegoat to blame a machine rather than foreigners and shithead management. Its crazy too because not only are you out a job you wind up getting shittier products and services at unreasonable prices, a double whammy!

I feel like the more obvious explanation is that we live in a time of economic uncertainty (cough tarrifs) so companies are cutting back hiring until things become more certain.

I would rather have somebody with life experience than somebody with an education right now. It's just like how we complain that the AI leaderboards are not representative of real AI skill, it's the exact same for academic benchmarks of whatever institution minted you a diploma. I don't need an overfitted worker just like i don't need an overfitted AI agent.

I don’t think it’s any of the reasons listed in the article or the ones mentioned here either.

I’ll be blunt, people don’t want to hire Gen Z because of bad past experiences with that generation.

When 1 in 6 companies are "hesitant to hire Gen Z workers," then yeah, obviously unemployment is going to be higher for them. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/1-6-us-companies-reluctant-10...

That’s just one article, but there are plenty more. Do a basic search for "not hiring Gen Z" or something similar and you’ll find tons of examples. It’s easier for people to believe AI is to blame rather than take the answer straight from the hiring managers mouths.

They don’t want to hire Gen Z because they see them as more hassle than they’re worth. I’m not saying whether that’s true or not, but that’s how a lot of managers and business owners feel right now, and you don’t have to look very hard to figure that out.

AI isn't replacing many jobs yet. But it is causing customers to hold off on certain purchases, like dev services, due to uncertainty. And the shills are amplifying the effect. I'm seeing layoffs caused by this.

Been chewing on versions of this debate for years - blame keeps shifting but not much really changes. Honestly, everyone points fingers but the fixes always seem out of reach. Kinda sucks, but that's how it goes.

Sure we have seen fantastic gains in AI capability, but until we have more AI tech diffusion into products, industrial processes, etc., AI’s effect on the economy may be much smaller that what people anticipate.

Isn't the simplest explanation that the economy is slowing and new college grads generally tend to have trouble getting hired during recessions?

"Even newly minted M.B.A.s from elite programs are struggling to find work."

I was worried at first but this is an elite journalism product for elites who are facing economic insecurity and not AI

> it's that it is taking away skills.

And for some it is giving away skills.

a give and take tool on a need to know basis

Isn't outsourcing has been happening for decades?

Every one of these posts wants to blame AI because that's the vogue explanation, but every time we see a shift like this there are better explanations.

The wave of tech layoffs a few years ago were blamed on AI but were so obviously attributable to interest rates and changing tax policies that the idea that the proto-AI tools we had at the time were responsible was laughable.

This shift we at least have better AI tools to blame (though I'd argue they're still not good enough), but we also have a US President who has straight up said that he wants to cause a global recession and has been doing everything in his power to make that happen.

Given that the impact of someone running a bulldozer through the economy like this is well-studied and that we'd predict exactly what were seeing here, attributing the damage to AI is silly verging on responsible. Place the blame where it belongs!

AI is only killing jobs because people are killing jobs and blaming it on AI.

There has been a longterm negative trend for recent grad employment.

Even those who do get employed, they tend to be underemployed with low wages.

The old excuse was 'automation' was killing jobs.

The lesser old excuse was offshoring.

Now it's AI?

How about we stop inventing excuses and perhaps look at root cause of the 'recent grad' factor. That perhaps requiring university degrees that arent worth anything for jobs that dont need them is the problem?

For me as a fresh graduate in Poland, the job market doesn't even exist for juniors rn. And I live in a big city. Even internships are but a dream.

It's tempting to connect "AI is kind of like having an always-awake intern" with "nobody is hiring interns" but I'm skeptical. I think this is more about the decline of the corporate enterprise model in general. Exponential growth can't continue forever. Management is trying to force the curve to be exponential by no longer hiring anyone who isn't clearly going to improve profits in the short term.