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AI Has Ruined the Job Market (www.theatlantic.com)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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I'm applying to jobs, and the amount of AI assessments, rounds, AI interviewers, questionnaires, is nuts.

One of these emails for example,

It's rough.

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[–] 39 points 3 months ago (9 children)

I have been in software for 20 years and I never had trouble finding work until this past year. All of a sudden it's a lot harder. I'm just one data point but this time feels different for me. The job market feels a lot more disjointed and full of spoofs and fake listings.

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  • [–] 9 points 3 months ago

    Yeah I have over 25 years and I also have had the assesment stuff although not to often and not every time. Basically I went into tech because it was a field where they wanted people and if you were sharp you could get a job. They don't seem to have the demand they used to but I don't see another place to pivot and honestly I don't think I can change careers the way I did over 25 years ago.

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  • [–] -4 points 3 months ago (6 children)

    Do you have experience with AI dev environments? That’s generally the differentiator right now. Claude Code replaces managing a junior dev team of 5. Anyone who can demonstrate the ability to leverage it is not short of work.

    Those 5 junior devs are, though.

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  • [–] 23 points 3 months ago

    Yep. Actually ran the rollout for Cursor at my last job, right before I got laid off lmao. I trained a bunch of devs on what do and what not to do. A bunch of my recent interviews have incorporated variations of the question "Do you think you could manage an LLM orchestration that would replace our junior devs?" and, I could but I don't think I can muster the enthusiasm for it that people are looking for. Maybe that's why I haven't made it through the interview gauntlet. So much senior hiring right now seems to be looking for people to be the scapegoat for LLM bullshit and I ain't looking for that kinda work.

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  • [–] 11 points 3 months ago* (4 children)

    Claude Code replaces managing a junior dev team of 5.

    But who was hiring 5 junior devs?!

    Did nothing they produced matter to anyone who knew better?

    I can't think of a better way to drive my organization into obsolescence, than to have 5 junior devs rampaging across the place leaving stupid mistakes in their wake.

    I love having one or two junior devs around the office. On a large team (15 devs), there's just enough deeply unimportant unimpactful harmless bullshit to keep two junior devs from doing too much damage.

    Once, on a huge team (30+ senior devs split into squads), I had four junior devs at the same time.

    That is the maximum I have ever allowed, and that was during a period of exceptional demand.

    Anyway, I guess I just wish the folks replacing 5 junior devs with an AI equivalent to 5 junior devs the day they deserve. Lol.

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  • [–] 10 points 3 months ago* (1 child)

    An extra problem is that AI heavily favours bullshitters. It destroys the capability and cues to recognize them.

    The tech job market is now a lemon market for both sides - neither applicants nor companies can reasonably know what's really offered to them, and what is made up.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    I most places I worked in (all in Europe), Junior Devs are generally hired as an investment, since their productivity sucks until they become more experienced so the idea is to teach them until they become more senior.

    You can't really replace such Junior Devs with LLMs because the LLMs don't learn (at best they'll somewhat follow past guidelines still in their context until those guidelines are push out as the context fills over time).

    Maybe in the US (were job security is a joke) there's more a tendency to hire Junior Devs as cheap manpower.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago

    I most places I worked in (all in Europe), Junior Devs are generally hired as an investment, since their productivity sucks until they become more experienced so the idea is to teach them until they become more senior.

    Yes. Same here. I never would have managed to build teams as large as I have if I didn't create some of my senior devs out of junior devs.

    You can't really replace such Junior Devs with LLMs because the LLMs don't learn (at best they'll somewhat follow past guidelines still in their context until those guidelines are push out as the context fills over time).

    Yes. Exactly! It boggles my mind when folks talk about all the money they're saving on junior devs. A forever-junior sounds terrible, to me - no matter how cheap.

    Maybe in the US (were job security is a joke) there's more a tendency to hire Junior Devs as cheap manpower.

    Yes. When I was doing consulting gigs for clients too incompetent to maintain their own developer teams, I would hire junior devs and charge clients for their work. Organizations too incompetent to hire and retain their own developers are also pretty reliably too incompetent to tell the difference.

    Even so - while I never felt I owed those (generally sociopathic, often malicious and usually willfully stupid) clients too much loyalty - professional ethics still meant that I didn't saddle them with any fully un-supervised junior developers. So they were still better off with my consulting team than with an AI.

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