Juniors are getting clobbered.
I hope we see induced demand for labour in the end. Worst case would be higher workloads for everyone.
I’d like to extend that graph a couple of years to the left. The analyses I’ve seen clearly demonstrate that this is a regression to mean after a post-Covid hiring spike. By looking at such a narrow window over such a fraught time, it looks like it could be saying anything here.
Are these workers? This is showing a real problem. Job openings? Not nearly as concerning. Without showing this in historical context, this is really dubious journalism.
This study controls for the post-COVID hiring spike in three ways: the researchers generated results without including the tech sector, they separated out remote work, and compared trends from 2018-2022 to those after. The hypothesis holds in all cases. The primary regression analysis also included a standard set of controls for hiring trends (such as interest rate fluctuation).
There’s enough here to find a negative correlation between generative AI and entry-level employment.
This video is talking about a slightly different chart, but it’s the same timeline for job openings disappearing. It’s very accessible. And it has a very different conclusion.
Slightly different? Comparing a dead simple plot of employment vs. the performance of the S&P to a DID Poisson regression event study is the coughing baby vs. hydrogen bomb meme.
This Stanford study is just one in a very active field of economic research, so it’s reasonable to be skeptical, but I really hope you don’t think people make decisions based on the kind of thing in that Tiktok video.
It’s openings, not employment. Which is why I asked whether the charts pasted here are showing employment or openings. And why I complained that the chart cuts off everything pre-Covid. If employment is going down, that’s a problem. If job openings are going down, it isn’t AI but a regression to mean. This video is the same jobs trend looked at through a different lens. It’s pretty clear and logical that the demand for more seasoned professionals is more static that for juniors.
This is numbers taken from public data and put into context, and I don’t think the fact that it’s posted on TikTok is relevant to the math. TikTok just has a better algorithm for discovery for me and that’s where I saw this guy’s work and started following him, and the length of short form video helps the content not exceed attention span.
That all being said, if employment of juniors is trending down and not just reverting to mean, then I agree with the consolation this is a doomsday scenario cooking over the next 40 years. I have been saying for a couple of years that’s a concern to watch out for. But so far I haven’t seen numbers that concern me. I’ll be continuing to watch this space closely because it’s directly related to my interests.
Whenever this gets posted, someone (rightly) remarks how short-sighted this is regarding the fact that if there are now juniors now, there won’t be any seniors in a few years.
And while that is true, I do envy the lack of cynicism of these people. To me it seems quite clear that the hope from the owning and ruling class is that the AI tools become “good enough” to do away with the entire ladder.
I truly believe this is one example where this is not necessarily (only) stupidity or incompetence, but also malice.
