Learn to plumb: New grads are competing with AI for coding jobs

The AI job apocalypse may already be here, writes Kevin Roose in the New York Times. "This month, millions of young people will graduate from college and look for work in industries that have little use for their skills, view them as expensive and expendable, and are rapidly phasing out their jobs in favor of artificial intelligence."

"Unemployment for recent college graduates has jumped to an unusually high 5.8 percent in recent months, warns the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Unemployment for recent graduates is "concentrated in technical fields like finance and computer science, where A.I. has made faster gains," notes Oxford Economics.

It's worse than it looks, writes Roose. "In interview after interview, I’m hearing that firms are making rapid progress toward automating entry-level work, and that A.I. companies are racing to build 'virtual workers' that can replace junior employees at a fraction of the cost."

One tech executive recently told me his company had stopped hiring anything below an L5 software engineer — a midlevel title typically given to programmers with three to seven years of experience — because lower-level tasks could now be done by A.I. coding tools. Another told me that his start-up now employed a single data scientist to do the kinds of tasks that required a team of 75 people at his previous company.

What happens in three to seven years, when they want to hire software engineers with experience? Or do they expect the AI will be handling those jobs too?

Employers tell Molly Kinder, a Brookings Institution fellow, that AI tools can replace marketing analysts, finance analysts and research assistants.

AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years, predicts Dario Amodie, CEO of Anthropic, which makes Claude. Unemployment could hit 10 to 20 percent.

Competition with AI is only one explanation for why new college graduates are having trouble launching careers, writes Derek Thompson in The Atlantic.

"Even newly minted M.B.A.s from elite programs are struggling to find work," he writes. "Meanwhile, law-school applications are surging — an ominous echo of when young people used graduate school to bunker down during the great financial crisis."

The Great Recession -- and then the pandemic and then inflation -- has disrupted the labor market in high-tech and other white-collar industries, Thompson writes. Job openings are way down in software development and IT operations.

Overall, "the share of online job postings seeking workers with a college degree has declined," he writes. "The return on investment for college is more uncertain."

Or, it's AI.

“When you think from first principles about what generative AI can do, and what jobs it can replace, it’s the kind of things that young college grads have done” in white-collar firms, Harvard economist David Deming told Thompson. “They read and synthesize information and data. They produce reports and presentations.”

Not everyone thinks the bots are displacing new graduates, Thompson writes. "A New York Fed survey of firms released last year found that AI was having a negligible effect on hiring."

So far.