But specifically entry level is down significantly since Nov 2022.
All of your points - interest rates, post pandemic hiring boom would apply to market as a whole.
Not saying it’s causation like the article claims, but there’s at least some correlation trend.
These categories have seen broad application of AI tools:
- CS, you’ll most likely talk to an LLM for first tier support these days.
- Account management comprises pressing the flesh (human required) and responding to emails - the latter, AMs have seen their workload slashed, so it stands to reason that fewer are required.
- Paralegal - the category has been demolished. Drafting and discovery are now largely automated processes.
- Data analysis - why have a monkey in a suit write you barely useful nonsense when a machine can do the same?
So - yeah, it’s purely correlative right now, but I can see how it being causative is perfectly plausible.
If I am running a factory that use to create carriages and now creates cars, I need people who can create cars now. If I want to expand the number of customers I serve, I need to hire more people.
If I am a software company, I don’t need to scale the number of software engineers I hire to serve more customers.
Since gen AI has been a thing, I mostly pivoted to more strategy based cloud consulting than hands on keyboard software development. But before Gen AI, I would have needed a couple of junior developers to do the grunt work of implementing well defined implementations. Now I can do both the strategy and implementations in the same amount of time.
Even before Gen AI the entire reason that software engineers get paid so much because software development has high fixed costs but near zero marginal costs. No other industry has been like that historically.
I have never once said “it sure would be nice to have a few more junior devs. That would really increase our velocity”.
As someone who is responsible for getting projects done on time, within budget and meets requiremenga, why would I push for hiring fresh entry level devs instead of hiring a mid level dev with experience for only 20-30% more? The spread isn’t that great for enterprise developers.
It’s even more true now that I can push for hiring a mid level devs working remotely in East BumbleFuck South Dakota for peanuts.
For what’s its worth, I am classifying seniority by the ability to work at certain “scope” and “deal with ambiguity”, not someone who “codez real gud” and can reverse a b tree on the whiteboard
https://www.levels.fyi/blog/swe-level-framework.html
And there is a diminishing return on new features. If Google fired every developer not involved in search and ads, they could survive another decade or so and probably end up being more profitable since they can’t produce new good profitable products to save their lives