This was posted in the engineeringstudents subreddit a while back, and the people in the CS industry all agree that AI gets blamed because it’s more interesting than the reality, that it’s actually offshoring that’s to blame.
The common joke is that the “A.I.” they keep referring actually stands for “an Indian.”
This one actually had more nuance than it sounded. The technology worked without any human intervention about 30% of the time, and the workers were only there to review stuff that the AI flagged that it wasn’t sure about.
Still fits the joke, but I always felt this got made fun of more than it deserved.
except that amazon eventually admitted it wasn't feasible with today's technology. they were trying to "fake it until you make it" and they never actually made it.
This is not in line with the numbers I've seen elsewhere. The article says that 700 out of a thousand trips needed to be manually reviewed, and Amazon's goal was around 50. Which makes sense, if you want to scale the tech, even 50 out of a thousand is going to be high if they have millions of transactions a day.
You're right I misread your comment. Probably because it's obvious how off it is. They wanted it to work 99.5 percent of the time, and it worked 30. Way off.
Yeah that didn’t work great, but I feel like it got more flak than it deserved. It’s faster for the people in the store, and cuts down on labor costs by both offshoring cashier work and automating some portion of it.
People treat it like a failure because it didn’t get 100% success, but the reality doesn’t align. It’s a great development, even a 30% reduction in labor costs is significant.
Requiring 70 percent of purchases to be manually checked is probably untenable. We don't know the process, but they would have probably had to watch video of them wandering the store, watching for them to put things in their cart. Meaning, at the rates that they were hitting, it actually took a lot more labor, not less. Not to mention the delay in being charged could be... unsettling.
Honestly, there were other problems with the concept, not the least that cashiers help with loss prevention. Which stores care about alot.
A 30% success is fine when you already have a system in place to define and identify which 30% should pass, e.g. an existing automated workflow. So you're saving 30% from an already diminished labor force, but you're still not bridging that gap from automation to generalization with LLMs
I honestly can’t think of any positions outside of customer support and call center where AI has done any replacing and I’d argue they’re doing a dogshit job at what they have replaced.
Andrej Karpathy: I think congrats again to OpenAI for cooking with GPT-5 Pro. This is the third time I've struggled on something complex/gnarly for an hour on and off with CC, then 5 Pro goes off for 10 minutes and comes back with code that works out of the box. I had CC read the 5 Pro version and it wrote up 2 paragraphs admiring it (very wholesome). If you're not giving it your hardest problems you're probably missing out. https://xcancel.com/karpathy/status/1964020416139448359
Oct 2025: I’m increasingly hearing from experienced, credible software engineers who are running multiple copies of agents at once, tackling several problems in parallel and expanding the scope of what they can take on. I was skeptical of this at first but I’ve started running multiple agents myself now and it’s surprisingly effective, if mentally exhausting https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/7/vibe-engineering/
Oct 2025: I was pretty skeptical about this at first. AI-generated code needs to be reviewed, which means the natural bottleneck on all of this is how fast I can review the results. It’s tough keeping up with just a single LLM given how fast they can churn things out, where’s the benefit from running more than one at a time if it just leaves me further behind? Despite my misgivings, over the past few weeks I’ve noticed myself quietly starting to embrace the parallel coding agent lifestyle. I can only focus on reviewing and landing one significant change at a time, but I’m finding an increasing number of tasks that can still be fired off in parallel without adding too much cognitive overhead to my primary work. https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/5/parallel-coding-agents/
Oct 2025: I'm beginning to suspect that a key skill in working effectively with coding agents is developing an intuition for when you don't need to closely review every line of code they produce. This feels deeply uncomfortable! https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/11/uncomfortable/
Oct 2025: I’m increasingly hearing from experienced, credible software engineers who are running multiple copies of agents at once, tackling several problems in parallel and expanding the scope of what they can take on. I was skeptical of this at first but I’ve started running multiple agents myself now and it’s surprisingly effective, if mentally exhausting! This feels very different from classic vibe coding, where I outsource a simple, low-stakes task to an LLM and accept the result if it appears to work. Most of my tools.simonwillison.net collection (previously) were built like that. Iterating with coding agents to produce production-quality code that I’m confident I can maintain in the future feels like a different process entirely. https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/7/vibe-engineering/
Many people on the internet argue whether AI enables you to work faster or not. In this case, I think I shipped this faster than I would have if I had done it all myself, in particular because iterating on minor SwiftUI styling is so tedious and time consuming for me personally and AI does it so well. I think the faster/slower argument for me personally is missing the thing I like the most: the AI can work for me while I step away to do other things.
Here's the resulting PR, which touches 21 files. https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/pull/9116/files
June 2025: Creator of Flask, Jinja2, Click, Werkzeug, and many other widely used things: At the moment I’m working on a new project. Even over the last two months, the way I do this has changed profoundly. Where I used to spend most of my time in Cursor, I now mostly use Claude Code, almost entirely hands-off. Do I program any faster? Not really. But it feels like I’ve gained 30% more time in my day because the machine is doing the work. https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2025/6/4/changes/
Go has just enough type safety, an extensive standard library, and a culture that prizes (often repetitive) idiom. LLMs kick ass generating it.
For the infrastructure component I started at my new company, I’m probably north of 90% AI-written code. The service is written in Go with few dependencies and an OpenAPI-compatible REST API. At its core, it sends and receives emails. I also generated SDKs for Python and TypeScript with a custom SDK generator. In total: about 40,000 lines, including Go, YAML, Pulumi, and some custom SDK glue. https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2025/9/29/90-percent/
Some startups are already near 100% AI-generated. I know, because many build in the open and you can see their code. Whether that works long-term remains to be seen. I still treat every line as my responsibility, judged as if I wrote it myself. AI doesn’t change that.
There are no weird files that shouldn’t belong there, no duplicate implementations, and no emojis all over the place.
It is easy to create systems that appear to behave correctly but have unclear runtime behavior when relying on agents. For instance, the AI doesn’t fully comprehend threading or goroutines. If you don’t keep the bad decisions at bay early it, you won’t be able to operate it in a stable manner later.
It improves productivity sure, but not at the degree people are claiming
It's not even close to a point where it can actually replace jobs and operate independently. It has to be constantly double checked to ensure that it's not hallucinating. MAYBE in a decade or so.
Tech bros are just using AI as an excuse to offshore
Just because something technically can be done with fewer people doesn't mean that it should.
When you give too many projects to one person it actually slows things down in the long run. It helps to only be able to focus on a few things at a single time.
Ex engineer at @getsoils @waymo @magicleap @twitter @google: Personal experience: turned a $1M/year (200K x 5) engineering department into ~$1,000 month across Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT/Codex: https://xcancel.com/olshansky/status/2001709058563400084
20+ year SWE: Couldn’t agree more. I used to run an agency a few years ago and I (as a single human) build more, faster and better than a product team can. Facts. It’s crazy. https://xcancel.com/paulgosnell/status/2001749809745781237
Hey! I work at meta. I didn’t say it could replace jobs (although it can, is, and will), but it does dramatically increase productivity. We also have agents that do operate independently.
Also human code has to be checked as well so that’s really not a strike against AI. In fact we have agents checking our human code now!
Sounds like you might be a bit behind the times in terms of your ML research.
EDIT: Case in point. Nothing invites condescension
And no it's not happening right now. AI is still decades away from operating independently. Even the most advanced models still work by guessing. LLMs are not truly AI.
Edit 2: Nice try at ragebaiting me. You're obviously a troll.
Maybe you should be less confident when you obviously are not aware of how quickly the field is developing?
When you say “maybe in a decade or so” to things that are happening right now, while claiming to be an expert in the field, it frankly invites condescension and mockery.
Look, you’re just wrong. We have AI operating independently at meta. And you’re clearly not an ML researcher, you are just regurgitating the Reddit groupthink about LLMs, having zero understanding of how they work. Any real ML researcher would know that LLMs are AI by definition.
It seems like you have such difficulty dealing with reality that you would rather pretend I’m “trolling” you than admit that your understanding of AI’s capabilities is quite incorrect.
I don’t see any meaningful difference between you and a flat earther or vaccine skeptic. You simply reject reality.
Software engineering manager here - not in a way that matters. Being able to make slop faster doesn't change that it's slop that will not scale or be maintainable.
OK? I suspect I've interacted with you specifically before. Working at Meta does not validate your skill or knowledge level. If anything, with how deeply unethical and dishonest Meta is in practically every area of its business, I'd be embarrassed to admit working there if I did.
Where do you work?
Where I work has nothing to do with this conversation, not that you'd likely have heard of the company anyway.
if you don’t think LLMs can generate maintainable code, you are absolutely bad at your job and don’t know what you’re doing.
Insulting me isn't going to help how other people perceive you. It may be how you cope with producing unmaintainable code, but it isn't healthy and you should probably see someone about that.
Hey don’t you know you’re not allowed to have any positive opinions of AI at all or suggest it’s anything but a planet destroying useless slop generator?
It’s really quite sad. These people have no idea what’s going on, but the ignorance is completely self-imposed. They have a few very difficult years of learning and adjustment ahead of them.
Of course I have. The unfortunate reality is that any new technology will replace some job, and we can’t improve society and our quality of life without new technologies.
Switchboard operators and assembly line workers had a rough go of it when their jobs were rendered needless, but the benefit to society provided by automation was far more than worth the cost.
This isn't one or two jobs being replaced though, companies are trying to replace EVERY SINGLE WHITE COLLAR JOB. They're not even giving the people they lay off benefits.
A: automation did the same thing, in near equally huge numbers, those are just the two that came to mind, and
B: so? That’s a societal problem and it’s up to us to solve it, but the solution can’t be “give up on any new technology that could significantly displace human labor.” That will result in societal and technological stagnation.
And they get what they pay for. I've posted this again and again: I've worked with company after company on implementations. Whenever the company hires an India-based team to do the implementation, it's a shit show. The team overpromises, underdelivers, and then tries to throw everyone else under the bus. I've just accepted that this is a cultural thing there. This never happens when it's an Eastern European shop that gets hired instead for example. I mean, it can't be an accident that literally every scam call you get is someone with a particular accent, can it?
I recently started a new role that is very metrics-based. We have an office in India and I just have to bite my tongue on this. Management is concerned about why the India office can't compete with our US offices. Last week my coworker had an issue with someone from the India office assigning my coworker's completed tasks to himself to pad his numbers.
So now I'm tracking all of my work outside of our Kanban boards in a personal spreadsheet to make sure nobody is skimming off of me.
I’m working with a few offshore team members and it’s impossible for them to communicate effectively with stakeholders. They know English as a language but just don’t have the conversational skills to discuss complex problems
I work with an Indian typesetter for one of our publications (academic journals). I’ve given them PDF, email, and verbal instructions on how to compile and upload the files for print - standard operating procedure over and over again. They keep fucking it up and our vendor (Printer) is like what the fuck!!?
I’ve ask the Indian typesetter to just send me all the fucking files and I’ll do it instead. They then get all pissy and like “I don’t understand what we are doing wrong?” After I’ve been explaining it to them for over 2 years now.
In contrast, our typesetter in Ohio for other publications just does everything flawlessly. I trust them 100% and don’t need to review their work.
I wanted to keep on going with my original post,
but also wanted to keep it concise.
I've lost track of the number of times when I was in support where somebody from India opened a ticket and attached all of the documentation for a project they needed to work on and straight up asked us to do it.
To be fair, salespeople and startup "executives" will do similar stuff where they will email you an RFP and TELL you to fill it out and get uppity when you won't do their work for them. Don't get me wrong, there are times when filling out RFPs makes sense. Emails to the support team like this rerouted to sales never went anywhere in my experience. Usually, sales already told them to kick rocks.
The Indians will just keep asking you to "do the needful" regardless of how much you try to explain that they want you to work on a massive project for them. My best guess is that they literally don't understand the scope of what they're asking for.
in my experience with their tech workers, they are slick shirkers, pompous incompetents, and RUTHLESSLY take credit for other people's successfully completed work -- organized crime really . . .
Stanford people grow up with money and take an education that says free market libertarianism is natural law, implies they’re superior to poor people if they end up earning more, and tells them exploitation is smart and necessary. Then they can’t get work because they’re screwed by other, older people just like them. Why should I care?
Based take. They set out to be captains of industry, real hardcore capitalists -- only to realize that someone else beat them to the punch and they're the cows being milked for their tuition dollars and forever rents.
I’m only industry adjacent, so this is largely an educated guess, but I think the answer is that remote work infrastructure is relatively new, only really reaching its current ubiquity post-Covid.
It has been happening for a long time, have you been living under a rock? It started in other areas like customer service and tech support, and has spread to CS in general. Pre-Covid, there was relatively little support for the idea of remote work being effective.
Once it became apparent it was, companies needed to adopt and learn to use the tools to effectively collaborate across continents, identify qualified candidates they’d never meet in person, maintain security, handle language and cultural barriers…
There’s a thousand and one little problems that had to be solved, all of which simply took a little time once the idea of remote work took off post-Covid
This is so bad. Not only I have to compete against FAANG layoff employees, but also now against Stanford kids. I'm no Stanford materials, just an above average guy, very bad for me.
Yup. One of my best friends is a CS major. In any other world, he’d be a top tier candidate. Personal projects in the dozens, relevant experience teaching at coding camps, volunteers, excellent grades, good references and industry contacts.
I'm not in engineering or CS. All of the "AI firings" I've witnessed so far have been organizations referencing AI as replacing staff, but then all that happens is the work is divvied out to the remaining staff. There is no "AI" replacing anyone, people are just being expected to do more with less. For example, my organization fired six out of eight hiring/HR staff while citing AI as the reason. Then after all those people left, the two people remaining had to pick up most of their work and more tasks were rationed out to hiring managers. AI has no role, the organization simply took six full-time responsibilities and found new desks to plop them on.
Lmao I've always found it hilarious that ivy league grads are SHOCKED to realize they also can't get a job just like, gasp, the rest of us non-ivy grads
To be fair, this sub doesn’t really help. Every time someone from MIT, Stanford, CMU, et al posts on this sub dooming about the future, every comment is just “you’ll be fine you go to X” ignoring the question and concerns. So there are many layers to this.
How do so many people not realize that just because it’s a private school doesn’t mean it’s an Ivy League school? There are exactly 8 and they are all in the Northeast.
A friend of mine went to Oxford. He was from the middle class but nearly all of his classmates were from the elite. They were snobbish and have never been told no in their lives. They are also utterly out of touch with reality- the British royal family are more in touch than they are. In fact, they don’t really see us as people but more as resources to be consumed. Go into any classroom and you’ll find someone with Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg’s personality. Most of them are miserable to be around if you didn’t also spend summers on your family’s private jet.
It’s far, far worse in the Ivy Leagues since so many students are only there because their parents went there or donated a building.
It’s far, far worse in the Ivy Leagues since so many students are only there because their parents went there or donated a building.
I think you're thinking more of legacy admissions. Bribery by building is not common but not too rare, legacy is much much more influential. Legacy admissions ensure the parent is of a certain social class, and if their kid is a student they're even more likely to donate. You don't need shady deals to get the upper hand, there is already a legitimatized structure in place
Though, in my experience, I'd have to disagree with you. Oxford had a more snobbish atmosphere than my school did, even despite the overload of business majors at my ivy. Oxford seemed to favor private school kids a lot more while my school had a mix of private and public feeder schools
Doesn’t only one Ivy have undergrad business? I thought traditionally they were all too snobby to offer majors that lead directly to a job because that’s not as academic
No they have most normal majors like other schools of their respective size. You can look them up online if you wish.
ETA: yeah I guess I only penn has an undergrad business school, the only nursing school as well. It is the largest one though. Generally the ivy league schools are smaller and prioritize grad school and research. for undergrads though it's basically free if you're middle class so I'm not complaining.
ETA: actually I am complaining. 20+ billion dollar endowment and you can't manage a half decent student mental health service? There was some third party evaluation that was done some times ago that evaluated the 8 ivy league schools mental health policies/practices and Penn ranked the highest with a grade of a D+. We averaged maybe a little more than one suicide a year. Two suicides happened in public when I was there, one of those was on campus. We got emails when anyone died, you could kinda tell when it was a suicide by the lack of any detail, and it wasn't too difficult to confirm things through the grapevine later. A while back one girl's parents sued after she passed away on the subway early one morning. She had told the school multiple times that she was thinking of suicide and nothing happened because CAPS is a bureaucratic nightmare. The other end of that spectrum is voicing suicidal thoughts once and being forced on a leave of absence that also includes a bureaucratic mess as documented here
I went to an ivy league. The biggest issue I had with some of my classmates was class. Some upper class kids just truly can't fully comprehend the state of the world and come off as incredibly out of touch and sometimes downright insulting. The ivy leagues and other elite institutions have a higher concentration of these types of students. You'll find them everywhere though if you look hard enough
yeah, "highly educated with no real life experience" can produce some grade A assholes. some things you can't learn at school. which is probably something they should teach...
It’s amazing how many McKinsey kids I’ve seen who graduated ivy but honestly have no grasp on how the real world works and are further insulated by their McKinsey consulting gig
I interviewed 2 Software Engineer kids from McKinsey and oh boy was it bad and I don’t even require coding tests
I can relate. Lived in this bubble as a kid. Was one of 'em "out of touch" kids coming into college. Public school really grounded me. Even then it's still privilege that I got to go there.
Ivy League resumes look more impressive on average, so the recruiter is more likely to give them to us (until we instructed them not to. So there is a bias, but for a time especially around 2023 we were doing back to back Ivy League interviews).
It’s the same issue with any other university grad. No practical skills, and lack of delivery…
My theory is that the number of good candidates out of Ivy League is the same as any other university. It’s just harder to spot the good ones from Ivy League schools…. Whereas a good state university grad is easier to spot.
This is spot on, and it's leaking into the other elite schools too, but I'm a little hesitant to call it a generational thing as it's more a failure on these universities to teach real interviewing, social interaction.
The amount of students that tell me their university is their resume is insulting. Real quotes from real adults. The entitlement is brutal. It also hurts the other hardworking, strong candidates.
On one hand, it provides an empathetic perspective to the candidates who have those large gaps on their resumes, may not be polished interviewers and are struggling to just get their name out there.
But on the other hand, it also shows when you have those salty, entitled, I deserve anything I apply to folks that I've interviewed that I feel better about avoiding the toxicity. Or apply to jobs they're grossly underqualified for and shame automated email rejection.
And I like to share the perspective of what it's like from our end because it actually amazes me how many people make assumptions of the hiring process that couldn't be further from the truth but might just be a coping mechanism.
I do wish more people would post their YOE and industry when posting. It feels like a sub grossly dominated by software/IT and I've been in manufacturing/health care my entire career with more hands on engineers and it's crazy how different those skill sets experience in the interviewing process is.
Even in the US it’s wild to read, most of our employers also don’t care as long as you went to an “acceptable” and accredited institution
It’s way more about meeting the employers through the school events or other means that builds those career connections. Little to do with the school unless you get really lucky and an alum hires you because you went to their school.
Different person, but often it's a lack of good project work.
Years ago, a grad might have been able to get a job as a junior just riding on the university's reputation, but nowadays if you can't articulate a specific problem, how you studied and solved it with code and what the benefit was it's really hard for me to recommend hiring you. Too many other people can do that.
And that's not getting into the vibe coders who clam up and can't answer basic questions because they've been having ChatGPT do their homework for the last 3 years.
perhaps they can use their superior intelligence to organize for a revamping of society as a socialist paradise then, with UBI, free health care, housing, university, now that humans are finally freed from the bondage of forced labor . . .
Not every one of them has that massive personality red flag. Some of them come out of those ivy league schools ready to get started, hungry, motivated, and eager to learn. But there are just as many ivy league fresh grads, that I have interviewed, who are mostly selling themselves off of their education. Many that I have interviewed have absolutely no idea what they want to do with their careers, they give very abstract, generic career goals. Combine that with this attitude that comes across like I should be thankful that I'm interviewing them in the first place, and it can be difficult to move them forward.
“Stanford computer science graduates are struggling to find entry-level jobs” with the most prominent tech brands, said Jan Liphardt, associate professor of bioengineering at Stanford University. “I think that’s crazy.”
They're mad they don't have $200k+ FAANG jobs thrown at them anymore...
Dw the non 200k/year jobs dont interview them because ‘why would a stanford grad wanna work at this mid tier co’ and ‘youll just leave when google calls you’
So if they dont get an elite job, its just doomed all around…
It has nothing to do with AI, part of it is because so many people jumped on the tech hype train so the market is oversaturated & part of it is due to poor soft skills.
The Stanford grads who could afford the sticker price are not the unemployed ones. Studies show that scholarship kids who go to Ivies do not tangibly experience upwards mobility after graduation. Worked my ass off to get a full ride to an Ivy, extremely impressive friends who did the same are working retail post-grad while the legacy admits without real world experience are doing just fine thanks to pre-existing connections.
I get that people are looking for schadenfreude where they can get it but it’s weird to see people in this sub on the side of the recruiters because they assumed it was rich kids getting the short stick. Rich kids never get the short stick lol
This is a shitty lesson to learn after graduating, but going to class is probably not one of the top 5 things you should do attending an elite university.
We did everything. We went to class AND did competitive internships, job fairs, made strong connections with professors, career center counseling etc. The job market is THAT cooked. If anything, the only thing I really took away from it were the classes- I learned so much and grew as a person, and that can’t be taken away.
The kids I know who are employed got entry level jobs at daddy’s hedge fund management firm. (ETA that or they’re floating by doing 2-3 years of unpaid internships post-grad while daddy pays for NYC rent). This is not a system you can game by simply thinking strategically if you don’t already come from that world.
Jesus if I had parents who had 300k for college I’d say forget it, just put it into the stock market and I’ll go work a chill job and I’ll still retire in my early 50s lol
Stanford tuition doesn't work that way. There is a sticker price and then there is what people actually pay. The vast majority pay less than the sticker price due to financial aid. If your family earns less than 150K, you don't pay tuition.
Exactly-$300k invested in Spy and Qqq four years ago today, is worth over $450k today. They could buy a business, go to college, buy a house or condo, or just invest it.
its possible that these unemployed grads are highly spoiled and not short on money whatsoever. so where most people would just accept slight underemployment until they work their way up, stanford grads might disproportionately have high expectations but no real need to get paid, as they can just live off their parents money anyways.
And this is how you make sure that if anyone breaks out of the lower class, they will soon find themselves there again, but overqualified to live. F this mentality.
Seriously, we are supposed to feel bad for people that spend $300k to send their genius kids to Stanford, but the precious babies can’t seem to find any work, of any kind, anywhere?
A significant number are NOT the rich kids you're thinking of. Some of them grew up poor and got full-ride scholarships. So yeah, you should cultivate some empathy for people from your own class that you seem intent on tearing down.
I write code as about 40% of my job, and am yet to find alleged AI that can replace me. And I'm not even a fancy-pants programmer with a computer science degree. Meanwhile, as of about a month ago MS Copilot became wholly incapable of writing code in one of Microsoft's bespoke languages for one of its products. Let this sink in: Microsoft made changes to a Microsoft chatbot that made it worse at working with a Microsoft product.
This is entirely just a socially-acceptable excuse for firing people and either not replacing them or replacing them with offshoring.
It both is and it isn't costing jobs. It is not truly viable as a replacement for a decent worker at literally anything, but it may be a replacement for some of the worse performers.
This of course makes it enticing for the nepo CEOs, who are naturally the lowest hanging fruit. They figure if it's smarter than they are it must be smarter than their workers. It's not, but their inherited wealth immunizes them from the consequences of bankrupting their own company. They will only fail up.
I've worked with some astoundingly inept people at certain points in my career. I would say that AI is a replacement for them inasmuch as they simply shouldn't have been on payroll at all. The role being vacant would have been an improvement, so having useless AI doing nothing but burn cash would also have been preferable to employing them. However, the preference would have been to have neither and instead have someone competent in the role.
The point isn’t that some people aren’t a net negative, it’s that using AI for a human role at all is a risk that companies aren’t taking. It’s not impacting hiring.
Many companies are claiming otherwise. I see no reason to disbelieve it given what I am seeing from some highly talented and experienced people who are out of work right now.
They may be doing it at their own peril, but that doesn't mean it isn't happening.
They want shareholders to believe they are, but they aren’t explicitly saying it because it’s not true and would be fraud. Example: Amazon blamed layoffs on AI hoping for that assumption to be made…but the fine print said because it was because of additional investments in developing AI model services to sell not using the AI models.
Anyway, source: am a full time consultant in governance/risk/compliance and am well versed in the data on this issue. It isn’t happening.
am a full time consultant in governance/risk/compliance and am well versed in the data on this issue.
I dunno how you view this statement but this doesn't really inspire confidence in your understanding of AI or it's future. But if you are well versed in the "data on this issue" can you point us to it? It would actually be cool to see some papers.
My friend is head engineer at industrial automation office and atleast he said how they could basically replace junior designers with delicated AI and they already need to give project management tasks to engineers because otherwise they would not have enough work in office because AI.
So its crazy how people seem to have polar opposite views about AI.
I don’t know, I got a regular bachelors in social statistics from a state school and had no problem finding a job and it was in a degree most people say is “useless”
Doesn’t this usually happen with each new wave of tech. When I was college-aged the guidance counselors encouraged me to get into computer network, that it was a growing field with lots of opportunity. When I finished my degree, there was an over-saturation of IT degrees holders and all I could get was a call center job.
What got and sexy and in demand now may not be after 2/4 years.
Yeah, but software is now easy. 7 years ago, I couldn't make a web app typing requirements into another web app.
seem like a person who could take instruction and learn quickly
With AI, there is the perception (idk how accurate) that someone who needs to be told things is useless as the AI can follow instructions, so the job now is to give instructions.
Probably not more complex software, but Lovable seems to live up to expectations. Even if there are bugs, it certainly qualifies as good enough in some cases.
Software isn't easy even with LLMs. That is what people who aren't software developers think about LLMs.
Having produced a "product" already isn't even a good metric or deciding factor on which candidates will be successful employees at your company. The ability to debug a complicated issue in a mature codebase is way more valuable than being able to churn out some garbage in Lovable that can't even be changed as requirements change.
One of my full time jobs (I am overemployed, with the help of AI) is evaluating coding agents, so I get access to beta versions of everything.
I think this career is going to struggle outside of architecting stuff, serving as translation for the product people, and turning the mass of ideation they produce into a spec. Granted, this has always been the job of a dev, but the part of it that used to be 90% of my day is gone.
I am not opening my IDE. I am not bothering to review the code anymore. I hooked Gemini up with read access to a database for a data error/integrity investigation that the PM has scoped out to take a month and I did it casually over Christmas. I had Claude push something and create a PR based on its own test results and my team lead gave me the usual LGTM.
I still need my experience to make it do something useful (like not giving Gemini write access to the DB), but I can't imagine I would have a use if I didn't have that experience.
We even have a brand new senior on my team who nobody gives much work to as it is easier to tell the AI to get the context required from the code than to teach him how to do a task. It would take a ton to get a junior useable.
This was posted in the engineeringstudents subreddit a while back, and the people in the CS industry all agree that AI gets blamed because it’s more interesting than the reality, that it’s actually offshoring that’s to blame.
The common joke is that the “A.I.” they keep referring actually stands for “an Indian.”
For those of you who missed this story: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazons-just-walk-out-actually-1-000-people-in-india-2024-4
This one actually had more nuance than it sounded. The technology worked without any human intervention about 30% of the time, and the workers were only there to review stuff that the AI flagged that it wasn’t sure about.
Still fits the joke, but I always felt this got made fun of more than it deserved.
except that amazon eventually admitted it wasn't feasible with today's technology. they were trying to "fake it until you make it" and they never actually made it.
Imagine if your car only worked 3 out of 10 times. Or if every 2 out of 3 times you went to the bathroom, someone had to review your toilet.
This is not in line with the numbers I've seen elsewhere. The article says that 700 out of a thousand trips needed to be manually reviewed, and Amazon's goal was around 50. Which makes sense, if you want to scale the tech, even 50 out of a thousand is going to be high if they have millions of transactions a day.
… that’s working 30% of the time. Literally exactly.
You're right I misread your comment. Probably because it's obvious how off it is. They wanted it to work 99.5 percent of the time, and it worked 30. Way off.
Yeah that didn’t work great, but I feel like it got more flak than it deserved. It’s faster for the people in the store, and cuts down on labor costs by both offshoring cashier work and automating some portion of it.
People treat it like a failure because it didn’t get 100% success, but the reality doesn’t align. It’s a great development, even a 30% reduction in labor costs is significant.
Requiring 70 percent of purchases to be manually checked is probably untenable. We don't know the process, but they would have probably had to watch video of them wandering the store, watching for them to put things in their cart. Meaning, at the rates that they were hitting, it actually took a lot more labor, not less. Not to mention the delay in being charged could be... unsettling.
Honestly, there were other problems with the concept, not the least that cashiers help with loss prevention. Which stores care about alot.
I feel like it should be able to flag individual items it wasn’t sure about, making the review only a few seconds at most.
Maybe, but maybe if part of the trip is flagged you want to review the whole thing.
In any case, they dropped it for now. We'll probably never know exactly why, except that a 70 percent failure rate is too high.
A 30% success is fine when you already have a system in place to define and identify which 30% should pass, e.g. an existing automated workflow. So you're saving 30% from an already diminished labor force, but you're still not bridging that gap from automation to generalization with LLMs
It also has nothing to do with gen ai
LOL that's comical
This has nothing to do with gen ai
AI = affordable Indian
Not in 2025.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/07/crowdstrike-announces-5percent-job-cuts-says-ai-reshaping-every-industry.html
At least, AI is the scapegoat for doing layoffs due to a worsening economy.
I honestly can’t think of any positions outside of customer support and call center where AI has done any replacing and I’d argue they’re doing a dogshit job at what they have replaced.
Yeah because any actual software engineer will tell you that AI is not the enourmous productivity boost business people think it is.
Heres what professional coders have to say
Andrej Karpathy: I think congrats again to OpenAI for cooking with GPT-5 Pro. This is the third time I've struggled on something complex/gnarly for an hour on and off with CC, then 5 Pro goes off for 10 minutes and comes back with code that works out of the box. I had CC read the 5 Pro version and it wrote up 2 paragraphs admiring it (very wholesome). If you're not giving it your hardest problems you're probably missing out. https://xcancel.com/karpathy/status/1964020416139448359
Creator of Vue JS and Vite, Evan You, "Gemini 2.5 pro is really really good." https://xcancel.com/youyuxi/status/1910509965208674701
Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette:
March 2025: Not all AI-assisted programming is vibe coding (but vibe coding rocks) https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/19/vibe-coding/
Says Claude Sonnet 4.5 is capable of building a full Datasette plugin now. https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/8/claude-datasette-plugins/
Oct 2025: I’m increasingly hearing from experienced, credible software engineers who are running multiple copies of agents at once, tackling several problems in parallel and expanding the scope of what they can take on. I was skeptical of this at first but I’ve started running multiple agents myself now and it’s surprisingly effective, if mentally exhausting https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/7/vibe-engineering/
Oct 2025: I was pretty skeptical about this at first. AI-generated code needs to be reviewed, which means the natural bottleneck on all of this is how fast I can review the results. It’s tough keeping up with just a single LLM given how fast they can churn things out, where’s the benefit from running more than one at a time if it just leaves me further behind? Despite my misgivings, over the past few weeks I’ve noticed myself quietly starting to embrace the parallel coding agent lifestyle. I can only focus on reviewing and landing one significant change at a time, but I’m finding an increasing number of tasks that can still be fired off in parallel without adding too much cognitive overhead to my primary work. https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/5/parallel-coding-agents/
Oct 2025: I'm beginning to suspect that a key skill in working effectively with coding agents is developing an intuition for when you don't need to closely review every line of code they produce. This feels deeply uncomfortable! https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/11/uncomfortable/
Oct 2025: I’m increasingly hearing from experienced, credible software engineers who are running multiple copies of agents at once, tackling several problems in parallel and expanding the scope of what they can take on. I was skeptical of this at first but I’ve started running multiple agents myself now and it’s surprisingly effective, if mentally exhausting! This feels very different from classic vibe coding, where I outsource a simple, low-stakes task to an LLM and accept the result if it appears to work. Most of my tools.simonwillison.net collection (previously) were built like that. Iterating with coding agents to produce production-quality code that I’m confident I can maintain in the future feels like a different process entirely. https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/7/vibe-engineering/
Oct 2025: Vibe coding a non trivial feature Ghostty feature https://mitchellh.com/writing/non-trivial-vibing
June 2025: Creator of Flask, Jinja2, Click, Werkzeug, and many other widely used things: At the moment I’m working on a new project. Even over the last two months, the way I do this has changed profoundly. Where I used to spend most of my time in Cursor, I now mostly use Claude Code, almost entirely hands-off. Do I program any faster? Not really. But it feels like I’ve gained 30% more time in my day because the machine is doing the work. https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2025/6/4/changes/
For the infrastructure component I started at my new company, I’m probably north of 90% AI-written code. The service is written in Go with few dependencies and an OpenAPI-compatible REST API. At its core, it sends and receives emails. I also generated SDKs for Python and TypeScript with a custom SDK generator. In total: about 40,000 lines, including Go, YAML, Pulumi, and some custom SDK glue. https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2025/9/29/90-percent/
AI helps sure, but it's not even remotely at a point where it can actually replace jobs. It needs to constantly be double checked
If workers are twice as productive, the company requires half the staff
Are you under the impression that human code doesn't need to be double-checked?
From one of your links (just one):
https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2025/9/29/90-percent/
Most of the human go programmers on here don't fully comprehend threading or goroutines either.
Never said they were perfect. Though keep in mind this was before Claude opus 4.5
Software engineer here - yes it is.
ML researcher here
It improves productivity sure, but not at the degree people are claiming
It's not even close to a point where it can actually replace jobs and operate independently. It has to be constantly double checked to ensure that it's not hallucinating. MAYBE in a decade or so.
Tech bros are just using AI as an excuse to offshore
As a SWE that's my experience.
Thank you! The real threat is outsourcing like usual. The same shit 20+ years ago. The real blame is cheap ah companies.
Improving productivity means fewer swes needed
Just because something technically can be done with fewer people doesn't mean that it should.
When you give too many projects to one person it actually slows things down in the long run. It helps to only be able to focus on a few things at a single time.
That’s what ai is for
But it still can't do projects by itself.
Ex engineer at @getsoils @waymo @magicleap @twitter @google: Personal experience: turned a $1M/year (200K x 5) engineering department into ~$1,000 month across Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT/Codex: https://xcancel.com/olshansky/status/2001709058563400084
25 year SWE and founder of multiple acquired startups, including Amp Code https://xcancel.com/ryancarson/status/2001716340424311021
I've been using LLMs to code for 704 days.
Opus 4.5 + @AmpCode + @vercel + @aisdk + @WorkflowDevKit + @publer + @NanoBanana is an absolute game changer.
The velocity I ship now is just hard for me to believe.
Launching a new large feature on my mature codebase (330,000 lines of TypeScript) never takes more than 1 day.
I can do things now in 1 day that would've taken 4 weeks for a team:
2 Devs 1 Designer 1 Infra 1 PM 1 Marketer 1 Content creator
20+ year SWE: Couldn’t agree more. I used to run an agency a few years ago and I (as a single human) build more, faster and better than a product team can. Facts. It’s crazy. https://xcancel.com/paulgosnell/status/2001749809745781237
Are you a bot spamming random links?
You're just proving my point. All of those still require a person.
Hey! I work at meta. I didn’t say it could replace jobs (although it can, is, and will), but it does dramatically increase productivity. We also have agents that do operate independently.
Also human code has to be checked as well so that’s really not a strike against AI. In fact we have agents checking our human code now!
Sounds like you might be a bit behind the times in terms of your ML research.
There's no need to be condescending.
EDIT: Case in point. Nothing invites condescension
And no it's not happening right now. AI is still decades away from operating independently. Even the most advanced models still work by guessing. LLMs are not truly AI.
Edit 2: Nice try at ragebaiting me. You're obviously a troll.
Maybe you should be less confident when you obviously are not aware of how quickly the field is developing?
When you say “maybe in a decade or so” to things that are happening right now, while claiming to be an expert in the field, it frankly invites condescension and mockery.
Look, you’re just wrong. We have AI operating independently at meta. And you’re clearly not an ML researcher, you are just regurgitating the Reddit groupthink about LLMs, having zero understanding of how they work. Any real ML researcher would know that LLMs are AI by definition.
It seems like you have such difficulty dealing with reality that you would rather pretend I’m “trolling” you than admit that your understanding of AI’s capabilities is quite incorrect.
I don’t see any meaningful difference between you and a flat earther or vaccine skeptic. You simply reject reality.
Software engineering manager here - not in a way that matters. Being able to make slop faster doesn't change that it's slop that will not scale or be maintainable.
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Or you simply don't know what a maintainable application is.
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OK? I suspect I've interacted with you specifically before. Working at Meta does not validate your skill or knowledge level. If anything, with how deeply unethical and dishonest Meta is in practically every area of its business, I'd be embarrassed to admit working there if I did.
Where I work has nothing to do with this conversation, not that you'd likely have heard of the company anyway.
Insulting me isn't going to help how other people perceive you. It may be how you cope with producing unmaintainable code, but it isn't healthy and you should probably see someone about that.
Yeah this guy sounds like a troll. They've tried ragebaiting me in this very thread as well.
Working at meta is not the brag they think it is.
Good luck with your tech debt.
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Citing meta is though it's a standard people look up to, is humorous.
Hey don’t you know you’re not allowed to have any positive opinions of AI at all or suggest it’s anything but a planet destroying useless slop generator?
It’s really quite sad. These people have no idea what’s going on, but the ignorance is completely self-imposed. They have a few very difficult years of learning and adjustment ahead of them.
Saying that AI can replace jobs is not a positive opinion.
A: “Productivity boost” and “replace job aren’t the same thing
B: Yes, it is. Technological developments reducing the need for labor are great.
It isn't great for the people that got laid off. Have you ever considered them?
Of course I have. The unfortunate reality is that any new technology will replace some job, and we can’t improve society and our quality of life without new technologies.
Switchboard operators and assembly line workers had a rough go of it when their jobs were rendered needless, but the benefit to society provided by automation was far more than worth the cost.
This isn't one or two jobs being replaced though, companies are trying to replace EVERY SINGLE WHITE COLLAR JOB. They're not even giving the people they lay off benefits.
A: automation did the same thing, in near equally huge numbers, those are just the two that came to mind, and
B: so? That’s a societal problem and it’s up to us to solve it, but the solution can’t be “give up on any new technology that could significantly displace human labor.” That will result in societal and technological stagnation.
And they get what they pay for. I've posted this again and again: I've worked with company after company on implementations. Whenever the company hires an India-based team to do the implementation, it's a shit show. The team overpromises, underdelivers, and then tries to throw everyone else under the bus. I've just accepted that this is a cultural thing there. This never happens when it's an Eastern European shop that gets hired instead for example. I mean, it can't be an accident that literally every scam call you get is someone with a particular accent, can it?
I recently started a new role that is very metrics-based. We have an office in India and I just have to bite my tongue on this. Management is concerned about why the India office can't compete with our US offices. Last week my coworker had an issue with someone from the India office assigning my coworker's completed tasks to himself to pad his numbers.
So now I'm tracking all of my work outside of our Kanban boards in a personal spreadsheet to make sure nobody is skimming off of me.
I’m working with a few offshore team members and it’s impossible for them to communicate effectively with stakeholders. They know English as a language but just don’t have the conversational skills to discuss complex problems
I work with an Indian typesetter for one of our publications (academic journals). I’ve given them PDF, email, and verbal instructions on how to compile and upload the files for print - standard operating procedure over and over again. They keep fucking it up and our vendor (Printer) is like what the fuck!!?
I’ve ask the Indian typesetter to just send me all the fucking files and I’ll do it instead. They then get all pissy and like “I don’t understand what we are doing wrong?” After I’ve been explaining it to them for over 2 years now.
In contrast, our typesetter in Ohio for other publications just does everything flawlessly. I trust them 100% and don’t need to review their work.
I wanted to keep on going with my original post, but also wanted to keep it concise.
I've lost track of the number of times when I was in support where somebody from India opened a ticket and attached all of the documentation for a project they needed to work on and straight up asked us to do it.
To be fair, salespeople and startup "executives" will do similar stuff where they will email you an RFP and TELL you to fill it out and get uppity when you won't do their work for them. Don't get me wrong, there are times when filling out RFPs makes sense. Emails to the support team like this rerouted to sales never went anywhere in my experience. Usually, sales already told them to kick rocks.
The Indians will just keep asking you to "do the needful" regardless of how much you try to explain that they want you to work on a massive project for them. My best guess is that they literally don't understand the scope of what they're asking for.
in my experience with their tech workers, they are slick shirkers, pompous incompetents, and RUTHLESSLY take credit for other people's successfully completed work -- organized crime really . . .
Stanford people grow up with money and take an education that says free market libertarianism is natural law, implies they’re superior to poor people if they end up earning more, and tells them exploitation is smart and necessary. Then they can’t get work because they’re screwed by other, older people just like them. Why should I care?
Based take. They set out to be captains of industry, real hardcore capitalists -- only to realize that someone else beat them to the punch and they're the cows being milked for their tuition dollars and forever rents.
It's offshoring and it probably won't end
Bangledeshi took your job not a computer.
Why werent they offshoring a few years ago when the job market was great?
I’m only industry adjacent, so this is largely an educated guess, but I think the answer is that remote work infrastructure is relatively new, only really reaching its current ubiquity post-Covid.
Then why didn’t they set up remote work infrastructure earlier? How hard can setting up zoom meetings be?
There wasn’t a demand for it until Covid?
Zoom existed before covid. So did skype and google meets
“Zoom” is not “remote work infrastructure.” It’s at best an extremely small component of it.
What else do they need? Everything has been done on a computer since the 2000s. Outsourcing could have started then if it was that easy
It has been happening for a long time, have you been living under a rock? It started in other areas like customer service and tech support, and has spread to CS in general. Pre-Covid, there was relatively little support for the idea of remote work being effective.
Once it became apparent it was, companies needed to adopt and learn to use the tools to effectively collaborate across continents, identify qualified candidates they’d never meet in person, maintain security, handle language and cultural barriers…
There’s a thousand and one little problems that had to be solved, all of which simply took a little time once the idea of remote work took off post-Covid
Is there any evidence offshoring or outsourcing has increased significantly in recent years relative to domestic hiring?
This is so bad. Not only I have to compete against FAANG layoff employees, but also now against Stanford kids. I'm no Stanford materials, just an above average guy, very bad for me.
Yup. One of my best friends is a CS major. In any other world, he’d be a top tier candidate. Personal projects in the dozens, relevant experience teaching at coding camps, volunteers, excellent grades, good references and industry contacts.
He can’t even get an internship.
I'm not in engineering or CS. All of the "AI firings" I've witnessed so far have been organizations referencing AI as replacing staff, but then all that happens is the work is divvied out to the remaining staff. There is no "AI" replacing anyone, people are just being expected to do more with less. For example, my organization fired six out of eight hiring/HR staff while citing AI as the reason. Then after all those people left, the two people remaining had to pick up most of their work and more tasks were rationed out to hiring managers. AI has no role, the organization simply took six full-time responsibilities and found new desks to plop them on.
Lmao I've always found it hilarious that ivy league grads are SHOCKED to realize they also can't get a job just like, gasp, the rest of us non-ivy grads
To be fair, this sub doesn’t really help. Every time someone from MIT, Stanford, CMU, et al posts on this sub dooming about the future, every comment is just “you’ll be fine you go to X” ignoring the question and concerns. So there are many layers to this.
How do so many people not realize that just because it’s a private school doesn’t mean it’s an Ivy League school? There are exactly 8 and they are all in the Northeast.
It’s stanford, i don’t think theyre assuming it’s ivy because it’s private.
Then why are they assuming it’s an Ivy? It’s not even on the correct coast for that.
Many people consider Stanford an honorary ivy. It is about as impressive as going to Ivy, as it is one of the best schools in the world.
Gonna guess you never went ivy? Lol.
I’ve interviewed maybe 20 Ivy League grads the past 2 years all 20 were very strongly no hire. Like it wasn’t even close.
Why?
A friend of mine went to Oxford. He was from the middle class but nearly all of his classmates were from the elite. They were snobbish and have never been told no in their lives. They are also utterly out of touch with reality- the British royal family are more in touch than they are. In fact, they don’t really see us as people but more as resources to be consumed. Go into any classroom and you’ll find someone with Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg’s personality. Most of them are miserable to be around if you didn’t also spend summers on your family’s private jet.
It’s far, far worse in the Ivy Leagues since so many students are only there because their parents went there or donated a building.
I think you're thinking more of legacy admissions. Bribery by building is not common but not too rare, legacy is much much more influential. Legacy admissions ensure the parent is of a certain social class, and if their kid is a student they're even more likely to donate. You don't need shady deals to get the upper hand, there is already a legitimatized structure in place
Though, in my experience, I'd have to disagree with you. Oxford had a more snobbish atmosphere than my school did, even despite the overload of business majors at my ivy. Oxford seemed to favor private school kids a lot more while my school had a mix of private and public feeder schools
Doesn’t only one Ivy have undergrad business? I thought traditionally they were all too snobby to offer majors that lead directly to a job because that’s not as academic
No they have most normal majors like other schools of their respective size. You can look them up online if you wish.
ETA: yeah I guess I only penn has an undergrad business school, the only nursing school as well. It is the largest one though. Generally the ivy league schools are smaller and prioritize grad school and research. for undergrads though it's basically free if you're middle class so I'm not complaining.
ETA: actually I am complaining. 20+ billion dollar endowment and you can't manage a half decent student mental health service? There was some third party evaluation that was done some times ago that evaluated the 8 ivy league schools mental health policies/practices and Penn ranked the highest with a grade of a D+. We averaged maybe a little more than one suicide a year. Two suicides happened in public when I was there, one of those was on campus. We got emails when anyone died, you could kinda tell when it was a suicide by the lack of any detail, and it wasn't too difficult to confirm things through the grapevine later. A while back one girl's parents sued after she passed away on the subway early one morning. She had told the school multiple times that she was thinking of suicide and nothing happened because CAPS is a bureaucratic nightmare. The other end of that spectrum is voicing suicidal thoughts once and being forced on a leave of absence that also includes a bureaucratic mess as documented here
My guess is ego - lots of them have been told they’re the special star their entire lives and can come off as a bit insufferable
I went to an ivy league. The biggest issue I had with some of my classmates was class. Some upper class kids just truly can't fully comprehend the state of the world and come off as incredibly out of touch and sometimes downright insulting. The ivy leagues and other elite institutions have a higher concentration of these types of students. You'll find them everywhere though if you look hard enough
yeah, "highly educated with no real life experience" can produce some grade A assholes. some things you can't learn at school. which is probably something they should teach...
It’s amazing how many McKinsey kids I’ve seen who graduated ivy but honestly have no grasp on how the real world works and are further insulated by their McKinsey consulting gig
I interviewed 2 Software Engineer kids from McKinsey and oh boy was it bad and I don’t even require coding tests
Can you elaborate a bit about why they were bad? I'm really curious what they were like.
Sure
Too much McKinsey speak using buzz words without understanding the actual questions
They could only talk in the abstract with databricks issues couldn’t site specific tasks where they had to solve an issue
They had no idea what ci/cd pipeline were
They had spent more time prepping presentations then programming work
And that was the biggest problem they just never built anything they just made “recommendations”
Thanks for sharing!
Do you work for McKinsey?
I can relate. Lived in this bubble as a kid. Was one of 'em "out of touch" kids coming into college. Public school really grounded me. Even then it's still privilege that I got to go there.
Are you talking about politicians ?
I'm talking about undergraduate students at my university. Though I'm sure they'll be the next gen
What you described is most of politicians brain rot thinking
Like I said, it's a class issue first and foremost. So that would check out
Prob $200k in debt and saying no to a $60k offer.
I doubt they were to that. Their parents don't give a shit about them and would probably do anything to get them away.
I bet they found some way to shoehorn they went to Harvard
I forget what the term is but there’s a term for people in the MBA program (I believe it’s cohort, but harvard was the only one using this term)
I have seen them try and use the term to see if anyone picks up they went to Harvard before
The ones I talked to dropped Cambridge frequently.
In my experience, most Ivy League students/grads are rich kids who can’t comprehend that they didn’t get in solely because of intellect.
what are some of the differences you noticed between regular college and ivy league?
Ivy League resumes look more impressive on average, so the recruiter is more likely to give them to us (until we instructed them not to. So there is a bias, but for a time especially around 2023 we were doing back to back Ivy League interviews).
It’s the same issue with any other university grad. No practical skills, and lack of delivery…
My theory is that the number of good candidates out of Ivy League is the same as any other university. It’s just harder to spot the good ones from Ivy League schools…. Whereas a good state university grad is easier to spot.
This is spot on, and it's leaking into the other elite schools too, but I'm a little hesitant to call it a generational thing as it's more a failure on these universities to teach real interviewing, social interaction.
The amount of students that tell me their university is their resume is insulting. Real quotes from real adults. The entitlement is brutal. It also hurts the other hardworking, strong candidates.
As someone from a country where employers don’t really care which specific university you went to, this is so wild to read
I don't care where you went to school but if you make it your entire reason why I should hire you, enjoy our automated email in 2-3 days
Curious as hiring manger do you like this sub ?
On one hand, it provides an empathetic perspective to the candidates who have those large gaps on their resumes, may not be polished interviewers and are struggling to just get their name out there.
But on the other hand, it also shows when you have those salty, entitled, I deserve anything I apply to folks that I've interviewed that I feel better about avoiding the toxicity. Or apply to jobs they're grossly underqualified for and shame automated email rejection.
And I like to share the perspective of what it's like from our end because it actually amazes me how many people make assumptions of the hiring process that couldn't be further from the truth but might just be a coping mechanism.
I do wish more people would post their YOE and industry when posting. It feels like a sub grossly dominated by software/IT and I've been in manufacturing/health care my entire career with more hands on engineers and it's crazy how different those skill sets experience in the interviewing process is.
Even in the US it’s wild to read, most of our employers also don’t care as long as you went to an “acceptable” and accredited institution
It’s way more about meeting the employers through the school events or other means that builds those career connections. Little to do with the school unless you get really lucky and an alum hires you because you went to their school.
Different person, but often it's a lack of good project work.
Years ago, a grad might have been able to get a job as a junior just riding on the university's reputation, but nowadays if you can't articulate a specific problem, how you studied and solved it with code and what the benefit was it's really hard for me to recommend hiring you. Too many other people can do that.
And that's not getting into the vibe coders who clam up and can't answer basic questions because they've been having ChatGPT do their homework for the last 3 years.
Stanford isn’t an Ivy League school, though.
They can thank the schools previous alumni for making future workers obsolete, then pulling the ladder up
Yeah but think about the shareholder value that was created
perhaps they can use their superior intelligence to organize for a revamping of society as a socialist paradise then, with UBI, free health care, housing, university, now that humans are finally freed from the bondage of forced labor . . .
Yeah, but what’s their incentive to help society?
finding themselves unemployable, for one . . .
Being a good person.
LOL
Not every one of them has that massive personality red flag. Some of them come out of those ivy league schools ready to get started, hungry, motivated, and eager to learn. But there are just as many ivy league fresh grads, that I have interviewed, who are mostly selling themselves off of their education. Many that I have interviewed have absolutely no idea what they want to do with their careers, they give very abstract, generic career goals. Combine that with this attitude that comes across like I should be thankful that I'm interviewing them in the first place, and it can be difficult to move them forward.
I mean, you'd be interviewing them for junior roles, what else do you expect? They don't know anything.
I'd say this is a bigger problem with fresh new hires.
All you need to say is that you have a relevant clue and you're ready to work hard and get competent.
The couldn’t find a job, or they couldn’t find the job that they wanted where they wanted at the salary level they wanted?
They're mad they don't have $200k+ FAANG jobs thrown at them anymore...
Dw the non 200k/year jobs dont interview them because ‘why would a stanford grad wanna work at this mid tier co’ and ‘youll just leave when google calls you’
So if they dont get an elite job, its just doomed all around…
It has nothing to do with AI, part of it is because so many people jumped on the tech hype train so the market is oversaturated & part of it is due to poor soft skills.
We are supposed to break out the violins for Stanford grads?
Unemployed Standford grads! And it’s a barometer for how bad the whole job market is right now.
Excuse me? Do you know who their dad is? Their dad is a lawyer, bro.
Whoever dad is, clearly wasted $300k plus on junior.
All Stanford graduates have lawyer dads???? Pretty sure that’s incorrect.
Why are you making shit up just to hate on people who are struggling?
Poor babies. Between what Stanford charges, and the cost of living in the area, they spent over $300k, but don’t worry, Mommy and Daddy are loaded.
The Stanford grads who could afford the sticker price are not the unemployed ones. Studies show that scholarship kids who go to Ivies do not tangibly experience upwards mobility after graduation. Worked my ass off to get a full ride to an Ivy, extremely impressive friends who did the same are working retail post-grad while the legacy admits without real world experience are doing just fine thanks to pre-existing connections.
I get that people are looking for schadenfreude where they can get it but it’s weird to see people in this sub on the side of the recruiters because they assumed it was rich kids getting the short stick. Rich kids never get the short stick lol
Thank you!
Crabs in a bucket mentality. Always amazing to see people punching to the side when they have the option to punch up.
This is a shitty lesson to learn after graduating, but going to class is probably not one of the top 5 things you should do attending an elite university.
We did everything. We went to class AND did competitive internships, job fairs, made strong connections with professors, career center counseling etc. The job market is THAT cooked. If anything, the only thing I really took away from it were the classes- I learned so much and grew as a person, and that can’t be taken away.
The kids I know who are employed got entry level jobs at daddy’s hedge fund management firm. (ETA that or they’re floating by doing 2-3 years of unpaid internships post-grad while daddy pays for NYC rent). This is not a system you can game by simply thinking strategically if you don’t already come from that world.
Jesus if I had parents who had 300k for college I’d say forget it, just put it into the stock market and I’ll go work a chill job and I’ll still retire in my early 50s lol
Stanford tuition doesn't work that way. There is a sticker price and then there is what people actually pay. The vast majority pay less than the sticker price due to financial aid. If your family earns less than 150K, you don't pay tuition.
yeah I wouldn’t know I went to a state school lol
Still worth the price if you are willing to grind for 10 15 years at least
Exactly-$300k invested in Spy and Qqq four years ago today, is worth over $450k today. They could buy a business, go to college, buy a house or condo, or just invest it.
its possible that these unemployed grads are highly spoiled and not short on money whatsoever. so where most people would just accept slight underemployment until they work their way up, stanford grads might disproportionately have high expectations but no real need to get paid, as they can just live off their parents money anyways.
There are poor students on full scholarships at every university, but especially at ones as prestigious and well funded as Stanford.
It’s very reasonable to expect to have a job that pays a living wage 6 months after graduating from a prestigious university.
Not everyone at stanford is rich :(
They actually have a TON of people from ‘normal’ backgrounds who just worked hard and got in…
And this is how you make sure that if anyone breaks out of the lower class, they will soon find themselves there again, but overqualified to live. F this mentality.
Seriously, we are supposed to feel bad for people that spend $300k to send their genius kids to Stanford, but the precious babies can’t seem to find any work, of any kind, anywhere?
A significant number are NOT the rich kids you're thinking of. Some of them grew up poor and got full-ride scholarships. So yeah, you should cultivate some empathy for people from your own class that you seem intent on tearing down.
The post was specifically referencing people that spent $300k to send their kids there. You must miss a lot of content.
It’s not AI, it’s outsourcing and work visas. America does not protect is jobs and it’s people.
indirectly due to AI? AI isn't doing any jobs, it's just diverting money away from real expenditures like staffing.
I write code as about 40% of my job, and am yet to find alleged AI that can replace me. And I'm not even a fancy-pants programmer with a computer science degree. Meanwhile, as of about a month ago MS Copilot became wholly incapable of writing code in one of Microsoft's bespoke languages for one of its products. Let this sink in: Microsoft made changes to a Microsoft chatbot that made it worse at working with a Microsoft product.
This is entirely just a socially-acceptable excuse for firing people and either not replacing them or replacing them with offshoring.
They can get a job. Just not the job they want.
AI is not costing anyone a single job. At this point it is far too useless in business.
It both is and it isn't costing jobs. It is not truly viable as a replacement for a decent worker at literally anything, but it may be a replacement for some of the worse performers.
This of course makes it enticing for the nepo CEOs, who are naturally the lowest hanging fruit. They figure if it's smarter than they are it must be smarter than their workers. It's not, but their inherited wealth immunizes them from the consequences of bankrupting their own company. They will only fail up.
It’s not a replacement for any worker, good or bad. It simply is too much liability to function as a worker at all.
That doesn’t mean companies and their leadership aren’t investing in it heavily, but mostly with no ROI and definitely not replace-salary ROI.
I've worked with some astoundingly inept people at certain points in my career. I would say that AI is a replacement for them inasmuch as they simply shouldn't have been on payroll at all. The role being vacant would have been an improvement, so having useless AI doing nothing but burn cash would also have been preferable to employing them. However, the preference would have been to have neither and instead have someone competent in the role.
The point isn’t that some people aren’t a net negative, it’s that using AI for a human role at all is a risk that companies aren’t taking. It’s not impacting hiring.
Many companies are claiming otherwise. I see no reason to disbelieve it given what I am seeing from some highly talented and experienced people who are out of work right now.
They may be doing it at their own peril, but that doesn't mean it isn't happening.
They want shareholders to believe they are, but they aren’t explicitly saying it because it’s not true and would be fraud. Example: Amazon blamed layoffs on AI hoping for that assumption to be made…but the fine print said because it was because of additional investments in developing AI model services to sell not using the AI models.
Anyway, source: am a full time consultant in governance/risk/compliance and am well versed in the data on this issue. It isn’t happening.
I dunno how you view this statement but this doesn't really inspire confidence in your understanding of AI or it's future. But if you are well versed in the "data on this issue" can you point us to it? It would actually be cool to see some papers.
My friend is head engineer at industrial automation office and atleast he said how they could basically replace junior designers with delicated AI and they already need to give project management tasks to engineers because otherwise they would not have enough work in office because AI.
So its crazy how people seem to have polar opposite views about AI.
I care much more about people graduating from normal universities who can't get jobs.
I don’t know, I got a regular bachelors in social statistics from a state school and had no problem finding a job and it was in a degree most people say is “useless”
What’s the job?
data analysis, state government , I mostly use spss
great major im trying to become a DA and noticed so many government jobs want heavy statisitcs
yep it’s the singular reason they hired me
Sandwich artist
nah I wish I could afford to live on a subway sandwich makers wages, but alas I no longer live with my parents
What about offshoring/outsourcing + foreign worker visas displacing Americans.
AI is taking our jobs! -> H1B Indians or just plain offshoring
Doesn’t this usually happen with each new wave of tech. When I was college-aged the guidance counselors encouraged me to get into computer network, that it was a growing field with lots of opportunity. When I finished my degree, there was an over-saturation of IT degrees holders and all I could get was a call center job.
What got and sexy and in demand now may not be after 2/4 years.
The people in the article admit that many of them do not have products they built.
I'm a recruiter and Lovable has let me build stuff. Not having built anything reflects really badly in that context.
Back in the olden days (like 7 years ago) you didn’t need to have built a “product” to be hired for an entry level programmer position.
You just had to share some class projects and seem like a person who could take instruction and learn quickly.
Yeah, but software is now easy. 7 years ago, I couldn't make a web app typing requirements into another web app.
With AI, there is the perception (idk how accurate) that someone who needs to be told things is useless as the AI can follow instructions, so the job now is to give instructions.
“Software is now easy” is a wild statement to make.
Probably not more complex software, but Lovable seems to live up to expectations. Even if there are bugs, it certainly qualifies as good enough in some cases.
Software isn't easy even with LLMs. That is what people who aren't software developers think about LLMs.
Having produced a "product" already isn't even a good metric or deciding factor on which candidates will be successful employees at your company. The ability to debug a complicated issue in a mature codebase is way more valuable than being able to churn out some garbage in Lovable that can't even be changed as requirements change.
It is viewed as a willingness to get shit done and try things.
Fixing open source bugs could demonstrate this, but most applicants lack this too.
Is cargo transportation now easy because of electric cars?
Yo the military is still hiring
They can find jobs, they just don't get to pick and choose with 250k roles they can saunter into. Welcome to the real world.
One of my full time jobs (I am overemployed, with the help of AI) is evaluating coding agents, so I get access to beta versions of everything.
I think this career is going to struggle outside of architecting stuff, serving as translation for the product people, and turning the mass of ideation they produce into a spec. Granted, this has always been the job of a dev, but the part of it that used to be 90% of my day is gone.
I am not opening my IDE. I am not bothering to review the code anymore. I hooked Gemini up with read access to a database for a data error/integrity investigation that the PM has scoped out to take a month and I did it casually over Christmas. I had Claude push something and create a PR based on its own test results and my team lead gave me the usual LGTM.
I still need my experience to make it do something useful (like not giving Gemini write access to the DB), but I can't imagine I would have a use if I didn't have that experience.
We even have a brand new senior on my team who nobody gives much work to as it is easier to tell the AI to get the context required from the code than to teach him how to do a task. It would take a ton to get a junior useable.
and then you woke up
Bro casually hooked up Gemini to an internal/customer database lmao. That has to be ragebait.