152 points by WhatsTheBigIdea4 days ago | 62 comments
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The title is a bit misleading. Reading the article, the argument seems to be that entry-level applicants (are expected to) have the highest AI literacy, so they want them to drive AI adoption.
I just run sub agents in parallel. Yesterday I used Codex for the first time yesterday. I spun up 350,640 agents and got 10 years of experience in 15 minutes.
It's interesting to see IBM tripling entry-level jobs, seemingly after reassessing the immediate impact of AI. The article frames it as a proactive step to redefine roles and avoid future mid-level talent shortages. However, many "big brothers" in the tech world often seem to go forward and backward on strategic decisions, sometimes at great human cost. Enterprises certainly have the choice to pivot their strategies, but making victims of employees due to flighty decisions, especially given IBM's history with age discrimination allegations, is rude and unacceptable. While new entry-level roles are positive, one has to wonder about the broader context and the stability these positions truly offer.
Is this for their in-house development or for their consulting services?
Because the latter would still be indicative of AI hurting entry level hiring since it may signal that other firms are not really willing to hire a full time entry level employee whose job may be obsoleted by AI, and paying for a consultant from IBM may be a lower risk alternative in case AI doesn't pan out.
And if it is for consulting, I doubt very serious they will based in the US. You can’t be priced competitive hiring an entry level consultant in the US and no company is willing to pay the bill rate for US based entry level consultants unless their email address is @amazon.com or @google.com.
Source: current (full time) staff consultant at a third party cloud consulting firm and former consultant (full time) at Amazon.
One might ask what value seniors hold if their expertise of the junior stage is obsolete. Maybe the new junior will just be reigning in llm that does the work and senior level knowledge and compensation rots away as those people retire without replacement.
Why is that bad? You write better code when you actually understand the business domain and the requirement. It's much easier to understand it when you get it direct from the source than filtered down through dozens of product managers and JIRA tickets.
But who ensures engineers are equipped to handle sensitive customer conversations? Direct access to users means direct access to their data, workflows, and pain points. Are we thinking about the privacy implications here?
Not sure why this is being downvoted. It’s spot on imo. Engineers who don’t want to understand the domain and the customers won’t be as effective in an engineering organization as those who do.
It always baffles me when someone wants to only think about the code as if it exists in a vacuum. (Although for junior engineers it’s a bit more acceptable than for senior engineers).
Customer interaction has imo always been one of the most important parts in good engineering organizations. Delegating that to Product Managers adds unnecessary friction.
Having spent more hours than I care to count struggling to control my facial expressions in client-facing meetings your assertion that that friction is unnecessary is highly questionable. Having a "face man" who's sufficiently tech literate to ask decent questions manage the soft side of client relations frees up a ton of engineering resources that would otherwise be squandered replying to routine emails.
Another one? What is it with IBM, they must really save lots of money in a way no one else has figured out by firing people at 50yo. This is like the 3rd or 4th one i've heard from them.
Interesting signal from IBM. The "AI will replace all junior devs" narrative never accounted for the fact that you still need humans who understand the business domain, can ask the right questions, and can catch when the AI is confidently wrong. Turns out institutional knowledge doesn't just materialize from a model — you need people learning on the job to build it.
The title could be dead wrong; the tripling of junior jobs might not be due to the limits of AI, but because of AI increasing the productivity of juniors to that of a mid or senior (or at least 2-3x-ing the output of juniors), thus making hiring juniors an appealing prospect to increase the company's output relative to competitors who aren't hiring in response to AI tech improvements. Hope this is the case and hope it happens across broadly across the economy. While the gutter press fear mongers of job losses, if AI makes the average employee much more useful (even if its via newly created roles), it's conceivable there's a jobs/salaries boom, including among those who 'lose their job' and move into a new one!
They hire juniors, give them Claude Code and some specs and save a mid/senior devs salary. I believe coding is over for SWE's by end of 2027, but will take time to diffuse though the economy hence still need some cheap labour for a few years, given the H1-B ban this is one way without offshoring.
Actually, that's not quite right. Each job posting typically represents multiple headcount allocations across different teams and geographies. The 240 total postings likely map to thousands of actual entry-level positions being filled.
> In the HR department, entry-level staffers now spend time intervening when HR chatbots fall short, correcting output and talking to managers as needed, rather than fielding every question themselves.
The job is essentially changing from "You have to know what to say, and say it" to "make sure the AI says what you know to be right"
Not because it's wrong, but because it risks initiating the collapse of the AI bubble and the whole "AI is gonna replace all skilled work, any day now, just give us another billion".
Agree, They could have owned the home computer market, but were out-manvoured by a couple of young programmers. They are hardly the company you want to look to for guidance on the future.
To a non-technical individual IBM is still seen as a reputable brand (their consulting business would've been bankrupt long ago otherwise) and they will absolutely pay attention.
So we should ignore a company with $60B in revenue making a major strategic pivot because they made mistakes decades ago? That's exactly the kind of thinking that misses inflection points.
Perhaps I'm being cynical, but could they be leaving out some detail? Perhaps they're replacing even more older workers with entry level workers than before? Maybe the AI makes the entry level workers just as good-- and much cheaper.
Doubt it. Unless we go through another decade of ZIRP tied to a newly invented hyped technology that lacks specialists, and discovering new untapped markets, there's not gonna be any massive demand spike of junior labor in tech that can't be met causing wages to shoot up.
The "learn to code" saga has run its course. Coder is the new factory worker job where I live, a commodity.
Wait until they discover those juniors need someone to learn from. You can't run production systems on Stack Overflow and GPT outputs alone. Seen this movie before.
