this is a super non-popular take on HN.

but the entry-level job market has always been tough.

with AI, outside the big tech world, it is hard to justify hiring entry level engineers as the time to train them ( 1 year+ ) to be productive enough is such a drag on the seniors, when the agents deliver things more care and more edge cases.

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cosmic_cheese 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

From personal experience, back in the 2010s it was particularly harsh for those with a non-standard background. What few "opportunities" that existed were a handful of unpaid or grossly underpaid internships which were closed off to those who weren't students or recent graduates. Everybody wanted employees who were ready to start pumping out code with little or no training.

That's not to diminish how much more difficult it's become since then but breaking into the industry has never been easy.

	▲	ghaff an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		That sounds about right. There was a well-established funnel from schools directly into entry-level positions. Absent that funnel, it's not clear how getting those entry-level positions was ever especially straightforward outside of a very robust tech hiring environment over the past decade.
	▲	y-curious an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I got my first dev job by moving laterally within a company from customer support. Helpdesk aka “Helldesk” was a common pipeline for people. I don’t think those jobs are easy to get either now.
	▲	tayo42 an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I feel like I never see anyone else say this. That was about when I got my career started and it was always difficult for me. And now it seems over despite all that work in the begining.

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CBLT 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I've been telling people the same thing. The tech industry has been cargo-culting "scaling the organization" where people are rewarded for org size. That zeitgeist has ended, and we've not even overcorrected much the other way.

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lovich an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The United States corporate culture has reached a failure mode of game theory. The average corporation is allergic to spending any money on training and has pushed all of the costs onto labor.

They hope that some other moron will take up the costs and then they can poach the trained employee for cheap, while any corporation that does actually train feels like they should get the employee for cheap afterwards instead of compensating the employee at market rate.

Simultaneously the average corporation refuses to do something like have a contract with the employee for X years of labor at a set rate in the exchange for the training because they are also allergic to not being able to change their minds and lay off half their staff the next year.

This would be a place for the government to come in and force everyone to pick the good square on the prisoner’s dilemma, but yet again, our corporate culture is allergic to regulation or cooperation.

You can still get through a winter or two by eating your seed corn so I guess we’ll just continue barreling down this path.

	▲	kcexn 5 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		You can't really force someone to work for X years at a place they don't want to. I don't know if what you're describing is an enforceable contract term.

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slipperybeluga 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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ydat an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

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