AI Adoption is Disproportionately Affecting Juniors?
Research claims that firms adoping AI reduce junior hiring...
New research (as usual US-based) of workers in 285000 firms (that’s a large number!), from 2015 to 2025 seems to indicate that starting in the first quarter of 2023 (i.e. when ChatGPT 3.5 and ChatGPT 4 were released, I think), there was a sharp reduction in junior hiring in companies adopting AI compared to similar companies not adopting AI.
Some thoughts about this:
During the time that junior hiring declined sharply in these companies, senior hiring continued to rise!
How do they know which companies were “adopting AI” and which weren’t? They used text analysis on job postings to identify companies that advertised dedicated “GenAI integrator” roles.
A lot of this kind of research has become possible because of LLMs! Earlier, the “text analysis” indicated above would actually have been done by junior research assistants. And it would definitely not have covered 285000 companies—the numbers would have been much smaller.
I wonder if the researchers doing this kind of research require fewer juniors
The research also points out that this shift towards more senior employees is happening through attrition—the companies aren’t (mostly) firing juniors; they’re just hiring fewer
The biggest unanswered question is:
The way we get seniors in an industry is by having juniors do the grunt work for years and slowly learn from the seniors until they become seniors themselves. But if the grunt work is being done by AI, where will the next generation of seniors come from? This is a serious problem across many industries, possibly the entire world economy, and I haven’t yet heard any convincing answers of how we are going to solve this.
Have you?