AI's Impact on Entry-Level Tech Jobs: A Growing Concern for Recent Graduates

AI may already be shrinking entry-level jobs in tech, new research suggests

If and when AI will start replacing human labor has been the subject of numerous debates. While it's still hard to say with certainty if AI is beginning to take over roles previously done by humans, a recent survey from the World Economic Forum found that 40% of employers intend to cut staff where AI can automate tasks. Researchers at SignalFire, a data-driven VC firm that tracks job movements of over 600 million employees and 80 million companies on LinkedIn, believe they may be seeing first signs of AI's impact on hiring. When analyzing hiring trends, SignalFire noticed that tech companies recruited fewer recent college graduates in 2024 than they did in 2023. However, tech companies, especially the top 15 big tech businesses, ramped up their hiring of experienced professionals. Specifically, SignalFire found that big tech companies reduced the hiring of new graduates by 25% in 2024 compared to 2023. Meanwhile, graduate recruitment at startups decreased by 11% compared to the prior year. Although SignalFire wouldn't reveal exactly how many fewer grads were hired according to their data, a spokesperson told us it was thousands. True, adoption of new AI tools might not fully explain the dip in recent grad hiring but Asher Bantock, SignalFire's head of research, says there's "convincing evidence" that AI is a significant contributing factor. Entry-level jobs are susceptible to automation because they often involve routine, low-risk tasks that generative AI handles well. AI's new coding, debugging, financial research, and software installation abilities could mean companies need fewer people to do that type of work. AI's ability to handle certain entry-level tasks means some jobs for new graduates could soon be obsolete. Gabe Stengel, the founder of AI financial analyst startup Rogo, started his career at Lazard investment bank where he helped large pharma companies buy biotech startups. Rogo's tool "can do almost all the work I did in the analysis of those companies," Stengel said on stage at Newcomer's financial technology summit last week, "We can put together the materials, diligence the company, look through their financials." While most large investment banks haven't explicitly reduced analyst hiring due to AI yet, executives at firms like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley previously considered cutting junior staff hires by up to two-thirds and lowering the pay of those they hire because the work with AI is not as demanding as before, the New York Times reported last year. Although AI's threat to low-skilled jobs is real, tech companies' need for experienced professionals is still rising. According to SignalFire's report, big tech companies increased hiring by 27% for professionals with two to five years of experience, while startups hired 14% more individuals in that same seniority range. A frustrating paradox emerges for recent graduates: they can't get hired without experience, but they can't get experience without being hired. While this dilemma is not new, Heather Doshay, SignaFire's people and talent partner, says it is considerably exacerbated by AI. Dashay's advice to new grads: master AI tools. "AI won't take your job if you're the one who's best at using it," she said.

Why landing your first tech job is way harder than you expected | TechCrunch

It's not your imagination, graduating seniors. The tech industry's pullback from entry-level hiring has reached concerning levels. LinkedIn's chief economic opportunity officer, Aneesh Raman, warned in The New York Times last week that "bottom rung of the career ladder" is "breaking" as AI eliminates traditional stepping-stone positions. The numbers are eye-opening: hiring of new grads by the 15 largest tech companies has plummeted over 50% since 2019, according to a report released this month by the venture firm SignalFire, which found that before the pandemic, graduates comprised 15% of Big Tech hires, a figure that has dropped to just 7%. There is some good news amid the scary headlines. The tech industry isn't actually shrinking; instead, tech roles are spreading across all industries, from healthcare to finance to retail. Recent research shows tech jobs are projected to grow from 6 million this year to 7.1 million by 2034. Even now, software developers face just 2.2% unemployment, which isn't stellar but is half the national rate. The catch: companies increasingly want AI skills, with one survey finding 87% of hiring leaders value AI experience, while nearly a quarter of all job postings now require it, per the WSJ.

Is AI making it harder for new college grads to get hired in tech?

Once the lifeblood of Silicon Valley, younger professionals are now having a tough time getting a foot in the door - but AI isn't the only problem. Once upon a time, Silicon Valley's move-fast-and-break-things culture welcomed college grads with open arms. Tech companies enthusiastically hired younger and less experienced talent, driven by an enthusiasm for fresh ideas and a financial climate that pointed to sunny days ahead. All of that suddenly and dramatically changed with the COVID-19 pandemic. Today, the unfettered hiring mindset across tech has been replaced by a sense of caution and a prioritization of experience. At the same time, new AI tools are starting to automate many of the routine tasks that traditionally would've been handled by younger, entry-level professionals. Recent college graduates, as a consequence, are feeling the sting of unemployment across the tech sector. Also: 4 ways business leaders are using AI to solve problems and create real value A recent report from SignalFire, a VC firm that tracks hiring trends across tech, found that new hires of recent college grads at tech companies in 2024 dropped by 25% compared to the previous year and by more than twice that amount compared to 2019, before the pandemic. Startups, meanwhile, hired 11% fewer recent college grads last year -- a drop of more than 11% from 2023. While workers at every level of experience took a hit during the pandemic, new college grads have been suffering the most dramatic residual effects: Recent data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York shows that unemployment among this younger demographic has risen by about 30% since the lowest point of the pandemic, compared to roughly 18% for the working population as a whole. In recent decades, young college grads have tended to have a lower rate of unemployment than the rest of the population since they often work for lower wages and are typically eager to kickstart their careers. But as noted in a report from The Atlantic last month, recent college grads are now entering a job market where their prospects for being hired are worse than at any other time in the past four decades. One interpretation of that phenomenon is that they're starting to be replaced by intelligent machines. How much of this shift away from younger talent in tech is being driven by automation? This isn't easy to measure, given the relatively recent adoption of cutting-edge AI tools in the workplace, along with their helter-skelter adoption across teams. By and large, as SignalFire noted in its report, AI doesn't appear to be replacing human workers wholesale in the tech sector just yet. It is, however, taking over many of the rote office tasks -- such as data entry and preparing reports--that used to be primarily handled by younger, less experienced workers. AI is still, of course, a major focus across the tech world, especially within the "Magnificent Seven" -- Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla. It's just that tech companies seem to be looking for more experienced tech professionals. Also: AI developers should be philosophers as much as technologists Recent college grads with computer science degrees are therefore faced with an unfortunate paradox: they can't get hired without experience, and they can't gain experience without first getting hired. "Today's tech employers aren't looking for potential, they're looking for proof," the authors of the SignalFire report wrote. While AI developers are rapidly pushing out new tools designed to boost workplace productivity -- AI agents are one recent example -- employers have been slow to adopt them at scale. It isn't clear yet how these new tools impact employee performance. In some contexts, it can be a double-edged sword: recent research, for instance, suggests that generative AI can boost productivity while simultaneously eroding a sense of meaning and engagement with one's work. Similarly, another recent study found that AI is driving job growth in job categories, and hindering it in others.

For Some Recent Graduates, the A.I. Job Apocalypse May Already Be Here

This month, millions of young people will graduate from college and look for work in industries that have little use for their skills, view them as expensive and expendable, and are rapidly phasing out their jobs in favor of artificial intelligence. That is the troubling conclusion of my conversations over the past several months with economists, corporate executives and young job-seekers, many of whom pointed to an emerging crisis for entry-level workers that appears to be fueled, at least in part, by rapid advances in A.I. capabilities. You can see hints of this in the economic data. Unemployment for recent college graduates has jumped to an unusually high 5.8 percent in recent months, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently warned that the employment situation for these workers had "deteriorated noticeably." Oxford Economics, a research firm that studies labor markets, found that unemployment for recent graduates was heavily concentrated in technical fields like finance and computer science, where A.I. has made faster gains. "There are signs that entry-level positions are being displaced by artificial intelligence at higher rates," the firm wrote in a recent report. But I'm convinced that what's showing up in the economic data is only the tip of the iceberg. In interview after interview, I'm hearing that firms are making rapid progress toward automating entry-level work, and that A.I. companies are racing to build "virtual workers" that can replace junior employees at a fraction of the cost. Corporate attitudes toward automation are changing, too -- some firms have encouraged managers to become "A.I.-first," testing whether a given task can be done by A.I. before hiring a human to do it. One tech executive recently told me his company had stopped hiring anything below an L5 software engineer -- a midlevel title typically given to programmers with three to seven years of experience -- because lower-level tasks could now be done by A.I. coding tools. Another told me that his start-up now employed a single data scientist to do the kinds of tasks that required a team of 75 people at his previous company. Anecdotes like these don't add up to mass joblessness, of course. Most economists believe there are multiple factors behind the rise in unemployment for college graduates, including a hiring slowdown by big tech companies and broader uncertainty about President Trump's economic policies. But among people who pay close attention to what's happening in A.I., alarms are starting to go off. "This is something I'm hearing about left and right," said Molly Kinder, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, a public policy think tank, who studies the impact of A.I. on workers. "Employers are saying, 'These tools are so good that I no longer need marketing analysts, finance analysts and research assistants.'" Using A.I. to automate white-collar jobs has been a dream among executives for years. (I heard them fantasizing about it in Davos back in 2019.) But until recently, the technology simply wasn't good enough. You could use A.I. to automate some routine back-office tasks -- and many companies did -- but when it came to the more complex and technical parts of many jobs, A.I. couldn't hold a candle to humans. Kevin Roose and Casey Newton are the hosts of Hard Fork, a podcast that makes sense of the rapidly changing world of technology. Subscribe and listen. That is starting to change, especially in fields, such as software engineering, where there are clear markers of success and failure. (Such as: Does the code work or not?) In these fields, A.I. systems can be trained using a trial-and-error process known as reinforcement learning to perform complex sequences of actions on their own. Eventually, they can become competent at carrying out tasks that would take human workers hours or days to complete. This approach was on display last week at an event held by Anthropic, the A.I. company that makes the Claude chatbot. The company claims that its most powerful model, Claude Opus 4, can now code for "several hours" without stopping -- a tantalizing possibility if you're a company accustomed to paying six-figure engineer salaries for that kind of productivity. A.I. companies are starting with software engineering and other technical fields because that's where the low-hanging fruit is. (And, perhaps, because that's where their own labor costs are highest.) But these companies believe the same techniques will soon be used to automate work in dozens of occupations, ranging from consulting to finance to marketing. Dario Amodei, Anthropic's chief executive, recently predicted that A.I. could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years. That timeline could be wildly off, if firms outside tech adopt A.I. more slowly than many Silicon Valley companies have, or if it's harder than expected to automate jobs in more creative and open-ended occupations where training data is scarce. But even if A.I. doesn't take all the entry-level jobs right away, two trends concern me. The first is that, in a rush to boost productivity and stay ahead of the curve, some companies may be turning to A.I. too early, before the tools are robust enough to handle full entry-level workloads. (We recently saw an example of this in Klarna, the Swedish buy-now-pay-later company, which declared two years ago that it was replacing customer service agents with A.I. chatbots, only to reverse course and rehire humans after customers complained.) Some executives are making a calculated bet that A.I. systems will improve quickly -- or that the money they stand to save by employing virtual workers instead of human ones is worth a few unhappy customers. But others may not realize the risks they're taking. The second is that even if entry-level jobs don't disappear right away, the expectation that those jobs are short-lived may lead companies to underinvest in job training, mentorship and other programs aimed at entry-level workers. That could leave those workers unprepared for more senior roles later on. "Nobody has patience or time for hand-holding in this new environment, where a lot of the work can be done by A.I. autonomously," Heather Doshay, the head of people and talent at the venture capital firm SignalFire, told me. If there's a silver lining for recent graduates, it's that -- at least for some of them -- the threat of A.I. replacement seems to be lighting a useful kind of fire. Some young workers I spoke to are using their experience with A.I. to vault themselves ahead of more senior colleagues, and others are steering clear of the traditional ladder-climbing professions altogether. Trevor Chow, 23, a recent Stanford graduate living in San Francisco, told me that many friends had weighed A.I. progress among their considerations when looking for jobs. Few of them were going into traditional tech and finance careers, he said, and more were doing risky things like starting companies -- on the theory that if humans are about to lose their labor advantages to powerful A.I. systems, they had better hurry and do something big. "It feels like there aren't that many years left to do things," he said. "If the amount of leverage you have as a human becomes very small, a lot of career paths that don't pay off for many years aren't worthwhile."

Learn to code, they said: AI is already erasing some entry-level coding jobs

New graduates are having trouble finding tech jobs thanks in part to the rise of AI. Credit: onurdongel via iStock / Getty Images There's been a lot of talk in recent years about AI replacing the role of humans in the workforce. It's been unclear exactly if or when that would happen on a broader scale. However, this is already happening in one industry in particular: The tech industry. Researchers at the venture capital firm SignalFire recently released their "State of Talent Report" for 2025, which analyzes hiring and employment trends across the tech industry. The big takeaway, according to SignalFire's report, is that new graduate hiring has declined. And the downturn isn't across the board. Hiring levels for experienced roles like mid- and senior-level positions have remained strong, while entry-level tech jobs have taken a big hit. According to the report, recent graduates made up just 7 percent of hires last year at Big Tech companies, which is down 25 percent from the previous year. It's not going any better at startups either, with new graduates making up just 6 percent of new hires, down 11 percent from 2023. The report makes mention of a few factors that could contribute to this downturn of entry-level jobs in tech, so it's not entirely the result of AI. Interest rates are much higher than they were during the tech boom during the height of the COVID pandemic. This, combined with other issues, has led to smaller funding rounds for startups and Big Tech companies looking to cut costs. However, even though there are other factors, AI is a significant factor. If there's one thing AI has been pretty good at, it's the more mundane, basic coding tasks that an entry-level worker would likely be assigned. In addition, these tasks can also easily be automated using AI coding tools. In recent months, Google released a new AI coding tool called Jules (which is free to use, for now), while ChatGPT and Anthropic's newest models are particularly good at coding. And Mark Zuckerberg recently said he hopes that AI will write half of Meta's code by 2026. Even experienced programmers have been affected by the shift to AI. As reported in a recent piece in The New York Times, workers at companies like Amazon say that AI has transformed their jobs into a factory-like assembly line. Other coders welcome AI, as it has freed them up from doing monotonous coding work. Furthermore, companies have been looking to expand their AI programs and hire more roles in the machine learning and data engineering categories. These tend to be more technical roles and are usually filled by those with more experience than a recent graduate. On top of that, this reconfiguration to focus on AI has led to less hiring in not just entry-level coding jobs but also non-technical jobs as well. According to SignalFire, many recent graduates break into the industry through non-technical roles like product marketing, recruiting, design, and sales. Companies are simply not hiring as much for those roles as they used to.

AI is keeping recent college grads out of work

Why it matters: The analysis from Oxford Economics adds hard evidence to anecdotal reports -- and scary warnings -- that AI is displacing white-collar workers. What they're saying: "There's a lot of concern that AI is eliminating entry-level white-collar positions, and I think this is just some of the first evidence that we're seeing," says Matthew Martin, a senior economist with Oxford Economics, who wrote the report. How it works: While it's risen over the past few months, the unemployment rate in the U.S. has stayed relatively low. But the jobless rate for recent college grads has risen faster and is now higher than the overall rate. Zoom out: Just last month, the unemployment gap between young workers with college degrees, and those without, was about 1.6 points. State of play: We're in a new world today. AI is eating tech roles and leading to what some are calling a white-collar recession. Reality check: As long as technology has progressed, there have been worries that robots will come for people's jobs. And certainly new inventions have eliminated many kinds of roles (telephone operators, say, or typesetters). The bottom line: For years, a computer science degree was viewed as a hot ticket to a great job. As that promise fades, the supply of tech grads will likely fall along with demand, Martin says. But that will take a while to play out.

No AI, no job. These companies are requiring workers to use the tech.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Luis von Ahn hoped to send a clear message to his 900 employees at Duolingo: Artificial intelligence is now a priority at the language-learning app. The company would stop using contractors for work AI could handle. It'll seek AI skills in hiring. AI would be part of performance reviews, and it'll only hire people when things can't be automated. The details, outlined in a memo in April and posted on professional networking site LinkedIn, drew outrage. Some cringed at AI translations suggesting that learning languages need human context. Many users threatened to quit Duolingo. Others blasted the company for choosing AI over its workers. The backlash got so loud that three weeks later, von Ahn posted an update. "To be clear: I do not see AI as replacing what our employees do (we are in fact continuing to hire at the same speed as before)," von Ahn wrote in the update on LinkedIn. "I see it as a tool to accelerate what we do, at the same or better level of quality. And the sooner we learn how to use it, and use it responsibly, the better off we will be in the long run." From Duolingo to Meta to e-commerce firm Shopify and cloud storage company Box, more companies are mandating their executives and teams implement AI-first strategies in areas such as risk assessment, hiring and performance reviews. Some of the directives are being detailed in public memos from top leaders, in some cases spurring outrage. Others are happening behind closed doors, according to people in the tech industry. The implication: AI is increasingly becoming a requirement in the workplace and no longer just an option. "As AI becomes more popular and companies invest more heavily ... the tools will start being embedded in the work [people] already do," said Emily Rose McRae, an analyst at market research and advisory firm Gartner. "The work they do will change." Meta plans to replace humans with AI to assess risks as it relates to the privacy reviews of its products, according to NPR. The company told The Post it's rolling out automation for "low-risk decisions," like data deletion and retention, to allow teams to focus on more complicated decisions. At Shopify, everyone is expected to learn how to apply AI to their jobs, CEO Tobi Lütke wrote in an April 7 memo to staff. The tech would also be a part of prototyping, performance and peer review questionnaires, and teams would have to demonstrate why AI couldn't do the job before requesting new hires. "AI will totally change Shopify, our work, and the rest of our lives," Lütke's memo, which went viral on social media, said. "We're all in on this!" In response, some people pushed back. "I cannot in good conscience recommend any company that is so recklessly throwing their good humans to the wind while putting all their faith in computer code that does not work a good portion of the time," Kristine Schachinger, a digital marketing consultant responded to Lütke on X. Following von Ahn's memo, Duolingo Chief Engineering Officer Natalie Glance shared details about what the strategy meant for her team. AI should be the default for solving problems and productivity expectations would rise as AI handles more work, she wrote. She also advised her team to spend 10 percent of their time on experimenting and learning more about the AI tools, try using AI for every task first, and share learnings. "We don't have all the answers yet -- and that's okay," she wrote in an internal Slack message she later posted on LinkedIn. "Duolingo was not the first company to do this and I doubt it will be the last," said Sam Dalsimer, Duolingo spokesman. Many white-collar workers across industries are already using AI in their work, from summarizing documents to writing emails and reports to research and data crunching. And Microsoft, Zoom and Google have been increasingly packing AI into many of their work products. At Box, CEO and co-founder Aaron Levie expects the company to use AI to eliminate tasks that clog up people's workflows, automate more so that the company can reinvest savings to achieve more and foster more experimentation. He also wants to train employees to be proficient in AI. "In engineering, we're probably in the final generation where you can go into a company with no AI coding expertise," Levie said in an interview with The Post. "What we've found internally and with more and more customers is that AI is really helping accelerate doing more, getting better work done, and solving problems faster." AI is already becoming a factor in some job interviews. Google software engineering candidates are given access to AI tools to solve problems, said Ryan J. Salva, senior director of product at Google. While Google doesn't have any mandates on using AI, it expects people to get the job done in the most efficient way, including using AI. "I would be surprised if they did not use AI most of the time," he said about developer interviews. Some directives are less about rules, and more about pushing employees to "wake up" and use AI. "Here's the unpleasant truth," Micha Kaufman, Fiverr founder and CEO, wrote in a memo. "AI is coming for your jobs. Heck it's coming for my job too." His memo advised employees to become prompt engineers and master the latest AI solutions in their fields. He then spent three hours huddled in a meeting room with 250 workers discussing his expectations, including that new hires be proficient in AI, employees double or triple their output and strive to automate their jobs. The goal is to redirect people to tasks that only they can do, such as generating innovative ideas or using human judgment, Kaufman said in an interview. "If you don't do this now, your value in the industry is going to drop, and you're going to be doomed," he said. Similarly, Wade Foster, co-founder and CEO of workflow automation platform Zapier, posted on X that he now expects aspiring employees to be equipped with AI skills. "We're setting a new standard at Zapier. 100% of new hires must be fluent in AI." This "AI-first" mandate isn't being well-received by everyone. People worry about AI replacing them at work, lowering the quality of products and services, and creating problematic outcomes such as misinformation and errors. "AI first = Employees last," said Chris Craig, a West Hollywood founder and CEO. "This is poor leadership." Some companies, lured by the promise of efficiency, are expected to adopt AI without making necessary workflow and structural changes, McRae of Gartner said. As a result, they'll probably fail to get their return on investment and frustrate workers in the meantime, she added. Moving too fast could backfire. After heavily touting its AI focus, Klarna, a Swedish fintech company, recently pulled back. AI helped the company lower vendor expenses, increase internal productivity and better manage operations with fewer employees, according to a company filing submitted with the Securities and Exchange Commission in March. From 2022 to 2024, Klarna shrank its head count by 38 percent (Klarna said its AI assistant handles tasks equivalent to more than 800 full-time roles). But the company ultimately went too far in its attempts to cut costs, Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg in May. The company told The Washington Post it recognizes AI's limitations, especially in nuanced interactions, and plans to recruit more human gig workers while investing in the tech. "We've learned that successful deployment hinges on thoughtful implementation," said Clare Nordstrom, a Klarna spokesperson. "Quality customer experience requires balance, which is why we're investing in advanced technology with a human touch." At many startups, AI-first strategies are nothing new, said Roy Bahat, head of venture capital firm Bloomberg Beta, which invests in the future of work and AI startups. "Most startups don't even need to think about having a policy about [AI] because if they're not already built from the ground up using AI, they're missing something." AI will steadily make its way into some workplaces regardless of mandates, McRae said. That's because increasingly, generative AI will be integrated into workers' tools seamlessly. They may use AI and not even realize it, she said. But until then, she expects more companies to join the AI-first bandwagon. "Everyone needs to understand that the tools we're using are new and our understanding of them will change."

Is artificial intelligence actually killing all the entry-level tech jobs?

The question of whether and when AI will begin to replace human labor has long been a subject of intense debate. Researchers at SignalFire, a data-driven venture capital firm that tracks workforce trends across more than 600 million professionals and 80 million companies on LinkedIn, believe they may be witnessing the initial signs of AI's impact on employment dynamics. Drawing on data from its Beacon AI platform, which tracks over 650 million professionals and 80 million organizations, the report highlights a dramatic downturn in new graduate hiring, the strategic dominance of elite AI labs like Anthropic in talent retention, and a significant reshuffling of geographic tech power centers. Over the last few years, the competition for tech and AI talent has been nothing short of fierce. SignalFire's latest analysis is about deep, structural changes. While headlines often focus on layoffs or the remote work debate, the data points to a more nuanced story of how, where, and who companies are hiring to build the next generation of technology. Perhaps one of the most alarming trends identified in the report is the collapse of entry-level hiring. The door to the tech industry, once wide open for new graduates, is now "barely cracked." This shift is attributed to a confluence of factors: smaller funding rounds for startups, shrinking team sizes, a reduction in new grad programs, and the increasing capabilities of AI automating routine tasks. The report notes that while hiring bounced back in 2024 for mid- and senior-level roles after a general dip in 2023, the cuts for new graduates have only deepened. Data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York corroborates this, showing a 30% rise in the unemployment rate for new college grads since September 2022, compared to an 18% rise for all workers. Perceptions aren't helping either: 55% of employers state that Gen Z struggles with teamwork, and a striking 37% of managers admit they would rather use AI than hire a Gen Z employee. This "experience paradox" means that even top computer science graduates are finding it difficult to break into the industry, especially at the "Magnificent Seven" (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Tesla), where the share of new graduates landing roles has more than halved since 2022. Companies are now prioritizing proven experience over potential, posting junior roles but often filling them with more senior individuals. While AI often takes the blame for eliminating junior positions, SignalFire suggests the reality is more complex. The end of the low-interest "free money madness" of 2020-2022, leading to overhiring and subsequent corrections, is a major driver. With tighter budgets, companies are hiring leaner. Carta data shows Series A tech startups are, on average, 20% smaller than in 2020. This isn't just about hiring less; it's a "hiring reset," with a focus on roles delivering high-leverage technical output, particularly in machine learning and data engineering, while non-technical roles in recruiting, product, and sales continue to shrink. The launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 didn't just usher in a new era of AI; it ignited an intense AI talent race. SignalFire's analysis of retention across top AI labs reveals a clear leader: Anthropic. An impressive 80% of employees hired at Anthropic at least two years prior were still with the company at the end of their second year. This stands in stark contrast to an industry known for high turnover. DeepMind follows closely with a 78% retention rate, while OpenAI's retention is lower at 67%, though still on par with large FAANG companies like Meta (64%). Anthropic's success isn't just about keeping talent; it's about strategically acquiring it. The report highlights: Big Tech companies like Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Stripe have also become prime hunting grounds for AI labs, with Anthropic being particularly successful in attracting senior researchers and engineers from these established players. The geographic distribution of tech talent is also in flux. While San Francisco and New York City remain dominant (hosting over 65% of AI engineers), other hubs are making significant gains. The report notes key trends from 2024: This isn't merely regional reshuffling. Companies are adopting a "proximity over presence" model, valuing closeness for hybrid schedules and anchor days over strict five-days-a-week office mandates, leading to a surge in in-state hiring. 41% of Gen Z workers are sabotaging their employer's AI plans SignalFire revisited its predictions from the previous year, noting successes like the persistence of fractional work, continued growth in cybersecurity talent demand, and the evolution of remote work into hybrid models. For 2025, the report forecasts several key developments: The overarching message of the SignalFire report is that "technology alone doesn't build the future, people do."

For some recent grads, the AI job apocalypse may already be here | Analysis

SAN FRANCISCO -- This month, millions of young people will graduate from college and look for work in industries that have little use for their skills, view them as expensive and expendable, and are rapidly phasing out their jobs in favor of artificial intelligence. That is the troubling conclusion of my conversations over the past several months with economists, corporate executives and young job seekers, many of whom pointed to an emerging crisis for entry-level workers that appears to be fueled, at least in part, by rapid advances in AI capabilities. You can see hints of this in the economic data. Unemployment for recent college graduates has jumped to an unusually high 5.8% in recent months, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently warned that the employment situation for these workers had "deteriorated noticeably." Oxford Economics, a research firm that studies labor markets, found that unemployment for recent graduates was heavily concentrated in technical fields like finance and computer science, where AI has made faster gains. "There are signs that entry-level positions are being displaced by artificial intelligence at higher rates," the firm wrote in a recent report. But I'm convinced that what's showing up in the economic data is only the tip of the iceberg. In interview after interview, I'm hearing that firms are making rapid progress toward automating entry-level work and that AI companies are racing to build "virtual workers" that can replace junior employees at a fraction of the cost. Corporate attitudes toward automation are changing, too -- some firms have encouraged managers to become "AI-first," testing whether a given task can be done by AI before hiring a human to do it. One tech executive recently told me his company had stopped hiring anything below an L5 software engineer -- a midlevel title typically given to programmers with three to seven years of experience -- because lower-level tasks could now be done by AI coding tools. Another told me that his startup now employed a single data scientist to do the kinds of tasks that required a team of 75 people at his previous company. Anecdotes like these don't add up to mass joblessness, of course. Most economists believe there are multiple factors behind the rise in unemployment for college graduates, including a hiring slowdown by Big Tech companies and broader uncertainty about President Donald Trump's economic policies. But among people who pay close attention to what's happening in AI, alarms are starting to go off. "This is something I'm hearing about left and right," said Molly Kinder, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, a public policy think tank, who studies the impact of AI on workers. "Employers are saying, 'These tools are so good that I no longer need marketing analysts, finance analysts and research assistants.'" Using AI to automate white-collar jobs has been a dream among executives for years. (I heard them fantasizing about it in Davos back in 2019.) But until recently, the technology simply wasn't good enough. You could use AI to automate some routine back-office tasks -- and many companies did -- but when it came to the more complex and technical parts of many jobs, AI couldn't hold a candle to humans. That is starting to change, especially in fields, such as software engineering, where there are clear markers of success and failure. (Such as: Does the code work or not?) In these fields, AI systems can be trained using a trial-and-error process known as reinforcement learning to perform complex sequences of actions on their own. Eventually, they can become competent at carrying out tasks that would take human workers hours or days to complete. This approach was on display last month at an event held by Anthropic, the AI company that makes the Claude chatbot. The company claims that its most powerful model, Claude Opus 4, can now code for "several hours" without stopping -- a tantalizing possibility if you're a company accustomed to paying six-figure engineer salaries for that kind of productivity. AI companies are starting with software engineering and other technical fields because that's where the low-hanging fruit is. (And, perhaps, because that's where their own labor costs are highest.) But these companies believe the same techniques will soon be used to automate work in dozens of occupations, ranging from consulting to finance to marketing. Dario Amodei, Anthropic's CEO, recently predicted that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years. That timeline could be wildly off, if firms outside tech adopt AI more slowly than many Silicon Valley companies have, or if it's harder than expected to automate jobs in more creative and open-ended occupations where training data is scarce. Even if AI doesn't take all the entry-level jobs right away, two trends concern me. The first is that, in a rush to boost productivity and stay ahead of the curve, some companies may be turning to AI too early, before the tools are robust enough to handle full entry-level workloads. (We recently saw an example of this in Klarna, the Swedish buy-now-pay-later company, which declared two years ago that it was replacing customer service agents with AI chatbots, only to reverse course and rehire humans after customers complained.) Some executives are making a calculated bet that AI systems will improve quickly -- or that the money they stand to save by employing virtual workers instead of human ones is worth a few unhappy customers. But others may not realize the risks they're taking. The second is that even if entry-level jobs don't disappear right away, the expectation that those jobs are short-lived may lead companies to underinvest in job training, mentorship and other programs aimed at entry-level workers. That could leave those workers unprepared for more senior roles later on. "Nobody has patience or time for hand-holding in this new environment, where a lot of the work can be done by AI autonomously," said Heather Doshay, the head of people and talent at venture capital firm SignalFire. If there's a silver lining for recent graduates, it's that -- at least for some of them -- the threat of AI replacement seems to be lighting a useful kind of fire. Some young workers I spoke to are using their experience with AI to vault themselves ahead of more senior colleagues, and others are steering clear of the traditional ladder-climbing professions altogether. Trevor Chow, 23, a recent Stanford University graduate living in San Francisco, said many friends had weighed AI progress among their considerations when looking for jobs. Few of them were going into traditional tech and finance careers, he said, and more were doing risky things like starting companies -- on the theory that if humans are about to lose their labor advantages to powerful AI systems, they had better hurry and do something big. "It feels like there aren't that many years left to do things," he said. "If the amount of leverage you have as a human becomes very small, a lot of career paths that don't pay off for many years aren't worthwhile."

AI Is Dramatically Decreasing Entry-Level Hiring at Big Tech Companies, According to a New Analysis

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicts that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level, white-collar jobs within five years. A new report shows that the biggest tech companies have significantly reduced their hiring of new graduates in recent years, and AI could be to blame as the technology takes over entry-level tasks. SignalFire, a venture capital firm that analyzes the job movements of over 650 million employees and 80 million companies on LinkedIn, noticed in a recent report released last week that established tech companies, including Meta, Microsoft, and Google, recruited fewer recent graduates in 2024 compared to previous years. Related: The CEO of $61 Billion Anthropic Says AI Will Take Over a Crucial Part of Software Engineers' Jobs Within a Year New graduates accounted for just 7% of new hires in 2024, down 25% from 2023 and over 50% from pre-pandemic levels in 2019. Meanwhile, at startups, the rate of new graduates hired dropped from 30% in 2019 to under 6% in 2024. Asher Bantock, SignalFire's head of research, told TechCrunch that there's "convincing evidence" that AI is a significant reason for the decline in entry-level tech roles. He explained that entry-level jobs are more vulnerable to automation because they consist of routine tasks that AI can easily take over. For example, AI can code and conduct financial research. Dario Amodei, the 42-year-old CEO of $61.5 billion AI startup Anthropic, told Axios on Wednesday that within the next one to five years, AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and cause unemployment to rise to 10% to 20%. Earlier this year that AI could write "essentially all of the code" for big companies within the next year. "On the jobs side of this [AI], I do have a fair amount of concern," Amodei said at a Council on Foreign Relations event in March, per Business Insider. Related: How Much Does It Cost to Develop and Train AI? Here's the Current Price, According to the CEO of an $18 Billion AI Startup. AI will impact industries like technology, finance, and law, Amodei predicted. Most workers won't recognize the dangers caused by AI until it has taken their jobs, he said. "Most of them are unaware that this is about to happen," Amodei told Axios. "It sounds crazy, and people just don't believe it." Research from American think tank The Brookings Institution shows that AI could replace more than half of the tasks carried out by entry-level roles, including market research analysts, graphic designers, and sales representatives. In comparison, more senior roles have up to five times lower risks of automation. Meanwhile, Harvard Business Review estimates that AI will affect 50 million jobs within the next few years, automating some roles while adding to workers' abilities in others.

For some recent graduates, the AI job apocalypse may already be here

AI is rapidly replacing entry-level white-collar roles, leaving recent graduates facing rising unemployment and shrinking job prospects. Companies increasingly automate junior tasks, especially in tech and finance, with little investment in training. Some young workers are pivoting early, launching startups or seeking alternatives, fearing traditional career paths may soon disappear.This month, millions of young people will graduate from college and look for work in industries that have little use for their skills, view them as expensive and expendable, and are rapidly phasing out their jobs in favor of artificial intelligence. That is the troubling conclusion of my conversations over the past several months with economists, corporate executives and young job seekers, many of whom pointed to an emerging crisis for entry-level workers that appears to be fueled, at least in part, by rapid advances in AI capabilities. You can see hints of this in the economic data. Unemployment for recent college graduates has jumped to an unusually high 5.8% in recent months, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently warned that the employment situation for these workers had "deteriorated noticeably." Oxford Economics, a research firm that studies labor markets, found that unemployment for recent graduates was heavily concentrated in technical fields like finance and computer science, where AI has made faster gains. "There are signs that entry-level positions are being displaced by artificial intelligence at higher rates," the firm wrote in a recent report. But I'm convinced that what's showing up in the economic data is only the tip of the iceberg. In interview after interview, I'm hearing that firms are making rapid progress toward automating entry-level work and that AI companies are racing to build "virtual workers" that can replace junior employees at a fraction of the cost. Corporate attitudes toward automation are changing, too -- some firms have encouraged managers to become "AI-first," testing whether a given task can be done by AI before hiring a human to do it. One tech executive recently told me his company had stopped hiring anything below an L5 software engineer -- a midlevel title typically given to programmers with three to seven years of experience -- because lower-level tasks could now be done by AI coding tools. Another told me that his startup now employed a single data scientist to do the kinds of tasks that required a team of 75 people at his previous company. Anecdotes like these don't add up to mass joblessness, of course. Most economists believe there are multiple factors behind the rise in unemployment for college graduates, including a hiring slowdown by big tech companies and broader uncertainty about President Donald Trump's economic policies. But among people who pay close attention to what's happening in AI, alarms are starting to go off. "This is something I'm hearing about left and right," said Molly Kinder, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, a public policy think tank, who studies the impact of AI on workers. "Employers are saying, 'These tools are so good that I no longer need marketing analysts, finance analysts and research assistants.'" Using AI to automate white-collar jobs has been a dream among executives for years. (I heard them fantasizing about it in Davos back in 2019.) But until recently, the technology simply wasn't good enough. You could use AI to automate some routine back-office tasks -- and many companies did -- but when it came to the more complex and technical parts of many jobs, AI couldn't hold a candle to humans. That is starting to change, especially in fields, such as software engineering, where there are clear markers of success and failure. (Such as: Does the code work or not?) In these fields, AI systems can be trained using a trial-and-error process known as reinforcement learning to perform complex sequences of actions on their own. Eventually, they can become competent at carrying out tasks that would take human workers hours or days to complete. This approach was on display last week at an event held by Anthropic, the AI company that makes the Claude chatbot. The company claims that its most powerful model, Claude Opus 4, can now code for "several hours" without stopping -- a tantalizing possibility if you're a company accustomed to paying six-figure engineer salaries for that kind of productivity. AI companies are starting with software engineering and other technical fields because that's where the low-hanging fruit is. (And, perhaps, because that's where their own labor costs are highest.) But these companies believe the same techniques will soon be used to automate work in dozens of occupations, ranging from consulting to finance to marketing. Dario Amodei, Anthropic's CEO, recently predicted that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years. That timeline could be wildly off, if firms outside tech adopt AI more slowly than many Silicon Valley companies have, or if it's harder than expected to automate jobs in more creative and open-ended occupations where training data is scarce. Even if AI doesn't take all the entry-level jobs right away, two trends concern me. The first is that, in a rush to boost productivity and stay ahead of the curve, some companies may be turning to AI too early, before the tools are robust enough to handle full entry-level workloads. (We recently saw an example of this in Klarna, the Swedish buy-now-pay-later company, which declared two years ago that it was replacing customer service agents with AI chatbots, only to reverse course and rehire humans after customers complained.) Some executives are making a calculated bet that AI systems will improve quickly -- or that the money they stand to save by employing virtual workers instead of human ones is worth a few unhappy customers. But others may not realize the risks they're taking. The second is that even if entry-level jobs don't disappear right away, the expectation that those jobs are short-lived may lead companies to underinvest in job training, mentorship and other programs aimed at entry-level workers. That could leave those workers unprepared for more senior roles later on. "Nobody has patience or time for hand-holding in this new environment, where a lot of the work can be done by AI autonomously," said Heather Doshay, the head of people and talent at venture capital firm SignalFire. If there's a silver lining for recent graduates, it's that -- at least for some of them -- the threat of AI replacement seems to be lighting a useful kind of fire. Some young workers I spoke to are using their experience with AI to vault themselves ahead of more senior colleagues, and others are steering clear of the traditional ladder-climbing professions altogether. Trevor Chow, 23, a recent Stanford University graduate living in San Francisco, said many friends had weighed AI progress among their considerations when looking for jobs. Few of them were going into traditional tech and finance careers, he said, and more were doing risky things like starting companies -- on the theory that if humans are about to lose their labor advantages to powerful AI systems, they had better hurry and do something big. "It feels like there aren't that many years left to do things," he said. "If the amount of leverage you have as a human becomes very small, a lot of career paths that don't pay off for many years aren't worthwhile."

Alarming trend as AI eats into jobs: Tech companies' hiring of new grads has plummeted over 50% since 2019

Job hunting is tough for new graduates, especially in tech. Big Tech has cut entry-level hiring significantly. AI is changing the job market, impacting early career roles. However, tech jobs are growing across industries. Software developers still face lower unemployment. AI skills are now essential for job seekers.For this year's graduates, finding a job could be more difficult than ever, particularly in the technology industry, as per a new report. The latest data provided by venture firm SignalFire indicates that the tech industry's biggest players have significantly reduced their hiring of fresh college graduates, cutting entry-level recruitment by over 50% since 2019, as per TechCrunch report. SignalFire's analysis also found that before the pandemic, graduates consisted of 15% of Big Tech hires, which has now fallen to only 7%, according to the report. ALSO READ: Big housing trouble in U.S: Citi says economy could head towards recession despite Trump's easing of tariffs Experts caution that this change is indicative of a larger transformation occurring in the tech sector, fueled primarily by artificial intelligence (AI), as per TechCrunch. LinkedIn's chief economic opportunity officer Aneesh Raman told The New York Times that AI is "breaking" the "bottom rung of the career ladder" by displacing much of the stepping-stone jobs that previously assisted early-career workers in finding a way into a company, as per the report. However, it's not all that bad as the technology sector is not shrinking, instead, the tech roles are spreading across all industries, from healthcare to finance to retail, reported TechCrunch. New research revealed that tech jobs are expected to expand from 6 million this year to 7.1 million by 2034, as per the report. While, even currently, software developers face only 2.2% unemployment, which is not great but is half the national rate, according to TechCrunch. ALSO READ: Circle Internet Group IPO: Top things investors need to know The key to getting a job is to focus on AI as companies increasingly want AI skills, and a survey found that 87% of hiring leaders value AI experience, while about a quarter of all job postings now require it, according to Wall Street Journal. Why is it harder for new grads to get hired in tech now? Because Big Tech has slashed entry-level hiring by over 50%, many of the fresher jobs just aren't there anymore. Are tech companies firing people or just hiring less? They're hiring less, especially new grads. The total number of jobs may still be growing, just not for entry-level workers.

Job losses: How AI has painfully disrupted dreams of young software engineering graduates

IT CEOs have indicated that AI-led productivity is changing the business model, with revenue growth and headcount growth being de-linked. "The last couple of years, we have been challenging our teams on how you can deliver twice the revenue and half of the people," said HCLTech CEO C Vijayakumar in February.As a story going viral recently recounts, back in the early 1990s, Infosys cofounder Nandan Nilekani had prodded and pestered actor and playwright Girish Karnad, a distant relative, to buy into the then-obscure software firm's IPO. As told to journalist Rollo Romig, author of I Am on the Hit List: Murder and Myth-making in South India, Karnad eventually gave in and bought some shares of Infosys. Within 10 years, as Infosys -- and India's burgeoning IT sector -- g rew, the share prices skyrocketed and helped Karnad out of a lower-middle class living to greater comforts, like a house of his own. Transformative. There is no other word that encapsulates what C++, Java and Python did for India and millions of folks like Karnad. Beyond shareholders, zeros and ones carried with them the aspirations of millions of youth who gained not just employment, but a living that lifted their families out of the lower middle-class trap, powered by fancy salaries, lucrative stock options and promise of foreign postings. So far so good. Then, out of nowhere, came the threat from artificial intelligence (AI). India's middle-class dreams, written in the promise of software, is now under threat from advancements of that very software. The jobs that millions of students had taken for granted as an entry to a long and successful career aren't quite there anymore, and a thirty-year dream is starting to lose steam. The drastic shift is leaving a bloody trail of laid-off employees, changing job descriptions and under-skilled young engineers. UNCERTAIN DAYS Pradeep (name changed), a techie in Bengaluru, is job hunting. This isn't the best time to be looking for one. But he does not have a choice as his company, a unicorn, fired him five months ago, along with close to a dozen colleagues. The last time he was looking for a job was in 2018 when he was a final-year engineering student. Back then, all that the unicorns he was interviewing for wanted was solid programming knowhow. After six years, he was laid off and there are more things he is worried about than getting the basics right. "Even if I get a job, how long can I hold on before the company decides otherwise? Is this going to be the end of my career?" Things are worse for junior developers just entering the workforce where AI tools can do a much better job. Their days are now marked by anxiety, fear and insecurity that threatens careers, lest they don't keep up with the change, and at times even when they do. Sneha (name changed), a manual tester in a Bengaluru-based IT services firm a decade ago, remembers how worried they were when automation was introduced. "We were worried that our jobs would be lost," she reminisces. That never came to pass in the five years she spent in the firm before moving to consulting. But today, testing is one of the areas seeing the most automation, and others such as frontand back-end development are soon likely to follow. RISE IN ANXIETY All of this, naturally, is leading to mental health issues. Harpreet Singh Saluja, president of IT professionals' welfare association Nascent IT Employees Senate (NITES), has been seeing increasing anxiety in young professionals with up to five years of experience, who were beginning to feel they were being gradually sidelined or replaced. "Many are unsure whether their job will still exist in the next six months or a year," Saluja says. "Every single project that you do, they track how many AI tools or AI integrations you are using. They don't always say it, but the bottom line is that if you don't, your job is at risk," says Pradeep. In long Reddit threads, software developers have been sharing how their department heads emphasise using AI tools and are removing teams that were doing documentation, something that has since been easily automated. For the moment it is each to their own. DARWINISM AT PLAY To stay relevant, many are upskilling and learning AI-first thinking and how to create workflows using AI. Platforms such as Scaler Academy, Newton School and 100xEngineers are seeing huge demand for their online courses on AI and ML. "It is a six-month weekend course, which is a mix of lectures and hands-on exercises," says Sridev Ramesh, cofounder, 100xEngineers. While new-a g e schools profit, engineering colleges that mushroomed across the country over the last few decades are just not equipped for this transition, and that is resulting in students charting their own course. Take Rachit (last name withheld to protect identity), a second-year computer science student. He was clear that regular engineering colleges might not help. After preparing for IIT-JEE, he decided to pursue a four-year undergraduate degree with Newton School of Technology, which focuses on AI. An avid programmer from Class 8, he taught himself Java and then Python, and is currently interning at one of the top AI startups in India and in his words "is loving it". As Nishant Chandra, CEO, Newton School, points out, the ecosystem is changing fast and students need to change with it. Chandra reckons that unfortunately about 90% of the colleges are not forward-looking, and that will impact the students. Prasad (name changed), a third-year engineering student, and his batchmates often discuss what AI would do to their prospects. "We are still a year from when we have to face it, but at present, we are unsure what we can do," he says. Prasad, who hails from a tier-3 town in Kerala, is doing computer science in Coimbatore. Ask him if the college is taking additional initiatives to equip them, and he is confused. "We have not heard anything from the college. Maybe we will see something before we start placements next year," he says. Unfortunately, by the time reality hits, it might be too late for students like Prasad. SURVIVAL PLAN Neeti Sharma, CEO, TeamLease Digital, says most engineering graduates are not completely ready for AI jobs. "More than 60% of these students don't have enough hands-on knowledge and experience," says Sharma, adding that beyond college degrees, what's needed is certifications in AI, cloud, security, or data science, working on real projects (like sharing code on GitHub), and joining hackathons or inter nships. "Students who keep learning and can show real projects or skills will have the best chance of getting hired in today's job market." That's not going to be easy. "We can't just learn one or two skills and assume that it will take us through the next five years," says Savita Hor tikar, global head of talent acquisition at the AI company Fractal, adding that adapting to the new reality of "continuous learning" is often harder for experienced professionals than freshers. IT CEOs have indicated that AI-led productivity is changing the business model, with revenue growth and headcount growth being de-linked. "The last couple of years, we have been challenging our teams on how you can deliver twice the revenue and half of the people," said HCLTech CEO C Vijayakumar in February. This means AI taking over grunt work and humans focusing on strategy, ethics and innovation, says Roop Kaistha, regional managing director-APAC at recruitment firm AMS. That is going to complicate things. India is home to the second largest pool of software developers in the world, with 5.8 million professionals. It also produces around 1.5 million fresh engineers every year. However, just 10% of them have the ability to secure jobs, according to a TeamLease report. So the question of higher-level output is going to be a pipe dream unless both the individual and the system change their orientation. Government, companies and institutions need to work together and create courses that match what businesses actually use now, says TeamLease's Sharma. Nitin Pai, director of Takshashila Institution, a centre for research and education on public policy, says that as long as companies and workers are prepared to learn, adapt and adjust, India will benefit from the AI revolution just as it has benefited from previous turns of the tech cycle. Sharmila Sherikar, head of corporate development, Sonata Software, says self-skilling has also become nonnegotiable with AI-readiness now being a baseline expectation. "Skilling programmes must evolve from being theoretical to being outcome-focused, anchored in the realities of a tech-driven, rapidly changing business landscape," she says. "While we have a number of skilling programmes underway, I think they are too disaggregated," Sangeeta Gupta, SVP & chief strategy officer of Nasscom, recently told ET. "You need a much more top-down thinking on skilling, not just for the top-end of AI, which is all the data scientists and that kind of work, but how will the workingage population be using AI more effectively in the day-to-day operations?" Until that happens, the pain will linger. As A Damodaran, professor, economics, IIM-Bangalore, says, "We have seen automation disrupting businesses historically. The biggest was textiles and then factories, where automation led to job losses. In factories, before automation, many of the workers were handling hazardous materials, and nobody voluntarily did that. And as history would show, people found other jobs. That will happen again." Unfortunately for the next generation of millions who were betting on software jobs, history will unfold far too slowly. (As told to Lijee Philip)

Is AI replacing entry-level tech jobs? Here's what reports suggest

Despite layoffs, tech jobs are projected to grow to 7 million by 2034. With AI taking over the world, a constant threat looms: Will AI replace humans in jobs? From automated customer service chatbots to AI-generated software codes, Artificial Intelligence is increasingly involved in tasks once handled by humans. But what does this mean for the future of employment, or will AI change the way we work? A new report reveals that top tech companies have replaced entry-level tech workers with AI. As many as more than half of the freshers hired have been dropped in recent years. As reported by TechCrunch, data from venture capital firm SignalFire states, "new graduates now account for just 7% of hires, with new hires down 25% from 2023 and over 50% from pre-pandemic levels in 2019." Experts consider this a sign that AI is poised to change how companies operate. Aneesh Raman, VP at LinkedIn, has noted that AI tools are now handling the kinds of tasks typically assigned to new hires, making it difficult for young professionals to establish themselves in the tech world. Big tech firms like Meta, Google and Microsoft have also confirmed that nearly 30% of the company's code is being written by AI. Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has recently claimed that the AI will be writing entire codebases for projects like Meta's Llama soon. Not only in data, but it can also be observed in the real world, as companies like IBM have recently laid off around 8,000 employees, many of whom work in HR, after AI systems took over their tasks. While these data may seem alarming, reports also suggest that the tech jobs is expected to see a hike from 6 million in 2024 to over 7 million by 2034, with technology playing a crucial role in industries such as healthcare, finance, and retail. While AI may have taken over several tasks, a survey cited by The Wall Street Journal suggests that 87% of hiring managers are actively looking for candidates with AI experience. It also adds that one in four job listings now mentions AI as a requirement. Hence, AI skills are now a must, and they may land you a good job.