Today, you hire an intern and they need a lot of hand-holding, are often a net tax on the org, and they deliver a modest benefit.
Tomorrow's interns will be accustomed to using AI, will need less hand-holding, will be able to leverage AI to deliver more. Their total impact will be much higher.
The whole "entry level is screwed" view only works if you assume that companies want all of the drawbacks of interns and entry level employees AND there is some finite amount of work to be done, so yeah, they can get those drawbacks more cheaply from AI instead.
But I just don't see it. I would much rather have one entry level employee producing the work of six because they know how to use AI. Everywhere I've worked, from 1-person startup to the biggest tech companies, has had a huge surplus of work to be done. We all talk about ruthless prioritization because of that limit.
Tomorrow's interns will be accustomed to using AI, will need less hand-holding, will be able to leverage AI to deliver more.
Maybe tomorrow's interns will be "AI experts" who need less hand-holding, but the day after that will be kids who used AI throughout elementary school and high school and know nothing at all, deferring to AI on every question, and have zero ability to tell right from wrong among the AI responses.
I tutor a lot of high school students and this is my takeaway over the past few years: AI is absolutely laying waste to human capital. It's completely destroying students' ability to learn on their own. They are not getting an education anymore, they're outsourcing all their homework to the AI.
It's worth reminding folks that one doesn't _need_ a formal education to get by. I did terrible in school and never went to college and years later have reached a certain expertise (which included many fortunate moments along the way).
What I had growing up though were interests in things, and that has carried me quite far. I worry much more about the addictive infinite immersive quality of video games and other kinds of scrolling, and by extension the elimination of free time through wasted time.
I mean, a lot of what you mentioned is an issue around critical thinking (and I'm not sure that's something that can be taught), which has always remained an issue in any job market, and to solve that deskilling via automation (AI or traditional) was used to remediate that gap.
But if you deskill processes, it makes it harder to argue in favor of paying the same premium you did before.
True, but this becomes less of an issue as AI improves, right? Which is the 'happier' direction to see a problem moving, as if AI doesn't improve, it threatens the jobs less.
> will need less hand-holding, will be able to leverage AI to deliver more
Well, maybe it'll be the other way around: Maybe they'll need more hand-holding since they're used to relying on AI instead of doing things themselves, and when faced with tasks they need to do, they will be less able.
But, eh, what am I even talking about? The _senior_ developers in a many companies need a lot of hand-holding that they aren't getting, write bad code, with poor practices, and teach the newbies how to get used to doing that. So that's why the entry-level people are screwed, AI or no.
You’ve eloquently expressed exactly the same disconnect: as long as we think the purpose of internships is to write the same kind of code that interns write today, sure, AI probably makes the whole thing less efficient.
But if the purpose of an internship is to learn how to work in a company, while producing some benefit for the company, I think everything gets better. Just like we don’t measure today’s terms by words per minute typed, I don’t think we’ll measure tomorrow’s interns by Lines of code that hand – written.
So much of the doom here comes from a thought process that goes “we want the same outcomes as today, but the environment is changing, therefore our precious outcomes are at risk.“
Today, you hire an intern and they need a lot of hand-holding, are often a net tax on the org, and they deliver a modest benefit.
Tomorrow's interns will be accustomed to using AI, will need less hand-holding, will be able to leverage AI to deliver more. Their total impact will be much higher.
The whole "entry level is screwed" view only works if you assume that companies want all of the drawbacks of interns and entry level employees AND there is some finite amount of work to be done, so yeah, they can get those drawbacks more cheaply from AI instead.
But I just don't see it. I would much rather have one entry level employee producing the work of six because they know how to use AI. Everywhere I've worked, from 1-person startup to the biggest tech companies, has had a huge surplus of work to be done. We all talk about ruthless prioritization because of that limit.
So... why exactly is the entry level screwed?