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AI MAY NOT FIRE YOU. IT MAY DELETE THE JOB YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO LEARN ON. Companies used to have a reason to hire people who were not very good yet. Junior engineers broke things, analysts needed checking, marketers produced work that got rewritten. That was the deal. The work still had enough value to justify paying someone while they learned how to become useful. AI is eating that layer first. That creates a strange labor market. Experienced people become more valuable because they can suddenly cover more ground with the same headcount, while beginners lose the work that used to turn them into experienced people. A senior engineer with good product judgment, customer context and a few strong agents can absorb tasks that used to be spread across several roles. From the company's point of view, that is great. From the point of view of someone trying to become senior, it is brutal. The real problem shows up a few years later. Senior people do not appear out of nowhere. They are built out of thousands of small mistakes, boring tasks, bad decisions, reviews, rewrites and years of being trusted with work that was slightly above their level. If AI takes over enough of that work, the pipeline starts to break. Companies may still complain about a shortage of senior talent while quietly removing the jobs that used to produce it. The people who make it through may look very different from the old career ladder. More founders, solo builders, operators and people who had to learn product, sales, code and management at the same time because there was nobody else around to do it. They will arrive already battle-tested. That leaves a pretty ugly question for everyone else. If companies stop paying people to learn, where exactly are beginners supposed to become good?

The decline in entry-level positions due to AI is real, but the root cause isn't what most people think. It's not AI eliminating the work. It's misunderstanding the role of AI in companies, and that misunderstanding is freezing hiring decisions that shouldn't be frozen. Here's what I'm seeing: many hiring leaders believe they're making an innovative, tactically smart decision by pushing off entry-level hiring while they "figure out" how AI applies to their business. It sounds strategic. In practice, it becomes largely fictitious. The jobs that exist today are going to be changed by AI, not removed by it. The focus of entry-level roles will shift to different tasks, but the need for entry-level people — employees who know how to work with AI from day one — is going to stay the same or grow. Someone still has to learn the fundamentals, wield the tools, and grow into the senior people we'll need in five years. AI doesn't change that math. It changes what the first few years look like. So why aren't we seeing this in the market now? Fear, uncertainty, and doubt about how companies should be hiring. People are holding off on bringing in junior talent until they understand the AI impact, and that wait-and-see posture is most likely going to put those companies behind the eight ball. Everyone has AI FOMO right now, so the paralysis is understandable, but it will take a while to normalize. I suspect a year to a year and a half before hiring leaders accept that entry-level roles are evolving, not evaporating. For those looking for their first gig, though, this is hugely impactful. A year or more of a frozen ladder is not an abstraction if you're the one trying to climb onto it. My advice: don't wait for the market to normalize. Learn the AI tools for your domain now, and position yourself as the entry-level hire who arrives already fluent in them. That's the version of the role companies will be hiring for once the dust settles. The data backs this up. Entry-level postings in the US have dropped sharply over the past 18 months, but the more nuanced read is that the work is being redistributed and the roles redefined, not that junior hiring is going away: weforum.org/stories/artifici…

New post with the excellent @FutureEconJacob examining the evidence (so far) on the impact of AI on the labor market. We reviewed 20+ papers and datasets and attempted to synthesize the evidence. Our take: 1) There is no strong signal that AI has had a negative or positive impact on employment in the aggregate. 2) When looking at specific sectors and demographics, the evidence is fairly mixed. While some have argued for negative impact on AI-exposed, early career hiring, others have identified moderators such as remote work or macroeconomic trends. There is also some evidence of positive impacts as well. So has AI hit the labor market yet? When looking at the employment statistics--not really. But that does not mean that jobs are not changing significantly, and that there aren't substantial changes in what skills are becoming less relevant versus in greater demand. That's a topic for another post! Link: aleximas.substack.com/p/has-…