Launch HN: WorkDone (YC X25) – AI Audit of Medical Charts
14 points by digitaltzar 1h ago 6 comments
Four years of sight reading practice (sandrock.co.za)
92 points by chthonicdaemon 3d ago 39 comments
Sorry, grads: Entry-level tech jobs are getting wiped out
73 nradov 141 5/22/2025, 1:15:24 PM sfstandard.com ↗
Everything feels so set now. Ever larger industry dominating ever more, with large scale software using established frameworks and technologies. Less vibrant scene of new and mid-life companies, still with exciting things brewing.
I struggle to elaborate why I feel it, but the lack of vibrancy, the lack of spark within the industry feels like it would lead so directly to these conditions of there being less entry-level jobs.
1. anything we used to give to entry-level we now give to offshore workers, typically in Asia. While mean wages metrics look great, the cost savings are an illusion because we spend twice as much time communicating and tacking back and forth to the final answer across timezones. compensation consultants dont care about that, they care about mean wage metrics
2. people are are told to hire h1 only -- not explicitly -- but implicitly
3. tech execs hired into the org have relationships with major h1 placement agencies and place from those exclusively, the jobs are advertised with impossible requirements and then quickly sent to h1 pools
4. it is ridiculous to expect a computer science grand to "driving forklifts, construction, moving, factory work" -- what was the point of grinding thru 12yrs of intense schooling if you were going to throw the kids under the bus when they graduate?
5. ai is part of it, perhaps for certain jobs, but it isnt AI causing the issues in technology
100% this. What you save in dollars is spent in time. Not just more documentation requirements, not just more meetings, not just changing your schedule to work early or late in crunch times, but way more time resolving obvious, easy issues.
If you're on salary, that costs nothing to the business, so they don't care until it starts to impact them...
Other areas like IT security or systems/network administration have tons of different qualifications/certifications that you can take, aligned to specific roles and career paths. Whether they're actually any good is another question - but at least there is some kind of structure there. And there are some attempts being made to further formalise it, with bodies like the UK Cyber Security Council establishing a professional register and chartership status.
But I don't think I've never met a developer who's talked about any programming-related certifications that they have. I'm sure that there must be some out there, but they don't seem to be widely used or respected.
And I suspect that any attempt to formalise the industry and require people to get certified to specific standards would result in a lot of pushback.
I agree, but at the same time this is what we told truck drivers when self driving cars was going to take over like a decade ago ("reskill, and at your own dime"). Kind of karma. Capitalism doesn't care unfortunately.
Also the we haven't actually replaced truck driver's at this point so nobody was actually told to reskill on their own dime yet and the "we" that specuated on this point is largely merely pragmatic.
Could you elaborate on the reasoning for manual work being different, and what it’s different from?
At FAANG, it typically works like this.
What's really striking to me is the rate of attrition. Can anyone explain it?
Aren't these good jobs? Aren't there less opportunities for good jobs for them to be able to churn to?
Where are they going? Why do they churn at such high rates?
These are not just unproductive environments, they're unpleasant. Having to be "on" for 8 hours a day because you don't even get a vague idea of privacy is exhausting.
I've funded and worked at a number of companies in the Enterprise SaaS space, and that's bull. I'm not saving any costs with a Visa sponsored employee.
At that point I may as well fully offshore to a GCC.
It often isnt about saving money, it is about having fragile immigrant workers on a leash that you can control with the constant threat of layoff--->deportation
and also the carrot of actual sponsorship. two paths to motivation.
and some will get made into full-timers -- I've seen it -- but it just centralizes control
Reality is, H1B hiring is just as impacted as normal hiring in the US.
You cant have offshore workers away from family, alone in a foreign country, with an RTO mandate, and glued to a desk in SF, constantly worried about deportation. This is about control, power, and abuse.
I think parent means over the long term. The dynamic they're describing has been in place a long time.
If you look at statistics for typical IT offshoring and near shoring markets like India, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria they have been in crisis since 2022. Only to show a slight rebound in Q1 of 2025.
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That was a mistake. I ended up a programmer anyway, just with a degree that didn’t really prepare me for it.
As for the data, starting with 2019 is going to skew things. In 2022-2023 things went sideways and many big tech employers didn’t extend any intern offers or didn’t even have interns.
This year interns are back.
During the boom, many people that couldn’t write a for loop got degrees and somehow got entry level jobs. After the dot com bust, many people avoided CS because such jobs evaporated.
This cycle will be a bit worse because four things are hitting simultaneously: (1) Hangover from idiot over hiring during COVID (2) AI is going to replace a lot of incumbent businesses with startups (3) The real economy shows every sign of collapsing due to the trade wars (4) The US is intentionally giving up its position as the best country for skilled workers to move to.
I can’t say what will happen with (4), but it seems unlikely (3) is going to win many elections for the incumbents.
Anyway, this year, firms are probably going to be simultaneously too conservative (eliminating job positions instead of retraining people to use AI with more aggressive product targets) and too aggressive (betting the magic AI genie will grant middle management’s wishes and also somehow not simultaneously commoditize all the stuff it automates away).
Anyway, I think there’s plenty of opportunity this year for any company that’s borderline competent. My personal experience with middle-manager-dominated large firms makes me pessimistic about their futures.
This wasn't universally true. In the SE US, late 1990s, I got 2 responses over a year of submitting applications for entry level coding jobs. One response was for a position hundreds of mi away.
Overlapping this time, I was serving as an employment counselor. I learned that this region was super insular and you need some kind of inside referral to get hired - in pretty much every industry. Local tech wasn't immune to that mindset.
It took me a few years to make connections and start working and even then it self-employed, on-site support. Thirty years later I'm still doing that.
On the other side, once I broke into an industry I could go all over. I got a referral into an ARC and within a few months I was serving all of them. They were all years needing someone but went without rather than hire cold.
Plus any solution that increases pay for entry-level workers necessarily costs employers more than the peanuts they currently pay workers overseas, so they'll bitch and moan as hard as they can to turn public interest against any politician that tries.
Really feels like we're just sitting ducks while other countries get their act together acting as hubs of innovation that already had far more varied industries across the board to begin with.
Adjusting expectations is important. If you start with the expectation that all you will have is a pot to piss in then it is all up from there.
Things may never look up, but when they do, I've found a lot of employers admire people who were willing to wipe old peoples' asses when the economy is bad rather than wale about the circumstances.
A lot of my peers were too good for those kinds of jobs and while they started their careers at the same time, they didn't make industry and collect paychecks while they did it, so I think I made the correct choice about how to spend those 18months.
For example:
If I am underpaid and overworked because my employer and I and all the people doing their best for the economy are all suffering together under unavoidable circumstances, I am going to stay tough, keep my head up, count my blessings, etc.
If I am underpaid and overworked because policy-makers are enabling it and our employers are deciding to shift a disproportionate share of the societal suffering onto employees and we are all allowing a culture of overwork and underpayment to seep in - I'm going to do something you are uncharitably describing as "wailing".
Isn’t there some quote about old men planting trees whose shade they’ll never know? Was that just a myth or did those generations actually exist?
To be more explicit, the time value of something closer is higher than one further, so you can actually induce under even a hypercapitalist society any arbitrarily long delay investment with 0 'real' payoff until the end.
My academic career was always revolving around the top but never quite at the top. So eventually I gave up on investing more effort for diminishing returns and focused on having an advantage the others weren't pursuing. I started working very early, with some embarrassingly shitty jobs at first, each of which allowed me to get the next slightly less embarrassingly shitty job subsequently and so on. I'm glossing over what could have been a long string of lucky breaks that probably made all the difference.
Anyway, by the time we finished university my colleagues who were right at the top got catapulted into the working world all the way to the level I had years before. Not quite ground level but not far. And I can still see that handicap in most of their careers even now, decades later.
Companies don't care if you work hard or not. You're disposable to them. If you work hard, you only get given more work. By turning employment into "gig" work, they've shifted as much of the risk and costs onto workers, too.
Companies have weaponized employment practices and now they're just burning everything to the ground because they figure there will always be someone desperate enough. Turns out that doesn't quite work - Amazon for example has had internal memos circulating that say in various communities they're pissing off or injuring so many people they are having trouble finding workers.
"Gig" companies care so little, will suspend or cancel workers at the drop of a hat, intentionally or unintentionally. Even Uber's CEO, when he tried going 'undercover' as a driver to see what it was like, admitted he was scared he'd get a less than 5 star rating because it almost instantly torpedos you, especially if you're new. Because the "customer is always right", these companies offer no way to challenge a customer's complaint even if it's obvious nonsense. Why investigate anything, which costs money, if you've got a long line of people desperate to make $6 delivering a cheesebuger 5 miles?
Our legislators let silicon valley roll right over a century worth of worker protections because it was "innovative" (ie they got lots of lobbyist cash.) Voters let them do it because they want their delivered cheeseburger, groceries or makeup as cheap as possible....and voters don't care about the "losers" who work those jobs. It's not them, after all...
That's what they'd say to your face, but statistics show that anything than a spotless carreer means you'll never recover. Once you fall behind your peers, you will never be promoted as much as them nor be paid as much.
You're just coaching people to be passive in the face of a hostile society, and that's bad, because it lets society off the hook for providing for its citizens.
Also isn't it strange that's mainly expected of the people at the bottom? Maybe the shareholders should start to expect the number won't keep going up to the max?
If it's 2025, and you need to convince yourself that all you may get is "pot to piss in," you should be working to burn it all the fuck down to the ground. After all, isn't it "all up from there"?
. . . which is literally never the correct answer.
If they are going to come to that conclusion, I'll let them get to that on their own.
> ...which is literally never the correct answer.
But it's the answer chosen all the time. If "entry-level tech jobs are getting wiped out," some (usually distributed) group made the decision to burn those new-grads plans to the ground. Why should they be insulated from similar decisions?
Working "to burn it all the fuck down to the ground" is just spreading that "love" to those groups. Those groups should be threatened with that, because otherwise they're not going to restrain themselves.
Oh, I totally understand that. HN is full of workers LARPing as tycoons; advocating for policies, attitudes, and ideology that are most likely going to end up being harmful to their own interests.
Given that born young children can die but unborn children cannot, and that adult children are more resilient, the middle age worker have always been some of the most resistant to revolution, but not because they are bootlickers.
Moving support, design, development and product management away from customers and to the lowest bidder will work for a while. But eventually it won't and the pendulum will swing back in the other direction.
The direction it will most likely swing is that legacy companies making poor decisions will be out-competed by new companies making better decisions.
Maybe those new companies will be from the US and the EU.
Maybe they won't.
Because those offshore workers can now be far more productive and can produce written output that's just as good as the stuff native speakers are doing, unlike the broken English responses that used to often distinguish outsourced work.
Of course it doesn't for everything - outsourcing never does. But why pay a western salary for someone to use ChatGPT and CoPilot when you can pay a fraction of that to get someone in another country achieving largely the same thing.
If a junior role can be done with ChatGPT and CoPilot, why pay a western salary for it when you can pay someone a fraction of the salary to use the same thing?
Of course, this only matters if you give half a rat's ass about whether the company is going to be solvent in a decade. If your management strategy is "pump metrics for bonuses and bail before they notice" then potayto potahto I suppose...
And sure, people say "well just pay them more" - but most businesses are never going to be able to match the salaries that the FAANGs and VC backed companies can - so training juniors has turned into a big gamble for them.
Which is terrible for the industry long-term, but in the short term it's not really in any single company's interest to try and change that.
It's business. Less dollars paid out for the same LLM content that the managers know the developers will produce in any case. Foolish to pay more for essentially the same LLM response.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
You can't justify hiring a new grad for $130K when you can hire top tier mid-career talent in Warsaw, Cluj, or Bangalore for $50-80K and average mid-career talent for $20-40k
In fact, companies like Infosys have begun adopting coding copilots en masse to reduce their own new grad hiring by 20%, but increase utilization rates from 70% to 85%. That said, most new grads were not getting substituted by Infosys freshers - they're getting replaced by mid-career H1Bs who were laid off during COVID and returned to the CEE or India
Furthermore, a significant number of mid-career Eastern European and Indian engineers, PMs, and managers returned to the old country during the COVID layoffs due to visa status. A lot of those guys were rehired by their old companies to found GCCs abroad.
Finally, state and federal governments in India, Poland, Romania, Czechia, etc provide tax incentives that reduce hiring costs by an additional $10-20k in aggregate.
The real hack here is to avail yourself of a digital nomad or engineer yourself an employment visa via some shell company and then live in the 3rd world while crushing the competition via 1st world education and language skills while passport broing somewhere with lax or unenforced visa rules.
There are significant insurance implications on an employer's side when dealing with employees remoting in random countries (first or third world).
Also, you as a company cannot avail tax incentives if employees are digital nomads.
For example, Czechia gives $20k per employee if you invest a couple million in office space, but conditions it with butts-in-seats.
Plenty of major tech hubs in CEE and India give 80-100% tax rebates or PLIs to foreign companies opening and hiring locally IF they also mandate RTO in those offices.
They tend to recover the cost through income tax and VAT.
Might be racist but that is going to likely overcome the tax savings on some random guy of otherwise similar software skills in India.
A new grad in Asia with AI access is just as good as a new grad in the US. Only way cheaper in the long run.
Where will we get experienced seniors in 20 years? Well first, will we even need theme? Will AI's be able to replace even seniors by that point? I mean, I'd put money on "Yes" to that question. Even if you're thinking "No", I mean the kids we're hiring now in Asia will be that much better in 20 years. And will be fluent with AI technologies and have a facility with them that we can only imagine today. Not only that, the AI's will be 20 years better.
I'm not sure that software development is a good long term plan for a young person in the US right now. Just being honest. Better to use what you know about software right now to try to start your own digital service of some kind. Just my 2 cents though. I could be totally off.
The problem comes if the number of years of experience you need to outperform the frontier AI models advances at more than 1 per year, which is not out of the question.
But nowadys with the culture being much more to to repeatedly jump between companies looking for salary increases, there's a lot less incentive to train juniors - because odds are they're just going to get poached or jump ship before that investment has really paid off.
The big companies or startups with VC funding and deep pockets will always be able to hire experienced people - but it's going to become increasingly hard for other people (and particularly public sector and nonprofits) to do so, as the pipeline of juniors -> seniors is being eroded.
In my observation, employers stopped being loyal to employees long before employees stopped being loyal to employers.
In the old times 12 year old could have economic utility. Now 26 year old often has none. It might be that with AI you might need to keep learning till 35 before you can usefully contribute to the economy.
Is the taxpayer going to pay for another five or ten years of education for people? Are the young people expected to borrow hundreds of thousands more for training? Are their parents expected to house and feed them for another decade?
My observation in tech is most jobs are for specialists rather than generalists. Also senior level jobs are quite rare.
AI is not the only factor to blame, it’s mostly lack of growth and economic uncertainty, at least this is what I see in the UK.
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Grads, it's not the seasoned workers, or automation. It's the incentives that drive the whole thing. And the people in charge of those incentives, and the context that created those, and the culture that supports all of it.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24670746
We are trying to motion against it as much as we can internally... by arguing that we can use <insert your favourite llm> as a good coaching/mentoring support for juniors to promote them quicker. But yea... We don't like where this is going, and right now it appears that not much can be done by how much money is being poured into this current LLM-based-delusion.
Edit: speaking specifically about SWE-Jr. jobs
Once the next year of grads come, it is a wipe-out, because you now have multiple years of graduates competing for the same one position. Also, you often dont want damaged goods -- better to hire the fresh grad from this year's batch than a grad from 1 or 2yrs ago who has been unemployed.
the market is brutal
“If there’s a data breach, and a significant percentage of your programmers are offshore, penalties double.”
We all generally agree here that while some talent is excellent, the majority of companies outsource to the cheapest (or 2nd cheapest, just to be safe) option possible. Turn that into a calculated risk - if you hire a company and their sloppiness causes a data breach, that's on you with heavy penalties for negligence for not validating their work - not the company you hired.
Change the law so that if Bank of America hires Infosys, and Infosys outsources to some sweatshop, Bank of America is the one who must be directly held responsible for a failure.
Look at what’s happening now: Spending started to collapse immediately after Trump got in:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PRMFGCON
My job pipeline is filled with clever young Americans who want to work.
These folks are stealing our jerbs.
Instead of discouraging offshoring, they’re threatening the physical safety of highly skilled foreigners. Those people have been the glue that holds the US economy together since, what, WWII?
If the US is no longer an attractive destination, they’ll set up shop overseas. Fast forward ten years, and the jobs they create will definitely not be in the US.
Concretely: Silicon Valley’s white collar workers are 66% first generation immigrants, and it’s the 4th largest economy on earth. (The US, including Silicon Valley, is number one). Just about all of my native born coworkers moved here for work.
Your Sr engineer is also still distracted and focused on those tasks.
Junior engineers come up with new ideas, can eventually put the whole system together. There's never just one code base.
What Ai tools are replacing engineers? I finay tried cursors free tier yesterday and it right off the bat misunderstood my code and made up library implementation details.
I always had hard times finding a job with every job search I did. Even living in San Francisco
The only reason they’re useful is that, unlike a human, they can be summoned in under a second and you can’t hurt their feelings by rewriting 100% of their stuff.
We had just over 20 applicants and selected 6 for interviews using a rubric to score candidates by reviewing CV/resume and cover letter. The rubric doesn't include a specific "years of experience" guideline anywhere. Of our 6 selected candidates, 3 were new grads and 3 were experienced candidates.
At that point in our process, 1 of our 3 new grads ghosted us and never responded to multiple contact attempts to schedule an interview - this may have been our top candidate by initial rubric evaluation. One of our other new grad candidates accepted another job and backed out of our scheduled interview. The third new grad did interview and had an unremarkable interview.
Ultimately, one of the experienced candidates received a job offer. This experienced candidate was one of the top two by initial rubric review along with the new grad who ghosted us. Funnily enough, these two candidates were the only unanimous selections by everyone on the hiring committee to interview, even using a rubric.
There were several parts of the process I found interesting. First, just over 20 applicants is typical for applicant count for an opened position over the last 8-10 years for us. There wasn't a noticeable uptick in applicants despite the general perception of it being a "bad hiring market." Second, we continue to find that many candidates don't have a CV/resume or cover letter that leans into demonstrating the candidate can write code. Maybe this is a result of general hiring processes that lean into automatic scanning and processing of CV/resumes and cover letters while my group actually reads these somewhat carefully and usually from a "we hope this person clearly demonstrates we should interview them" perspective. Third, despite my personal misgivings, the hiring process clearly selects for "has worked with <insert specific set of technical tools> experience. Even a great candidate can't seem to be attractive to other folks in our hiring process if their past experience doesn't include <specific tool/framework> use. Fourth, and this was a change different from past hiring, 4-5 of the applicants were ML/AI-focused candidates with MS degrees (and one PhD). This position is/was clearly just a normal app developer job in an organization that doesn't ship software for sale - we do small-scale app dev and data management for our internal organization users.
These ML/AI-focused candidates were interesting for other reasons. Almost none of them demonstrated any experience on paper besides "wrote a little python to load some ML/AI tool and ran experiments." This isn't bad experience on the face of it, but their CV/resumes and cover letters didn't talk about software dev at all. To a candidate, it was almost all "ran and tweaked model for small gain in performance" for some data set. I'm not sure where these folks will land in the current hiring market?
But lately I just hire 5+ year experience because there are so many available now, and the cost for them has gone down also.
At least that's the dominant narrative since a decade. And I'm sure it's actually true, and least when the question is about knowing all youtokgram memes of the day.
Some people probably meant to automate other people out of their jobs, so they get laid off. Those people deserve what they got.
To fix it today, you do the same thing. But you'd have to also cancel all the visas, and invalidate citizenship that was founded on fraud. Not much more to this story, if your concern is having jobs in the USA for people already here.
Individuals in the USA have been experiencing the pain alone for a few decades now. They've felt a very real crash for quite a while now. For me, how a worker born in the US is doing is "the economy". That's the New Right, while your views represent the Left in this country.
Any pain Google feels in the shift to tariffs and jobs for Americans rather than the rest of the world isn't optional. They're welcome to shutdown US operations if it's undoable.