Definitely not buying this. If anything I think we will see a barbell distribution in the job market, with entry-level and very high end jobs still available and a lot of the middle tier of jobs being taken out. The theory behind this is that the entry-level people can increase their effectiveness using AI tooling to the point where where they are almost as effective as the middle-tier used to be, the very high end are still needed to do the things that AI doesn’t do well and fewer middle managers, professional meeting attendees and telephone sanitizers are needed to make the whole thing function.
I don't see the middle tier disappearing, it already has the jobs the entry level would take and few were shaken loose by return to work mandates and flat pay rises even when less of the industry was lowering total effective compensation.. In some countries/industries jobs very quickly reach a max compensation and then continue to hire the most experienced for the same price as anyone else.
All we have now are "entry level" jobs with PhD level requirements and senior roles that companies post but never hire.
The market doesn't want actual junior engineers right now. Training juniors into productive workers takes time and money when you could just hire a senior, call them a junior, and chronically under pay them until they quit
Why are we talking about “jobs” like it’s some singular thing? Is the best we can do to explain what we think might happen to line up every person who has something that can be described as a job, left to right by experience, and then decide which part is going to be mowed down by AI?
It’s just going to be way more complex than that. Some people are going to have more work than they know what to do with. Some jobs are going away, some people will see zero change. It’s going to depend on what you do, what industry you’re in, where you live, your experience. We can see some vague outlines of what is coming but the only thing we can be certain of, at this point, is there will be a lot of change.
