The title is a bit misleading. Reading the article, the argument seems to be that entry-level applicants (are expected to) have the highest AI literacy, so they want them to drive AI adoption.
gerdesj 12 minutes ago [-]
I hope they have a good 10 years experience in that "literacy".
MikeNotThePope 8 minutes ago [-]
I just run sub agents in parallel. Yesterday I used Codex for the first time yesterday. I spun up 350,640 agents and got 10 years of experience in 15 minutes.
thaway123123 2 days ago [-]
Is this for their in-house development or for their consulting services?
Because the latter would still be indicative of AI hurting entry level hiring since it may signal that other firms are not really willing to hire a full time entry level employee whose job may be obsoleted by AI, and paying for a consultant from IBM may be a lower risk alternative in case AI doesn't pan out.
raw_anon_1111 2 hours ago [-]
And if it is for consulting, I doubt very serious they will based in the US. You can’t be priced competitive hiring an entry level consultant in the US and no company is willing to pay the bill rate for US based entry level consultants unless their email address is @amazon.com or @google.com.
Source: current (full time) staff consultant at a third party cloud consulting firm and former consultant (full time) at Amazon.
xenospn 2 hours ago [-]
Why would Amazon bring on a full-time consultant instead of just hiring you?
raw_anon_1111 44 minutes ago [-]
I worked internally at AWS Professional Services - their internal consulting department - every AWS ProServe employee is a “blue badge” employee with the same initial four year offer structure of base + prorated signing bonus + RSUs (5/15/40/40). Google also has a large internal consulting department for GCP.
I can’t fault you for not knowing AWS ProServe doesn’t exist. I didn’t know either until a recruiter reached out to me.
Insanity 1 hours ago [-]
My partner is also a consultant and one client was Google. I’m also confused about the exact reason why they didn’t just hire someone.
raw_anon_1111 42 minutes ago [-]
No that’s not what I meant at all. Amazon Professional Services are made up of full time “blue badge” employees who get the same type of base + bonus + RSUs that all other blue badge employees get.
roenxi 48 minutes ago [-]
"You see we leased this back from the company we sold it to and that way it comes under the monthly current budget and not the capital account."
~ Monty Python, Meaning of Line (1983), on The Machine that Goes Ping.
kjkjadksj 50 minutes ago [-]
One might ask what value seniors hold if their expertise of the junior stage is obsolete. Maybe the new junior will just be reigning in llm that does the work and senior level knowledge and compensation rots away as those people retire without replacement.
sqircles 52 minutes ago [-]
IBM has cut ~8,000 jobs in the past year or so.
Sounds like business as usual to me, with a little sensationalization.
alienbaby 2 hours ago [-]
"software engineers will spend less time on routine coding—and more on interacting with customers"
Ahh, what could possibly go wrong!
Insanity 1 hours ago [-]
Customer interaction has imo always been one of the most important parts in good engineering organizations. Delegating that to Product Managers adds unnecessary friction.
Nextgrid 2 hours ago [-]
Why is that bad? You write better code when you actually understand the business domain and the requirement. It's much easier to understand it when you get it direct from the source than filtered down through dozens of product managers and JIRA tickets.
secondcoming 2 hours ago [-]
Programmers have an unfortunate tendancy to be too honest!
Insanity 1 hours ago [-]
Not sure why this is being downvoted. It’s spot on imo. Engineers who don’t want to understand the domain and the customers won’t be as effective in an engineering organization as those who do.
It always baffles me when someone wants to only think about the code as if it exists in a vacuum. (Although for junior engineers it’s a bit more acceptable than for senior engineers).
johnnyanmac 21 minutes ago [-]
We're assuming we all somehow have perfect customers with technical knowledge who know exactly what they want and can express it as such, while gracefully accepting pushback over constraints brought up.
Anyone who's worked in a "bikeshed sensitive" stack of programming knows how quickly things railroad off when such customers get direct access to an engineer. Think being a fullstack dev but you constantly get requests over button colors while you're trying to get the database setup.
whstl 10 minutes ago [-]
Dealing with the occasional pushy customers is way easier than dealing with pushy PMs or designers. Which happen to be the majority.
Customers bikeshed WAY less than those two categories.
Another one? What is it with IBM, they must really save lots of money in a way no one else has figured out by firing people at 50yo. This is like the 3rd or 4th one i've heard from them.
altcunn 1 hours ago [-]
Interesting signal from IBM. The "AI will replace all junior devs" narrative never accounted for the fact that you still need humans who understand the business domain, can ask the right questions, and can catch when the AI is confidently wrong. Turns out institutional knowledge doesn't just materialize from a model — you need people learning on the job to build it.
The title could be dead wrong; the tripling of junior jobs might not be due to the limits of AI, but because of AI increasing the productivity of juniors to that of a mid or senior (or at least 2-3x-ing the output of juniors), thus making hiring juniors an appealing prospect to increase the company's output relative to competitors who aren't hiring in response to AI tech improvements. Hope this is the case and hope it happens across broadly across the economy. While the gutter press fear mongers of job losses, if AI makes the average employee much more useful (even if its via newly created roles), it's conceivable there's a jobs/salaries boom, including among those who 'lose their job' and move into a new one!
aussieguy1234 18 minutes ago [-]
I realized the AI replacing developers hype was all hype after watching this.
A bunch of big companies took big bets on this hype and got burned badly.
awesome_dude 2 days ago [-]
> In the HR department, entry-level staffers now spend time intervening when HR chatbots fall short, correcting output and talking to managers as needed, rather than fielding every question themselves.
The job is essentially changing from "You have to know what to say, and say it" to "make sure the AI says what you know to be right"
jerlam 23 hours ago [-]
Probably not on the IBM jobs site yet, where the number of entry level jobs is low compared to the size of the company (~250k):
Aren't those general jobs opening. Like junior swe only needs a single generic posting for all positions
Nextgrid 2 hours ago [-]
Bold move.
Not because it's wrong, but because it risks initiating the collapse of the AI bubble and the whole "AI is gonna replace all skilled work, any day now, just give us another billion".
Seems like IBM can no longer wait for that day.
int0x29 1 hours ago [-]
Is IBM invested big in LLMs? I don't get the impression they have much to lose there.
bayindirh 1 hours ago [-]
Their CEO already said what he's thinking about all the spending [0].
Good. Nobody needs to rip that bandaid off. Might as well be IBM.
brianwawok 2 hours ago [-]
I mean it’s IBM. On average, 70% of their decisions are bad ones. Not sure I’d pay a single bit of attention to what they do.
small_model 21 minutes ago [-]
Agree, They could have owned the home computer market, but were out-manvoured by a couple of young programmers. They are hardly the company you want to look to for guidance on the future.
Nextgrid 2 hours ago [-]
To a non-technical individual IBM is still seen as a reputable brand (their consulting business would've been bankrupt long ago otherwise) and they will absolutely pay attention.
bayindirh 1 hours ago [-]
Yeah, they are only 114 years old. How they can have the knowledge to stay afloat in trying times like this?
xhkkffbf 1 hours ago [-]
Perhaps I'm being cynical, but could they be leaving out some detail? Perhaps they're replacing even more older workers with entry level workers than before? Maybe the AI makes the entry level workers just as good-- and much cheaper.
westurner 2 days ago [-]
Tripling entry-level hiring is a good plan.
> Some executives and economists argue that younger workers are a better investment for companies in the midst of technological upheaval.
verdverm 2 days ago [-]
IBM, in the midst of a tech upheaval? They are so dysfunctional, it's the core of why I left
faragon 2 days ago [-]
With the workforce may happen like with DRAM and NAND flash memories: unexpected demand in one side leaving without enough offer in other sides.
joe_mamba 1 hours ago [-]
Doubt it. Unless we go through another decade of ZIRP tied to a newly invented hyped technology that lacks specialists, and discovering new untapped markets, there's not gonna be any massive demand spike of junior labor in tech that can't be met causing wages to shoot up.
The "learn to code" saga has run its course. Coder is the new factory worker job where I live, a commodity.
They hire juniors, give them Claude Code and some specs and save a mid/senior devs salary. I believe coding is over for SWE's by end of 2027, but will take time to diffuse though the economy hence still need some cheap labour for a few years, given the H1-B ban this is one way without offshoring.
Rendered at 23:12:44 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Because the latter would still be indicative of AI hurting entry level hiring since it may signal that other firms are not really willing to hire a full time entry level employee whose job may be obsoleted by AI, and paying for a consultant from IBM may be a lower risk alternative in case AI doesn't pan out.
Source: current (full time) staff consultant at a third party cloud consulting firm and former consultant (full time) at Amazon.
I can’t fault you for not knowing AWS ProServe doesn’t exist. I didn’t know either until a recruiter reached out to me.
~ Monty Python, Meaning of Line (1983), on The Machine that Goes Ping.
Sounds like business as usual to me, with a little sensationalization.
Ahh, what could possibly go wrong!
It always baffles me when someone wants to only think about the code as if it exists in a vacuum. (Although for junior engineers it’s a bit more acceptable than for senior engineers).
Anyone who's worked in a "bikeshed sensitive" stack of programming knows how quickly things railroad off when such customers get direct access to an engineer. Think being a fullstack dev but you constantly get requests over button colors while you're trying to get the database setup.
Customers bikeshed WAY less than those two categories.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNuu9CpdjIo
https://www.cohenmilstein.com/case-study/ibm-age-discriminat...
Why Replacing Developers with AI is Going Horribly Wrong https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WfjGZCuxl-U&pp=ygUvV2h5IHJlcGx...
A bunch of big companies took big bets on this hype and got burned badly.
The job is essentially changing from "You have to know what to say, and say it" to "make sure the AI says what you know to be right"
https://www.ibm.com/careers/search?field_keyword_18[0]=Entry...
Total: 240
United States: 25
India: 29
Canada: 15
Not because it's wrong, but because it risks initiating the collapse of the AI bubble and the whole "AI is gonna replace all skilled work, any day now, just give us another billion".
Seems like IBM can no longer wait for that day.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46124324
> Some executives and economists argue that younger workers are a better investment for companies in the midst of technological upheaval.
The "learn to code" saga has run its course. Coder is the new factory worker job where I live, a commodity.