alt Hacker NewsYou’re right that LLMs are going to push out jobs at the low end of the market. “Code monkey” type jobs are going to be displaced the same way computers displaced a lot of basic clerical and computational jobs.
But that doesn’t mean there won’t be entry level jobs, they will just have a different set of qualifications and expectations. Just like it’s hard to get a job doing arithmetic today without some other knowledge of the application, future jobs in computing are going to require people to understand things outside of the realm of programming alone. They are going to need to know more about the application of the code they write. It’ll be bad for developers who “just close Jira tickets” but problem solvers in a specific field will be okay.
So, what does that leave for the current new grads? The LLM field hasn't even stabilized yet, we're still pretty far from a defined set of qualifications. Yet hiring has already stopped due to economical factors. By the time it swings back, the new grads of tomorrow will already be graduating with these qualifications that we won't get to learn or develop with real jobs.
And what if this results in the overall market size decreasing? If a company can use LLMs effectively, they may need far fewer people to do the job they're doing than they used to. This would result in an exodus of everyone - biased towards the lower end, no doubt, but it would still hit everyone else and greatly worsen working conditions due to an oversupply of desperate people looking for work.