Companies are cutting entry-level jobs and rehiring some of them in the same year, showing how hard it is to both automate the tasks junior employees used to do and protect the pipeline that typically produces senior talent. Stanford economist Erik Brynjolfsson's team found that workers between 22 and 25 in jobs AI reaches first lost 16% of their employment relative to older colleagues doing the same work, with young software developers losing nearly a fifth of their jobs relative to the late-2022 peak. The decline for the most exposed 22-to-25 group has sharpened to nearly 4% a year, up from under 3% after the first 12 months. Professors Amy Edmondson and Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic argue that cutting these jobs trades a small, immediate saving for the pipeline that turns a 24-year-old into a manager who has actually done the work. Amazon's cloud chief Matt Garman called replacing junior developers with AI "one of the dumbest things I've ever heard," and his company is hiring 11,000 interns and recent graduates this year even after cutting 14,000 corporate jobs last fall.
Amazon.com IncAmazon's cloud chief criticizes replacing junior developers with AI, and the company is hiring 11,000 interns and graduates, signaling a balanced AI adoption that protects talent pipeline.