The entry-level-jobs aren't going anywhere
22-year-olds around the world rejoice
There is much ado about how AI is going to make it difficult for early career folks to build the skills they need to succeed in the workplace or academia.
“Alas!” they say. “Gone are the days when a bright young lass could learn the ropes by running data analysis - she has been replaced by Claude! The boilerplate sports stories write themselves, and so does the code - what is a young white-collar worker to do?”
This feels a bit like lamenting that future mathematicians have had the ladder kicked away upon the invention of the calculator. “How will they gain the skills to succeed at the blackboard when they haven’t done reams of long division?”
In my first few jobs, I much of my time doing work that is now automate-able.
In college I spent 12 months writing nuclear reactor simulation software1 - I spent about 10 of those months debugging C++ compiler errors, which Claude could now just do for me.
At BCG I spent most of my time in excel writing artisanal index-matches by hand. Honestly my excel ability is now more of a liability than a benefit, because I know I can just power through calculations in excel rather than set up my data funnels properly in advance.
It would make zero sense to hire a 22-year-old to do the work that I did then. Instead you would hire a 22-year-old to do more ambitious work.
If Codex had been around when I was in college, I would have built the software in 2 months, then spent the other 10 months integrating it into the broader system to make it actually useful2. At BCG, spared the effort of performing analysis by hand, I would have redirected energy into making the analysis higher quality3.
The excel and coding tasks can be done by AI and are no longer relevant for me. But I also picked up a bunch of tacit knowledge that do still matter: All that boring stuff like how to tell if analysis looks right, how to break down a problem into pieces and execute each step, how to tell when analysis will be needle-moving or not.
So I’m not worried that entry-level jobs will disappear. They will just change, moving up the value chain to activities that are higher-abstraction and higher-agency, and focusing young workers on the skills that are still relevant.
Until the day that all jobs are replaced, there will always be work in the margin between Claude-one-shots-it and requires-a-competent-professional. 22-year-olds around the world rejoice.
Shout out Geoff my long-suffering advisor. This is the reason I have a Github, which I pretend gives me street cred around these parts (check out my work on MultiGroupMC).
No, dear reader, the nuclear reactor simulation software I built freshman year was never actually used. If only I had had Claude.
Or more realistically, higher quantity.