Entry-Level Tech Jobs Are Getting Wiped Out  ## Metadata - Author: [[The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source]] - Full Title: Entry-Level Tech Jobs Are Getting Wiped Out - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/583d830e-e90e-45e9-92f8-36ad38c9389f ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Entry-Level Tech Jobs Wiped Out** - Entry-level tech hiring has dropped over 50% at large tech companies since 2019. - AI is seen as cheaper and quicker than junior coders despite similar code quality. Transcript: Jerod Santo The San Francisco Standard published some sobering news for new graduates. Quote, hiring of new grads by the 15 largest tech companies has fallen by more than 50% since 2019, according to a new report from VC firm SignalFire. While hiring for mid- and senior-level roles rebounded last year, following mass layoffs across all levels in 2023, it declined at the entry level. The gap between the overall unemployment level and that of recent college grads recently reached an all-time high according to census data. End quote. What is the culprit? You're not going to like this. Quote, previously, startups would typically hire one senior person and two or three early career coders to assist, but AI holds advantages over those junior employees. Why hire an undergrad when AI is cheaper and quicker? While AI-generated code isn't top tier, neither is code written by new grads. The key difference is that the iterative process to make AI code better takes minutes while a junior coder might need days for the same task. End quote. This seems like bad news for everyone involved. The good news for grads though is there's never been a better time in history to start your own business and you'll probably never have as little responsibility as you do right now. ([Time 0:00:51](https://share.snipd.com/snip/352b7b09-67ad-4526-a723-33cae6a166ce)) - **AI Agent in Your Terminal Shell** - The Forge team created an AI agent integrated directly into your shell, not just IDEs. - This design leverages terminal speed and rich development context for efficiency. Transcript: Jerod Santo Forge is an AI agent in your terminal. While most dev tool makers are building AI agents for your IDE, your text editor, and or your web browser, the Forge team decided to put one in your shell. Here's why. Speed and efficiency. Terminal interfaces provide sub-50 millisecond startup and direct system access. Rich context. Your shell session already contains your complete development context. Tool ecosystem. Forge seamlessly combines with the powerful Unix tool ecosystem through pipes and redirections. And composability. Forge follows the Unix philosophy of combining specialized tools to solve complex problems. I find this approach both novel and interesting, at least for we developers who already work in the terminal. ([Time 0:02:12](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4c52d64e-d686-4154-aa70-a2c34fb6b364)) - **Choose Tools That Make You Happy** - Choose developer tools that make you happy, even if they are obscure or inconvenient. - Using tools you enjoy can improve your motivation and satisfaction at work. Transcript: Jerod Santo Choose tools that make you happy. The actual title of this post by Fernando Beretti starts with, You can, like you can choose tools that make you happy. But I like my imperative form better. Now it's more than permission to choose tools that make you happy, but instruction to do just that. That being said, the post isn't really about permission or instruction. It's about admitting that which we already do. Quote, Emacs is a Gnostic cult. And you know what? That's fine. In fact, it's great. It makes you happy. What else is needed? You are allowed to use weird, obscure, inconvenient, obsolescent, undead things if it makes you happy. We are all going to die. If you're lucky, you get three giga seconds and you're up. Do what you are called to do. Put ZFS in your air fryer. Do your taxes in Fortran. Just don't BS me. Don't look me in the eye and tell me snowball is the language of the future. Don't tell your boss it was a rational cost-benefit calculator. Quote, calculation that made you rewrite the front end in prologue. End quote. Related, I love the comments on Mitchell Hashimoto's clip about why he chose Zig for Ghostie, and I bet Fernando would love them as well. ([Time 0:03:04](https://share.snipd.com/snip/15c27b38-bbc4-4cfe-b5da-b9966b927ef4)) - **Jujutsu Changes Version Control Mindset** - Nathan Whitmer explains how Jujutsu VC made him rethink commits and conflict resolution. - He appreciates its safer, more flexible workflow compared to Git's rough edges. Transcript: Jerod Santo Jujutsu, JJ for short, is an up-and version control system that many smart people are saying many nice things about. Nathan Whitmer says Jujutsu's flexibility and safety changed his approach to version control. Quote, Working with Git has been great, especially in contrast to what came before. But despite years of development, it still has sharp edges and presents a steep learning curve. Jujutsu doesn't fix that exactly, but it sands off some rough edges and makes some different decisions that result in a much safer and far more flexible workflow. End quote. What surprises me about JJ excitement and adoption is that nobody claims it's revolutionary or 10x better than Git or anything like that. They just say it's marginally better in many small ways that I guess add up to make it adoption worthy. In this post, Nathan explains how JJ has made him think differently about commits and intentionality, rebasing, conflict resolution, and more. He also followed this post up with a perhaps more approachable JJ Tips and Tricks, which is also linked up in the newsletter. ([Time 0:04:11](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e8ba496d-05a4-42ec-b3a8-d521daee336f)) - **Push Ifs Up and Fors Down** - Push if conditions up in your code to centralize complex branching logic. - Push loops down for performance and flexibility in processing batches of data. Transcript: Jerod Santo Push ifs up and fours down. Here's two rules of thumb that make a lot of sense to me. Oddly enough, I don't think I've heard them before. Or maybe I just forgot. Either way, Alex Kladov suggests we push if conditions as high up as is reasonable. Here's one reason why. Quote, control flow and ifs are complicated and are a source of bugs. By pushing ifs up, you often end up centralizing control flow in a single function, which has a complex branching logic, but all the actual work is delegated to straight line subroutines. If you have complex control flow, better to fit it on a screen in a single function rather than spread throughout the file. What's more, with all the flow in one place, it often is possible to notice redundancies and dead conditions. End quote. The main reason he thinks we should push force down is performance. Quote, if you have a whole batch of things to work with, you can amortize startup cost and be flexible about the order you process things. In fact, you don't even need to process entities in any particular order, you can do vectorized, destructive array tricks to process one field of all entities first before continuing With other fields. ([Time 0:08:14](https://share.snipd.com/snip/bfd7286e-f011-45b2-b430-65194f9428b2))