https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Canaries_BrynjolfssonChandarChen.pdf
We find that since the widespread adoption of generative AI, early-career workers (ages 22-25) in the most AI-exposed occupations have experienced a 13 percent relative decline in employment even after controlling for firm-level shocks
It’s tragedy of the commons type shit. We’re seeing this big in software engineering firms. Nobody wants to hire juniors anymore because you have to train them, and if you’re the loser company that hires juniors and trains them you’re basically just training juniors to be eaten up by Big Tech as soon as they become seniors, so it’s just a “waste of money.” Of course if everybody thinks this way (as they are) then nobody trains juniors and you have no senior engineers in 15 years. But executives can only think of the next quarter so uh who cares.
to some of us it’s comedy of the commons
Executives want to think of their employees as replaceable cogs that can be abused and replaced to turn a profit. Training is a cost to them and of course your whole logic holds. It is really a contradiction of capitalism. Tragedy of the commons is a capitalist apologetic invention, believe it or not, to justify privatization. Capital needs to maximize profit, it will do so best with a skilled workforce, but it is against the interests of individual capitalists to train workers that they believe will just leave after being trained.
Extending the contradiction, these employers are the same ones that avoid promoting from within or giving raises to retain workers. They think they’re maximizing profits by avoiding raises for 2-5 years but then eat the larger costs of constantly interviewing candidates and paying them even more than those who left. And don’t even think about the dead weight of the bloated management structure, another contradiction intended to discipline labor and validate the capitalists.