AI is not just ending entry-level jobs. It’s the end of the career ladder as we know it | Postings for entry-level jobs in the U.S. overall have declined about 35% since January 2023

“Job losses among 16-24 year-olds are rising as the U.S. labor market hits its roughest patch since the pandemic.

But forecasts that AI will wipe out many entry-level roles pose a much bigger question than current job market woes: What happens to the traditional career ladder that allowed young workers to start at a firm, stay at a firm, and rise all the way to CEO?

A[ study](https://www.signalfire.com/blog/signalfire-state-of-talent-report-2025) found there was a 50% decline in new role starts by people with less than one year of post-graduate work experience. The data ranged across core business functions — sales, marketing, engineering, recruiting/HR, operations, design, finance and legal — with the 50% decline consistent across the board.

If predictions about AI advancements ultimately leading to superintelligence are proven correct, Max Tegmark, president of the Future of Life Institute, says the issue isn’t going to be about whether the 50% entry-level jobs being wiped out is accurate, but that percentage growing to 100% for all careers, “since superintelligence can by definition do all jobs better than us,” he said.

“If we continue racing ahead with totally unregulated AI, we’ll first see a massive wealth and power concentration from workers to those who control the AI, and then to the machines themselves as their owners lose control over them,” Tegmark said.

Is this somehow controlling for the fact that the entire economy has been on the slow skid since at least then? Is it clear that this is *actually* attributable to “AI” in some way?

“What happens to the traditional career ladder that allowed young workers to start at a firm, stay at a firm, and rise all the way to CEO?”

Uh, what happened to any economic mobility by staying with a company?

It’s survivor bias to see the handful of people that break into corporate from retail or supply and believe we really have any places that have ROOM for younger people. Raising retirement age only exacerbates the root issue.

This is reflected in our politics. Old dems cling to their seats, none have raised the new guard and they butt heads with the few young and hot blooded dems there are. Old repubs cling too, but their funding class has pushed up several shameless younger faces to try and make them look like they are anything but 100% money interest beholden whereas dems are ~90% beholden.

Dems have consistently pushed for policies that help people here, regardless of who they are. Repubs have consistently legislated for moving money upward and concentrating it as much as possible. And economically, dem presidents have reflected better stock markets than repubs, consistently since Roosevelt.

Would be interesting to see how many dems would vote to RELEASE THE FILES if there was an actual chance repubs weren’t going to block RELEASING THE FILES.

Recruiters are the problem in my opinion.
No understanding of the role and only concerned with they get out of it, so they are likely pad the roles requirements up.

Even without AI we would have the same results.

Remember there was a massive hiring spree during covid and those were let got for the sake of profit. There was a firing spree right after.

Those more experience profiles are in the market and the young adults entering the market needs to compete against those.

We need to be careful when opposing two numbers against each other, Correlation does not imply causation

What’s the baseline? Hiring has surged in the beginning of the pandemic, so in the grander scheme of things this might just be a correction.

lol anyone who says AI (in 2025, not 2045) is going to decimate labor has never truly worked with AI. I say this as a software engineering leader who works with it full time and is regularly discussing how to pull back from it due to its net uselessness after you factor in all its mistakes, additional cost, dead ends, etc. Entry-level jobs are down because a few years ago companies were over-hiring in a way our generation will never witness again. It was one of the most foolish hiring sprees anyone’s ever seen, and now things are correcting. AI is the perfect scapegoat.

I wonder if this administration is pushing divisive rhetoric so hard in order to direct the inevitable anger and restlessness away from themselves

These tools replace tasks, not jobs, but it’s easy to conflate the two. The leadership at these companies aren’t hiring because there is uncertainty in the economy. They are then hand waving the issue away and telling existing employees to “just use AI”, even though it never actually happens. It’s not the cause, it’s an excuse. All that is happening is an increased workload on existing workers. 

As far as evidence: I’d like to hear from the workers still in these businesses telling us about their day-to-day using AI tools as a “coworker”. The only accounts I’ve read like this are software devs trying to interact with the GitHub Copilot agent, and posting their absolutely infuriating interactions which they say only have increased their workload and decreased quality.

Let’s see some actual evidence of these tools replacing jobs. That’s not a lot to ask. Where’s the 60 Minutes expose in it? Let’s see these tools in action, at scale, performing the same roles. I suspect if you look into the workings of any of these companies, you’ll just find overworked and stressed existing staff who are trying to use these tools to reduce workload, but are really just needing more people. The CEOs won’t hire because it’s a recession, and can feel fine about it because their staff “has AI now!” 

And in this economy, people aren’t going to quit because of the uncertainty of getting another job, so they’re just dealing with it. 

That’s the banal truth. Same shitty business practices with a shiny new AI veneer.