Will AI collapse the career ladder before new graduates can get on it?

V.L. didn’t particularly want to study computer science.

She was interested in biology, but she’d experienced enough instability in childhood to know she didn’t want that for her future. A career in tech felt like a fast track to financial stability.

“ I don't think it's because I'm super materialistic,” she said. “It wasn't like I want to be able to have this crazy lifestyle and buy all these things. It was like, I want to be safe.”

But the tech industry of today isn’t the safe bet it once was. V.L. was one of about 2,000 workers in Washington laid off from Microsoft earlier this month, part of a broader 6,000-employee downsizing. She asked to be identified by her initials to protect her future job prospects.

RELATED: Microsoft to lay off nearly 2,000 employees in Washington state

V.L. is re-entering a job market where she’ll be competing with thousands of laid off tech and government workers, along with new graduates, at a time when opportunities for junior and mid-career professionals appear to be shrinking.

Economic uncertainty and the rise of artificial intelligence have many wondering whether the bottom rung of the white collar career ladder is about to drop out.

Employers are loathe to admit how much work they’re handing over to large language models, but there are some clues suggesting work that used to be done by entry level employees is being automated.

Microsoft says as much as 30% of its code is being written by AI. Duolingo will only let managers hire new employees if they’re not able to automate the work they would do. IBM replaced hundreds of HR workers with AI. And companies across the economy are slowing or freezing hiring.

AI is one current in a storm of factors creating uncertainty and hesitancy in the job market — but it’s an acute concern for young people entering the workforce today, who often get their start doing the types of mundane tasks that AI is best at.

It’s unclear how automation will ultimately transform office work. Some jobs will likely be eliminated, and new job categories will be created. But that leaves today’s job seekers stuck in a limbo that makes for a difficult environment to start a career.

State of play

Although the overall job market isn’t flashing red, there are some early warning signs for entry level workers. Indeed data show internship postings are the lowest they’ve been six years, with the exception of 2020, when the pandemic skewed all job numbers.

In a data review for KUOW, Indeed Economist Allison Shrivastava found a slight decline in job postings requiring less than one year of experience across a variety of white-collar sectors in the past few years.

“While these percentages remain low, primarily due to typical advertising practices in postgraduate sectors, the downward trend is notable,” she said. “It likely reflects increasing experience requirements as the labor market continues to loosen.”

Seattle recruiter Maja Jensen said she’s noticing a similar trend.

“ We are not seeing as many entry level job openings anymore,” she said. “It's definitely more on the mid to the high-level side.”

Meanwhile, some of the Seattle area’s biggest employers have been shedding workers. Microsoft, Amazon, and other tech companies have gone through several rounds of layoffs since 2023.

RELATED: Could layoffs lead to a startup baby boom?

Russell Ollie was a data analyst and recruiter for Microsoft until its latest round of cuts. He said he’s been laid off three times since graduating in 2018, and never for performance.

“ It's very disheartening,” he said. “It's difficult to plan for the future as well. In a few years I plan to have married my girlfriend and maybe we're looking for a house, but I don't even know if we can get to that point without some sort of stability.”

Most experts say AI isn’t replacing jobs at these companies outright — at least not yet. But it is being used to make workers more efficient, and by reducing headcount, Big Tech is betting it will be able to do the same or more work in the future with fewer employees.

There’s another way the AI revolution could be hurting early-career workers, too. AI research, development, and adoption is expensive, and companies are trimming their budgets where they can to invest in the new technology, says Tina-Marie Gulley. As CEO of the Ada Developers Academy, she trains women for software jobs and works with employers in the area to place them.

“We definitely see some job polarization, especially for entry level programming positions,” Gulley said. “But I think it's not the reason why we think. We thought AI was going to replace early career engineers, and I don't think that's quite it. I think organizations are still trying to pivot and figure out what solutions they're going to build for, and they don't want to necessarily always invest in early career talent to do that right away.”

Jobs on the line

For years, Seattle’s tech industry has been a key driver of breakneck growth, attracting thousands of transplants each year with high-paying jobs. Seattle tech companies seemed to have an insatiable appetite for talent that would never dry up. But economic headwinds and AI are changing that, and the implications reach beyond tech.

Tech companies are both developers and early adopters of AI, which is becoming increasingly proficient at writing code.

A study by the Brookings Institution that used data shared by OpenAI looked at fields where large language models can do the majority of tasks in half the time or less. The jobs with the highest exposure to automation were in computer and mathematics.

But office and administrative support, as well as business and financial operations, were also at high risk. Big tech companies, like Microsoft, and local startups are racing to develop software that can take on more of those tasks.

Law firms, venture capital funds, and other service providers are turning adopting tools like Caddi, a Seattle startup in the AI2 Incubator.

Caddi automates tedious processes that skilled professionals do dozens of times a day. It works like training an intern or junior employee. A user takes a recording of their screen while going through a process, like onboarding a new client. They visit the handful of websites and apps required, send documents back and forth, and narrate the process for the recording.

“ From there, you start interacting with it again the same way you would another employee,” said Caddi co-founder Aditya Sastry. “You get an email from a client that has a contract attached, you just forward it to Caddi ... it'll go through everything that you forwarded us and say, ‘hey, I think these are the things that you want to do. Can you confirm it?' The same way you would be interacting with a junior employee.”

If AI takes on more work that would typically be done by junior employees, it’s easy to envision a future in which early-career professionals can’t get a foot in the door. But many of the people closest to these tools say that’s not what they expect.

Sastry believes reducing “repetitive, busy work” will create more opportunities for junior employees “to learn the critical skills they need to succeed in that industry, and moving documents around and uploading this thing here, and then sending it to this person I don't think is really that.”

It raises the question, how much of that mundane, repetitive work is necessary to learn a craft? And how can educators help today’s students learn the basics — which AI can easily do for them — while also learning to use AI to be more efficient?

A curveball for higher education

As a longtime leader of the University of Washington’s computer science department, Ed Lazowska is wrestling with those questions.

“ We graduate students who are prepared to be serious engineers, but their on-the-job training in their internships, for example, and their first year at work has tended to be work that AI can now do," he said. "So some combination is going to be necessary of us preparing them to enter the workforce at a higher level. We’ve got to do that."

Lazowska also said it's incumbent on employers to invest in junior employees by treating their first year on the job as a continuation of their education.

Gulley, of the Ada Developers Academy, said she’s also training her cohorts to diversify their skills, getting credentials beyond software engineering to be more competitive in a highly dynamic job market. Both educators recommended students look for tech jobs in fields outside of Big Tech — like education, life sciences, or finance, where AI adoption may be slower.

Most experts interviewed for this story said they’re optimistic educators and employers will figure out a new model to help students become professionals, but the interim period could be rocky for young people starting their careers today.

As a computer science student a the University of Washington, Andy Stanciu’s strategy is to incorporate AI into his workflow (when professors allowed it) but make sure he always understands what’s happening under the hood.

“I really interact with it and understand what it's producing and why, because if I'm not following, then there's no point really,” he said. “It's just doing my work for me. If there's some way to hold the students accountable that would be great. But we're not there yet. I think education, especially computer science education, is going to be tricky these next few years.”

Stanciu is preparing to spend his second summer interning for Amazon. And for his part, he’s not especially worried about his job prospects. He thinks that the meaning of “entry level” will change, but that there will always be a place for dedicated graduates.

“ Entry-level engineers are going to be more focused on the bigger picture, and on correctness and efficiency … all the boring stuff, all the stuff that we would need to take a week or so reading documentation on, understanding how it works, integrating, that stuff will all be so much more efficient and we’ll really focus on the higher level stuff.”

Listen to the full episode on Booming, KUOW's economy podcast

Update, Thursday, 5/29/25: This story has been updated to note that Caddi is part of the AI2 Incubator.