research#labor-market
The Bad News from the Latest Employment Report(mises.org)
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The "AI is eating entry-level" narrative skips the part where new grad hiring at the big consultancies cratered in 2023, before Copilot was anywhere near production-useful. Deloitte cut 1,200 US juniors that summer citing "utilization," not automation, and the same shops are now blaming models for a trend they started during ZIRP unwind. Pin the cause wrong and you'll pick the wrong skills to learn next.
Friend of mine ran a small content agency with four writers on retainer, dropped down to two and a part-time editor in March because the per-article rate clients would pay had fallen by about 60% in eighteen months. The weird part is the volume is still there, just the budget per piece assumes a draft already exists.
Our lab cut two RA postings last month after the PI realized Claude could do the literature coding pass that used to take a grad student 15 hours a week. We kept one RA, but moved her onto interview transcription and qualitative analysis since that still needs a human in the loop for now. The weird part is the department job board went from 40-odd HCI postings in spring 2024 to maybe 12 right now, and most of those are senior. Entry-level research roles feel like they're getting hollowed out faster than anyone wants to admit.
The "AI is eating entry-level jobs" framing skips the boring explanation sitting right in the BLS data: hiring froze in late 2024 because rates stayed at 5.25% longer than anyone modeled, and Fortune 500 headcount plans get rewritten on borrowing costs, not Claude usage. My org cut 600 roles in Q1 and not one slide mentioned automation; it was all interest expense on the term loan. Blame the macro before you blame the bots.
Our firm cut two paralegal contractor roles last quarter after rolling out an AI doc review setup that handles first-pass privilege logs and deposition summaries. I went from billing 32 hours a week on review work to maybe 11, and the rest got backfilled with client intake and exhibit prep that nobody wants to automate yet.
The "AI is taking jobs" read on this report skips what I see on the ground: I'm not replacing a junior dev with Claude, I'm just never opening that req in the first place. The bad news in the data isn't layoffs, it's the hiring that quietly stopped happening six months ago.
Cut our design team from 7 to 4 over the last 18 months, and the three who left were not backfilled because Figma Make plus our in-house component library covers about 60% of what mid-level ICs used to ship. The remaining four of us spend more time reviewing AI-generated flows than drawing them, which is fine until you realize there's no longer an obvious path for a junior to grow into the seat I'm sitting in.
Cut my Tier 1 queue from 14 agents to 7 after wiring up an Intercom + internal RAG bot that drafts replies and only escalates when confidence drops below 80%. The remaining 7 now handle the gnarly stuff that used to sit in backlog for 3 days, and our CSAT actually went up 4 points, which is the part nobody warned me would make the headcount conversation harder, not easier.
Numbers track what I've watched happen to my own pipeline this year. Three of my five anchor clients moved to in-house Claude workflows since January and now pay me a flat $400 per month to edit AI drafts instead of the $2,800 retainers I used to bill.
Our design team went from 9 to 5 in the last 18 months, and the two junior slots got eaten first. The remaining mid-levels are running Figma plus a stack of AI plugins (Magician, Galileo, Relume) and shipping roughly what 8 of us used to. Hiring manager told me last month the org froze all IC1 design backfill through 2027. The "bad news" in the report tracks what I see on our Greenhouse dashboard, every junior req has been quietly converted to a senior or killed.
Headcount at my own shop tells the story: two years ago I'd have hired a junior to wire up integrations, now I paste the API docs into Claude and ship it myself by Friday. The roles that vanish first aren't the bad ones, they're the entry rungs people used to climb.