AI Is Killing Junior Jobs, Here’s What’s Replacing Them

0:28Okay, so get this. juniors over time, you can see the different quarters, like 2023, 2022, and all that. After AI comes out around 2022, it starts to decrease over time. And then in the blue here, seniors are still continuing to go up. And so there's been a couple of these studies already. We talked about the 70 ,000 Filipino study and how the recruiters, 72 % of people or so, they prefer the AI. And so this just shows that the gap is getting larger and larger. And I just saw something the other day were on, I think it was CNBC, your favorite channel, where they were talking about how it's actually going up the stack now.

1:03So it's not just juniors anymore, but it's going up to seniors. And what I also think is interesting here is check this out. So there's this U-shaped graph over here. This is tier one. Number one here is like a Harvard, for example, a tier one college, okay? And then you have tier two college, tier three, tier four, tier five. So five is like tier five is like the lowest college, okay? So you can see for a Harvard type of deal, the decrease in juniors is less than the other ones tier two three four it is significantly less versus um you know tier one and tier five so that's interesting to me because if you're a tier five college for some reason you have the least decreases and then harvard would be the second um or like a tier one like a harvard would be like number number two so we're seeing a massive decrease tier one colleges are seeing some decreases but tier five is seeing the least amount correct yeah and so my my and what for what type of positions all positions or just the junior positions or just juniors okay just juniors and then one more thing before we kind of react to this one too is it's not just it related too so if you look at seniors versus juniors juniors are in the red over here seniors are in the blue you can see for health um seniors are still continuing to uh wait percentage change in number of hires okay so in health care and social it's gone up the most and then you can see the percentage chain for juniors over here, minus 20, minus 40.

2:22So seniors are getting hired more, right, for health. And then when you look at these other roles over here, it's almost all decreases for juniors. So the right side of the chart is going up. So that means they're actually seeing increases. Correct. The left side is seeing decreases. Yeah. Manufacturing seniors, they're not hiring as many. It's almost a zero. Yeah. Yeah. And then manufacturing, oh, my God, it's like minus 20. Oh, yeah, you're right. Because the seniors for healthcare is actually increasing, but the juniors are actually decreasing. Yeah, 25 % up for healthcare, but then you go all the way to manufacturing on the left.

2:54It's basically zero. So they're holding steady at these other ones or they're increasing a little bit for seniors. But for juniors, it's less. And so what this tells me, because we've talked about this, you're doing this and I'm doing this and we have friends doing this. The only juniors that we're hiring are extremely big on AI. They have to give examples. They have to talk about workflows. And I remember I was interviewing someone recently. I was like, so rate your AI fluency on a scale of one to 10. She's like 10. I was like, oh, like you never want to rate yourself a 10 first and foremost.

3:20No. I was like, OK, so 10. Like, so you build like agentic workflows. You build like agents and things like that. Oh, she's like, oh, yeah, I've done all of that. I was like, OK, so can you give me an example of like a tool or workflow that you built? And she's like, oh, yeah, I'm sorry. I just got certification. Oh, so you basically lied to me. And then they rated themselves as a 10. Yeah. That's like a one. How could you rate yourself as a 10? You're just doing certifications, right? So in my mind, I'm like, look, this is how if you're a leader in your company, if you're going to hire juniors, you have to hire people who are AI native, who are really big on it, who are obsessed about AI, because this gap is going to get bigger.

3:52And this is already starting to bleed over into more mid-senior level roles, and it's going to bleed over into senior. And I'm not particularly – I don't think this gives you and I joy by any means, but it's happening. Look, you look at this graph over here. Seniors is going up, but look, it's starting to flatten over here, whereas juniors is starting to trend downward. where totals are starting to trend downwards. This is going to happen for a lot of roles. Even for your role and my role, if we're not on top of it, yeah, we're going to be in trouble too. Dude, I totally agree. But this chart, I'm assuming the total, is it accounting for mid-level too?

4:23Because junior is the entry level, senior is like executive. I think it's just looking at this graph. It's only seniors and juniors. I don't think it's accounting for the middle. Got it. Yeah. What do you think? Yeah, I think A is going to have an impact on a lot of jobs. It already is. Google, there was an article that ended up coming out that Google has decreased mid-level managers, but it was by 30%. Google mid-level managers, I see so much stuff. Yeah, 35%. So Google has eliminated 35 % of managers overseeing small teams in the past year. And no one has proof of it, but they're saying, is AI the reason?

5:05is this is why Google doesn't need as many people. And I don't know for certain, it could just be a restructuring. It doesn't look like Google went out there and made a statement being like, yeah, we're eliminating a ton of people using it because that sounds bad itself. And I don't see corporations volunteering that information, whether it's true or not. And that 35 % could have been for other reasons as well, but you're going to see it. And you're also going to see the flip side in which people aren't certain yet what AI is better than humans for or what it's worse. A great example of this is Taco Bell and their drive-thru.

5:48They're thinking about getting rid of AI. So they did a small test in which for the drive-thru assistance, they had some humans going out there or AI saying like, hey, what would you like to order? And in some cases it worked really well. Some cases it worked so bad, I think one person asked for like 1 ,800 cups of water, something ridiculous like that, so he can get in touch with a human. Yeah. But yeah, different organizations are testing different things and Taco Bell is like, oh, for our drive-throughs that are busy and have long lines, we're thinking of keeping humans. For the ones that are shorter, don't have as much lines, we're thinking of using AI.

6:28But in essence, what they're saying is for like busy lines, it's not necessarily just about efficiencies it's there how i'm reading this is when you have a lot of lines and you need people constantly that of course costs money but it shows that the human's probably messing up less so it just moves the line through but if you have a drive-through with very few cars coming through you use ai and said you're saving some money because you don't need a full-time human and even if they mess up a little bit here or there the cost of fixing it is probably cheaper than hiring a human. Yeah. So I think it's what's going to happen is even if we use the Taco Bell example, maybe AI will do 70, 80 % of the work, but you still have a human loop for 20 to 30%.

7:10And that's still a lot of efficiencies ultimately. And I do think we're going to move into a world, this is a little more philosophical, but most people will have universal basic income to supplement. And I think I also believe in what Elon said about universal wealth. I think universal wealth will happen probably 10, 15, 20 years out. There's going to be a period of adjustment. But I think if you want to get ahead of this and you maybe you don't want to rely on universal basic income, what you do is you arm yourself with the knowledge here, you stay curious, and then you are constantly building on yourself, you're building skills to make yourself more marketable.

7:43And then you will have to worry about this. This is why I think tier five schools, maybe those people are, they might be a little cheaper. But also you have I think a lot of people that go to tier five schools, like sometimes they are more, for example, you went to a Cal state, right? A Cal state is like, it's a decent school, but it's not a tier one school by any means. Right. Decent. It's okay. School. It's okay. School. It's probably towards the bottom end. Okay. So what do you think? What tier do you think that's it? Uh, definitely tier five. That's the last tier, right? There's no tier six.

8:16No, there's only two. Let's just say in this scenario, there's only two or five. Okay. So, and I went, I, I barely gone to the UC San Diego, right. transferred from UC Riverside. I would consider that a tier three school. Tier three. Well, I think I was at a tier four, tier five at UC Riverside. Okay. So I'm saying we're like the same person. You know, you're UC San Diego. I finished at UC San Diego, but I started at UC Riverside. Yeah. So, okay, let's assume I'm tier three, tier four, but you and I both worked our butts off. And I think people that go to tier fives, a lot of them will, not a lot of them, but there's, there's, there are a select few that will work their butts off.

8:47A lot of the people that didn't do well in school end up doing really well as a business person or a leader. so a lot of my friends that are wealthy ended up going to ivy league or stanford you can say it's not ivy league yeah yeah um and i've hired a lot of people and my buddies have hired a lot of people and there's one thing i would say most of us feel really consistent about when we tend to we've all hired from these tier one schools all the way down to tier five it's not this case always but a high percentage time and when i say high percent well into the double digits what ends up happening when we hire people from tier one schools is they feel not necessarily privileged or act privileged it's more so they felt that they spent so much energy and they put in so much effort to get into one of these tier one schools that they deserve a lot right so maybe some sense of entitlement not with all people but quite a few of the people we've interviewed and that's a lot of the reasons why we feel candidates from tier one schools don't always work out but on the flip side when we interview people from tier five tier four tier three they're more hungry like my ceo i believe he's from arizona state university i don't know what tier that would be but i'm gonna guess i think tier five yeah yeah yeah and the guy just works his tail off he's in cuba right now on a family vacation all right he's cuban uh no his wife is okay and they're going seeing their parents can't always get out of the country so they go see them yeah and it's a holiday i know he has a client call today a potential client call and a pitch and he'll figure out internet and everything today it's labor day yeah he doesn't care wow right because that was when their assistant gave time and this is a multi-billion dollar company not like one or two or five like well well well into the billions yeah doesn't care yeah he'll do whatever for work and business and grind it out and i don't know the last time he didn't work on a saturday or a sunday yeah i know he's been better now and he doesn't work christmas or thanksgiving but when i say he doesn't work christmas or thanksgiving he probably spends at least 30 minutes to hour checking emails, making sure there's no fires or anything, even on a holiday.

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13:35Yeah, when you look at tier one, you look at what Jensen said. So I was rewatching a video today this morning. And one guy was asked, so, you know, what would you say to the Stanford students over here? This guy's like sitting, right? He's kind of like a little overweight, too. But he's like, yeah, so what do you think about like you know the the um stanford like what would you what lessons would you give to our students here and then jensen's over here he's like he pauses he's like you know if i were to say any one thing stanford's an amazing school you guys really work really hard you know best of the best students you know top school in the one of the top schools in the planet but you know what i've learned is that people that go to schools like this right have very high expectations and people that have very high expectations have very low resilience and there's a certain entitlement that he's basically saying that, right?

14:15Yeah, and he's saying like - It's a similar. Yeah, similar thing to what you're saying. And I do see that. I will say though, there are a couple of Harvard people that I worked with. We have someone on our team from Harvard and they're amazing, right? They work really hard. There's a massive chip on their shoulder and I appreciate that. But I've also worked with people at Harvard where my first job that I got coming out of college was data entry. So I was making$30 ,000 a year. I was only like 22 years old or so. And I saw a guy that was doing the same exact work I was doing, data entry. 30 years old, went to Harvard and had no energy.

14:47I think he thought life was done after he went to Harvard. And I'm just like, yeah, it has nothing to do with the school that you go to. It really just comes down to how hard you continue to push and how hard you're willing to push. Yeah. And Stanford and Harvard produce great people, especially the ones who are willing to grind it out. And I've seen a lot of amazing entrepreneurs come from there. There has to be tons of amazing workers. I hear more about the entrepreneurs, of course, because a lot of them have made billions of dollars. and you know a lot of them as well. And we're not talking about purchasing, but you just go on the Forbes list.

15:18A lot of those people went to Stanford and Harvard, at least in tech. But when you look at employees, I find that you get people who are just willing to grind it out after they graduated from the Arizona State University. It's like, all right, I got to get my crap together. I got to get my life and just push hard. And a lot of the people that I've interviewed from, let's say Stanford, are just like, I did so well and I got into this school. you know my life should be easier but that's not reality yeah they just believe in that it's because we've been brainwashed as kids i don't know about you but for for me i was always like oh go to stanford go to ucla at very least so it's it was very much a brand thing growing up chinese right asian um and so but you realize none of that matters at the end of the day what matters is how much you contribute to the world and if you want to contribute more that means you have to continue to grow so so i look at thiel thiel went to stanford yeah uh-huh um i don't know where he got his law degree from but let's just assume stanford uh i believe he has two kids right actually i don't know it's something like that and he has a program and a lot of good companies like i believe figma was one of them came out of his fellows yeah exactly where he'll pay you money not to go to college yeah and i'm a big believer that in today's world you don't need a tier one college and you don't even need a tier two three four or five college and it's all pretty much useless for most professions yeah not all some like maybe a doctor is still required architect yeah yeah yeah uh architect do you even need to go to college for that i don't know i i think there's a there's a good amount to study you can chat gpt it i know like shaking his head yes architect doctor um like a i don't know like an engineer type yeah yeah so but here's what engineer no not a computer engineer i'm talking about like structural engineer oh god yeah but do you know what's interesting you you can take a look at this i don't want to digress too much but take a look at Alpha School for your kids.

17:09There's a guy, I think his name's Joe Lamont. He found a Trilogy software, very successful back in the day, right? Yeah, I know. Very successful guy, right? He created Alpha School? So I think it was his friend that created it. He's now the principal of it. So the way they make it work is he gamifies it, I think, for the kids. He makes learning very fun, right? And he believes that because General AI came out a couple of years ago, now he's all in on Alpha School and he wants to change education. And so check out Alpha School because I think the future of education is it's all going to be personalized for children and it's all going to be gamified.

17:38It's all going to be fun. And you and I, I think we would have figured out by age five or six that we were probably entrepreneurs already. Because I think by age nine, I was already building websites and things like that. I just got distracted by games. You were probably in it. Like you started your first business on what? 12 years? You're selling CDs? Teenish. But when did you start selling CDs? I don't know, like 13, 14? Exactly. So it was there the whole time. But what if you got to, I think you and I, even at age six, we could have started. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, cool. Yeah. I didn't know Joe was a principal of Alpha School.

18:09They don't have one in Los Angeles, but yeah. You know Joe? Yeah. Great. I work with him. There you go. At Trilogy. Okay. There you go. So I know quite a few of his team. Andy ended up leaving Tribe, and then he ended up creating his own fund. But yeah, Joe is a billionaire from Apple and Amazon stock. Yeah. He bet hard. He pressed hard. That's another thing. So they talk about slugging percentage, right? How hard are you willing to bet when the timing is right? And he pressed his chips. And we talked about this last time too. You have to be willing to press your chips. Yeah. No, I didn't know he was in charge of Alpha School.

18:46But I was talking to Lloyd and he's in Austin. He was telling me about Alpha School. We sent him to a really great school here called Merman. And it's an amazing place for education. and they just teach your kids as far as they'll go. So if they're like five, but they do college level math, they'll give them college level math and encourage everything. So here's the thing. Joe Lamont has been a billionaire for a very long time. Very low profile. He hasn't done a podcast for, I don't think he's ever, that was the first podcast he did on Invest Like the Best. So I'm listening to that right now. He spoke, he has public speaking gate.

19:21Yeah. And his daughter goes to Stanford, if I'm not mistaken. I think he sent his kids to Alpha School too. So originally someone that founded, I think her name's McKinsey or something. He was like, oh, I'm not going to send my kids to this. Eventually it got better. And then I think he's like, okay, I'm going to send my kids to this. So I think it was alpha school. Plus you send them to Stanford, but he's really book smart. Yeah. And then his dad was number two at GE under, was it Jack Welsh? Should we surround it? Yeah. His dad was number two. That's cool. So good upbringing. Well-connected family.

19:48But I think the future of this is personalized, gamified education. Personalized to personalize it to your likings and then gamified to keep you engaged. Yeah. That's what's going to happen. And you're probably seeing it with your kids as well. And that is it for today. We'll see you tomorrow. Thank you.