AI is taking entry-level white-collar jobs. This story is everywhere.
Here it is in The Atlantic: The job market is brutal for young workers.
And in Bloomberg Businessweek: A Dozen Young Job Hunters on What It Takes to Get Hired.
Here it is in Axios: AI is taking entry-level jobs.
These are about the entry-level white-collar job market in general, but the same coverage is out there for specific fields: consultants, paralegals, software engineers…
I have three reactions, roughly in chronological order:
First: I am so sorry for the difficulty and anxiety people are suffering: the ones who have been laid off, the ones worrying they might be next, the ones looking for work in a bad market, and the ones in school watching it all rapidly approach. I had a taste of this, graduating into the Great Recession, but we knew that was temporary, not a new normal. This is awful.
Second: Companies are taking this too far, and there will be a correction. I believe strongly in the potential of enterprise AI, but the trends now look like an overestimation, or maybe a misunderstanding, of AI's capabilities. Some companies already realize that they're killing their leadership pipeline, that they're not building institutional knowledge and loyalty, and most importantly that you can't automate all the intangible good that entry-level people do for an organization.
Third: Is the entry-level white-collar job even worth mourning?
When I left college, I didn't get an entry-level white-collar job, at least not in the typical sense. I taught high school English and then second grade through Teach for America, went to law school, and served as an attorney for the Department of Justice. I got back into coding and my friends and I put hours into startup ideas that were fun but never launched. I volunteered on political campaigns, recorded music, tried blogging a few times, and traveled whenever I could make it work. I lived in tiny apartments and didn't save very much money.
At thirty, things changed. I got married. I realized I didn't want to be a lawyer, so I got a job in management consulting. That started as a way to change careers—I wanted to work in sustainability, and a lot of the jobs that looked interesting wanted consulting experience—but as we started adding up the prices of rent for a two-bedroom apartment, daycare, saving for college, buying and maintaining a car, and someday buying a home, it became a way to earn enough to make it all possible.
Consulting was a difficult transition: the hours (on my first project, sometimes 18 hour days), the constant travel, the jumping-through-hoops of a client-services job. One difficulty I hadn't prepared for was suddenly feeling behind in my career. As a teacher and a prosecutor, I was among the youngest in my job, and I didn't realize how important it was to me to feel I was keeping pace in my career. Now, there were people at my firm who were my age but years ahead, because they had joined early and worked their way up while I'd been doing other things. For the first time, I had a manager who was younger than me and I didn't like the feeling (though he was great). I wondered if I'd wasted my twenties on false starts.
But I realized I could see the past of those advanced colleagues by looking at the new entry-level consultants I was working with. They were in their twenties, and here they were spending all day in small rooms, picking through spreadsheets and moving boxes around on slides.
The consulting firm was tough to get into, and these people were impressive. I thought about all the years of effort that led them there, starting young: working for good grades, getting into honors classes, putting in the time on test prep. I thought about the sports and instruments they must have played, the hours their parents must have spent driving them from this lesson to that game, to ensure that they grew up (and presented to admissions offices as) well-rounded. I thought about the liberal-arts education most of them would have had: the seminars on the classics, the labs, the theses they spent hours in the library researching. And at the end of that extraordinary, decades-long investment not only in their aptitude but in their character and confidence, they'd made it through a rigorous interview to land this coveted job, one they could proudly post on LinkedIn and their parents could mention gratuitously to their friends.
And that prize was sitting at a laptop shuffling data for hours on end so that a large company could decide what cost reduction target each of its five business units should adopt. I still didn't like feeling behind, but I would not have traded my twenties for that.
I'm talking about consulting because I know it, but there are thousands and thousands of entry-level white-collar jobs like this around the American economy, in every industry and across disciplines, and applicants are stepping over one another to get them. It's not that these jobs aren't worthwhile. The work needs to be done. It's that they're a waste of early adulthood.
Most obviously, they're a waste for the people in them. That time is when it's possible to try things, before your career settles into a groove and before (for many) you have the responsibility of taking care of others. It's when conviction is clearest and the sense of the possible has not been dulled by years of setbacks and incrementalism. Work on something ridiculous and ambitious and meaningful. Do something that fails—not because it helps you succeed next time, but because living through it deepens your empathy for others who struggle. Do a job where nobody cares how smart you are or where you went to school or what grades you got, because all that matters is whether you work hard and get it done. Do something that can't get automated. Not everyone can turn adventure and inspiration into a career; lots of people are going to just have jobs. But if there is a time in life to try, this is it.
Just as importantly, this kind of entry-level job is a waste for the world. Employers value entry-level hires for what they might be in the future, but in the present, they seem to care most that these hires will work for less. Their level of respect for junior employees is evident in the very fact that they're looking to turn over the work to AI.
Meanwhile, there are plenty of organizations and causes desperate for the talent and drive of people early in their careers. What would it look like if a fraction of the ability currently pointed at basic professional tasks were instead directed toward national service, organizing and activism, art, and entrepreneurship? Americans have long told ourselves, particularly as others matched and overtook us in areas like manufacturing, that our ultimate long-term advantage is our spirit: the courage, audacity, creativity, and vision to make the unimaginable and to accomplish the impossible. I believe that, but if that's the case, why are we investing so much in cultivating millions of bright minds only to send them—at the peak of their ability to think differently and take risks—into jobs that use so little of what makes them invaluable?
Twenty years ago, halfway through my time in Teach for America, I wrote an essay for my college newspaper talking about my experience as an overwhelmed new teacher. I included this near the close:
I have learned that energy and idealism are not naïve traits to be ironed out by experience. They are rare and valuable assets, and they are sorely lacking in our public education system.
Today, I'd only change "public education system" to "civilization." Entry-level white-collar jobs are a waste of one of our most precious assets, and of everything we invest in cultivating it.
That's all easy to say, but most people in their twenties can't act on it. Entry-level white-collar jobs are attractive, even to those who would rather be doing anything else, because they make sense. If at some point you want stability and security, it's best to start early: build a resume, pay down loans, start saving, make connections. The stories of those who leave the path and make it are exhilarating, but we know that most don't.
I was extraordinarily lucky to get jobs in my twenties that let me follow purpose while covering my bills. I was lucky to find an employer (the consulting firm) that understood that the experience I had was valuable even if not typical, which allowed me to transition to a new phase when I needed to. I was lucky to have a supportive family, so I knew that trying different things could mean career setbacks but not material ruin.
We can do things to make these possibilities more accessible; public policy can turn the luck available to some into a system that works for everyone. What we'd need to do is not hard to imagine. At minimum: universal healthcare (finally), and childcare too; higher education overhauled to be more affordable and flexible; hiring practices moved toward skills, so you can try things early in your career and know employers will value your atypical experience. There are countless other ideas that we could try: support for more national service, giving people early in their careers an initial financial stake, making housing more affordable, and so on. The goal shouldn't be saving the entry-level job from automation. It should be making it possible to do something better with that precious time.
Something like this has been done before.
Like many kids (including my own), I loved Calvin and Hobbes. Calvin's childhood was relatable to me: a time for exploration and questioning (and building character), summers filled with making up games and winters with snow forts, and no responsibilities beyond school and a few chores. It seemed so timeless as to be the natural order. But it was created.
Of course American children had been expected to work. Of course industrialization drew them into factories, where they spent pitiless hours in miserable conditions, until activists got laws passed to pull them out and put them in schools. Those schools were themselves, in part, driven by industrialization: the need for a numerate and literate workforce and the growing economic capacity to pay for universal schooling (and to allow parents to earn enough to support the family without their children's contributions). Industry upended life and reformers stepped in to change the rules and make it work. If we remember our childhoods fondly, we owe it to those advocates from generations past.
Right now, there are other ages of life that are broken, and have been for generations. Parents of young children know that the world is not set up for us. If you live in a two-income household, what do you do with your kids during the summer? How about on those half days that sneak up or when the school unexpectedly announces that it is discontinuing afterschool care?
The economy is evolving quickly, so more people in midlife are going to need to make career transitions. How are they supposed to do it?
Or the elderly: medical science is thankfully allowing longer lives, but most people's retirement savings will not nearly cover the cost of the care they need.
In all of these, as in the story at the beginning, individuals find ways through with luck, but luck is not a plan worthy of a serious nation.
The early career stage has been broken for generations too, for all the reasons above, even if many of us didn't notice. We didn't need AI to introduce the policies above and should have done them years ago, and AI-driven automation is going to create (actually, is already creating) real pain for a generation whose early careers will not be what they expected. But, AI will also create a moment of upheaval and increased economic capacity that we could use to make something better, if we take the opportunity.
I want an America where those early in their careers see service, or creation, or experimentation as natural, even obvious, first steps, instead of taking jobs that waste their youth so that they can build soberly toward middle age. They should be confident that they'll have a safety net today and the option of finding a more stable track if life demands it in the future. That's a better life for those living it, and a better use of their gifts for us all.