Once upon a time, Silicon Valley's move-fast-and-break-things culture welcomed college grads with open arms. Tech companies enthusiastically hired younger and less experienced talent, driven by an enthusiasm for fresh ideas and a financial climate that pointed to sunny days ahead.

All of that suddenly and dramatically changed with the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Today, the unfettered hiring mindset across tech has been replaced by a sense of caution and a prioritization of experience. At the same time, new AI tools are starting to automate many of the routine tasks that traditionally would've been handled by younger, entry-level professionals. 

Recent college graduates, as a consequence, are feeling the sting of unemployment across the tech sector. 

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A recent report from SignalFire, a VC firm that tracks hiring trends across tech, found that new hires of recent college grads at tech companies in 2024 dropped by 25% compared to the previous year and by more than twice that amount compared to 2019, before the pandemic. Startups, meanwhile, hired 11% fewer recent college grads last year -- a drop of more than 11% from 2023. 

While workers at every level of experience took a hit during the pandemic, new college grads have been suffering the most dramatic residual effects: Recent data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York shows that unemployment among this younger demographic has risen by about 30% since the lowest point of the pandemic, compared to roughly 18% for the working population as a whole.

In recent decades, young college grads have tended to have a lower rate of unemployment than the rest of the population since they often work for lower wages and are typically eager to kickstart their careers. But as noted in a report from The Atlantic last month, recent college grads are now entering a job market where their prospects for being hired are worse than at any other time in the past four decades. One interpretation of that phenomenon is that they're starting to be replaced by intelligent machines.

The role of AI

How much of this shift away from younger talent in tech is being driven by automation?

This isn't easy to measure, given the relatively recent adoption of cutting-edge AI tools in the workplace, along with their helter-skelter adoption across teams. By and large, as SignalFire noted in its report, AI doesn't appear to be replacing human workers wholesale in the tech sector just yet. It is, however, taking over many of the rote office tasks -- such as data entry and preparing reports--that used to be primarily handled by younger, less experienced workers.

AI is still, of course, a major focus across the tech world, especially within the "Magnificent Seven" -- Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla. It's just that tech companies seem to be looking for more experienced tech professionals. 

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Recent college grads with computer science degrees are therefore faced with an unfortunate paradox: they can't get hired without experience, and they can't gain experience without first getting hired. "Today's tech employers aren't looking for potential, they're looking for proof," the authors of the SignalFire report wrote.

While AI developers are rapidly pushing out new tools designed to boost workplace productivity -- AI agents are one recent example -- employers have been slow to adopt them at scale. 

It isn't clear yet how these new tools impact employee performance. In some contexts, it can be a double-edged sword: recent research, for instance, suggests that generative AI can boost productivity while simultaneously eroding a sense of meaning and engagement with one's work. 

Similarly, another recent study found that AI is driving job growth in job categories, and hindering it in others.

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