The business world is so terrified of AI that recent graduate hiring is in crisis. However, there is a company that is just going in the opposite direction: IBM not only has not frozen these hirings, but is tripling them. And his argument is powerful.
IBM wants new graduates. “We are tripling our hiring of junior positions,” explained Nickle LaMoreaux, IBM’s top human resources officer, in a interview at Charter. In fact, he highlighted, those positions they are filling “are for software developers and for all those jobs that they tell us AI can do.” It is a surprising statement, especially considering that the market trend is just the opposite.
Unemployment among recent graduates—and among young people—is at record levels in the last decade in the United States. Source: Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
The problem of unemployment in Gen Z. The young people of the generation Z (Born between 1997-2012 approximately) face one of the most complex times when looking for a first job. In the United States, the unemployment rate for recent graduates is at 5.6%, the highest in the decade except for the time of the pandemic. Managers of technology companies have been warning for some time that AI is going to greatly impact work, and especially in the field of programming.
Junior profiles with a new focuseither. While competitors appear to show growing interest in replacing entry-level positions with automation — 37% plan to do so according to Korn Ferry—, IBM is changing the mentality. Newbie software engineers won’t spend their days chipping away at routine code that an AI can generate. Instead, they will focus on interacting with clients and monitoring model results. AI no longer replaces the junior, but forces him to be more strategic from day one.
IBM is not the only one to think this way. Although it seems that the trend towards automation is clear, IBM is not alone in this flight forward. Dropbox is doing the same, and its head of human resources, Melanie Rosenwasser, believes that Gen Z has a fundamental advantage: they are better prepared to work with AI than veterans. According to her, “it’s as if (the young people of Gen Z) were on their bikes in the Tour de France while the rest of us are on training wheels,” she said. on Bloomberg.
But. IBM’s move is not without a certain cynicism. The company made this announcement a week after carry out a mass layoff to focus on growth areas. It is as if they have created a revolving door in which they have removed expensive seniority to let in cheaper youth.
AI as an amplifier. Be that as it may, the CEO of IBM, Arvind Krishna, defends this strategy – logical – indicating that AI is not a substitute for human capacity, but rather an amplifier. The speech, whether we believe it or not, represents a unique commitment, especially now that companies seem to propose that they will do the same with many fewer employees. For IBM, the bet is on loyalty and knowledge cultivated from the base instead of subordinating everything to algorithms.
“Developers, developers, developers!”. At the .NET event that Microsoft organized in 1999, the famous viral moment occurred in which an overexcited and sweaty Ballmer sang that from “Developers, developers, developers!” non-stop. The company was trying to attract talent again with that speech, but in reality that work had been intense years before.
Hiring recent graduates worked very well for Microsoft. Steven Sinofsky, who led the development of Windows 7, told on Twitter how Microsoft became what it was thanks to its strategy of hiring recent graduates—even if they had not completed their degree. The development of Office, for example, was especially nourished by these young people, but that strategy was stopped. As Sinofsky explains, “The ‘dark times’ were accentuated by a forced pause in hiring recent graduates, and the consequences were felt five years later.”
In Xataka | “They are much more daring”: Gen Z is overturning all labor consensus in its massive entry into work
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings