AI is hitting entry-level jobs hardest, Stanford study finds
Comments
dver
georgeburdell
I don’t understand this logic. If I’m being honest, the most productive people with AI on my team are the two youngest. They don’t have product wisdom, yes, but the gap is so noticeable that I pushed my manager to forego the full-time work experience requirement that we have always had so that new hires don’t even know the old way of working and can just reframe the field in terms of AI.
AI is the biggest threat in over a generation to seniors who aren’t investing in keeping up. Managers without an instinct for AI are an endangered species as well.
elmer2
On the contrary, new generations are skipping the fundamentals and using AI instead.
Seniors will become more valuable as that knowledge is lost and AI isn't capable of full replacenent.
I use AI daily and it takes almost no extra brain power to use.
asdfman123
But the AI transition is different than old technological changes in that you don't really have to learn anything. You don't have to memorize keywords and new concepts like you'd have to for, say, a new JavaScript framework. If you don't know something about AI, you can just ask it and it will tell you.
Basically the only hard part for old people is getting USED to using AI. Some haven't, but it only takes a few weeks to do. After that, experience and taste really comes in handy and that can't be developed overnight.
SoftTalker
Yeah that's my feeling about it. I don't code much these days so have not used AI very much in that respect, so for me it's basically a superpowered search agent that can formulate relevant answers based on the details I provide, without the "why do you want to do that" or "tell us what you're really trying to achieve" that you'd so often get on tech forums.
But if I had to use AI for coding I don't think that it would take me very much time at all to get into the swing of it. I wrote code by hand for decades, so I know how to judge whether it's producing something that looks reasonable.
throw849494499
Working with AI is like commanding team of Indian developers and testers. Nothing new, we seen this before.
darth_avocado
Why not use your actual account instead of creating a throwaway one if you feel so comfortable saying this?
NoMoreNicksLeft
>If you don't know something about AI, you can just ask it and it will tell you.
If your questions are sharp, probing for detail, and intelligent. Have you seen how people question AIs? It's as if they can't even conceive of the AI being able to supply specific detail.
Kim_Bruning
I'd love to see examples of that! Just from debates on HN alone, I get the idea that there's huge deltas, and I'm getting really really curious.
EagnaIonat
Depends on the nature of the work. In highly specialised work the junior would train with a senior while the senior can offload the easier work.
Now the senior can use the AI instead of dealing with a junior.
Plus the biggest danger I’ve seen numerous times is the junior engineer can’t easily tell if the AI is wrong.
They either accept it as correct or spend more time trying to fix AI output with an AI in an area they don’t have the skills for.
armcat
Same here. The absolute star in my team is the youngest. But! I think what's happening is that the distribution in this age group has shifted. Essentially the absolute best (high IQ, super ambitious, great communicator, cracked builder types) are now even better positioned than ever before. But the majority of mass in this age category now suffers, i.e. everyone that's "good" or "very good" but not exceptional/brilliant.
seanmcdirmid
I think the problem is evaluation. They can't tell who the good juniors are with respect to the new skills that they are looking for, so they go for experience instead. It doesn't seem sustainable though for obvious reasons.
> AI is the biggest threat in over a generation to seniors who aren’t investing in keeping up. Managers without an instinct for AI are an endangered species as well.
New tech has always been the biggest threat to seniors who aren't investing in keeping up.
risyachka
If you find a proper senior dev - it will be like 10 or more of that junior you described.
Because you can’t shortcut experience. And AI multiplies that.
I’ve seen what ai-focused good senior dev can do and it is scary.
stefan_
The juniors I have seen don't even try to understand anymore what they are building. They don't understand the product, they don't understand the technology. So everything AI is building for them is nonsense. "Reviewing" it is impossible. Some of them think they are being extra clever having Claude process review comments for them. Even if you hire one, this way they are out the door within the month.
randycupertino
Right now my company seems to be only hiring people they already know or have worked with before. Every single hire in the last 4 months I've seen get on-boarded has been back-channeled. I've had 4 direct referrals and none of them have gotten in but all made it to the final round just to be surpassed by someone the hiring manager already knew and liked from their previous teams. Even with a strong referral it's hard!
dver
I had a job search as well and same. Previous slam dunks that stalled at final interviews with someone who had a higher recommendation.
Fortunately I have some unique skills that allowed me to land a gig.
33e
Why is this? Is it partly influenced by the fact that LinkedIn etc suck?
randycupertino
I think it's trust. If you worked with someone and you know they are awesome and you are running a team you want to hire people who are known entities that you know will hit their deliverables, do a great job and won't be weird or cause friction with cross functional teams. Also of course there's always politics to navigate. I had a candidate I loved for my team who made it through 8 rounds and panel interview with strong hiring recommendations but we got overruled by our skip level who wanted to hire her friend.
The interesting thing is people recommend "networking" and people think it's like... meeting people at industry events or reaching out to linkedin connections but that's not really how I see networking working in real life. The networking that actually gets people jobs is networks from people you've already worked with before, or your professor is on the board of the company or like.. your parents know the exec team really well etc. So new grads truly are disadvantaged.
HWR_14
A known value is worth a lot.
y-curious
We hired one junior out of maybe 10 hires. I don’t really know where to slot them in currently, as they lack the background knowledge of what is good or bad from AI. It’s a shame because years ago, I would have hired them and pointed them at a million small projects. Best of luck to your son. I wish I had advice
dver
Thanks, it's been tough on him. I'm glad we're able to support him through this, others are not as fortunate.
He's looking into pivots now and taking flight lessons.
y-curious
Does he do any side projects? Where you can support him most is feed him some problems he can build a solution for. I think working through the pain points of building an end to end product and putting that on his resume will go far. I also would recommend he finds non-SWE jobs at companies for the time being too. I mentioned in another comment but I was a “solutions engineer” aka customer support. It was minimally technical and boring but it had plenty of time to upskill and move laterally.
I am a new father to a 3 month old son. I will be nudging him to be an electrician if he has no obvious career interests. Union, good pay, endless work and lots of opportunities to do your own thing. It’s scary to even consider what the job market will look like in 22 years.
dver
He just did something that was game related and has been playing with some graphics stuff. His degree game related CS.
8cvor6j844qw_d6
Just curious if there's really no offer at all or offers with lowballs?
I know a 2 of senior devs that got laid off from different times and one is approaching nearly a year of unemployment with no offers and another approaching half a year with few offers but elected to continue looking due the offered salary not matching their expectations.
dver
He hasn't gotten to an in person interview stage yet.
A_SIGINT
Can you give me an email to reach out to you at? My company may need an intern/Junior here soon. I'd be happy to take a look at his resume.
Fully remote, Full stack .NET in addition to AI/Python/data-science work
dver
dverespey@gmail.com is mine. In my profile as well.
Tade0
This sounds much like the civil engineering crisis in my region of the world after the 2008 financial crisis.
There was barely any new construction going on for a couple of years and once it started anew, there was a gap as while people were retiring, new hires weren't replacing them.
I guess we're just going to shrink as a field until the market won't be able to handle it.
glimshe
Our field started as a niche for geeks. For a long time, CS paid you the average for engineering work - hardly equivalent to six figures today for most with the exception of seniors. It's still like that on most of the world.
Many people here lived through ridiculous times. It was possible to make 1M in a year without incredible skills/hard work. Big tech was and still is full of these people.
I'm not saying that was a bad thing at all, but it always felt unsustainable. CS salaries will decline and fewer people will want to be software developers, balancing the market. Then it may go back to where it came from with the geeks sticking around. No more coding bros. Maybe that's okay.
When I got my degree, I never expected more than a slightly above average salary. I do this because I love it and can't imagine doing anything else. I was lucky and I'm thankful for the luck I had.
dimaaan
That resonates me.
When I was in high school, I lied to girls about what I was planning to major in just so I wouldn't sound like some antisocial nerd.
Nobody back then thought coding was cool. It was just the thing the weird kids did in the computer lab.
dayvid
There's no mercy for people learning the ropes now. The lower latency of LLMs make people impatient to deal with growing pains.
david38
Agreed. My daughter with a degree in math from Berkeley served coffee and tutored for a year before being accepted into a math PhD program. Amazing
armcat
It's interesting because a study here in Sweden [1] produces identical results. To quote from the study:
"An event study documents an accelerating decline in employment of 22–25-year-olds in high-AI-exposure occupations, reaching 5.5 per cent by early 2025 relative to less exposed occupations within the same employers"
[1] Same Storm, Different Boats: Generative AI and the Age Gradient in Hiring, Lodefalk et al, https://www.oru.se/globalassets/oru-sv/institutioner/hh/work...
Zigurd
The article assumes that jobs that can be automated are vulnerable. But in the postmortem of the AI driven layoffs so far, it's more that expectations about AI and productivity are driving the job cuts.
In other words shareholders and senior management are being shown the appearance of expectations about AI being met, whether or not it's working. Entry-level jobs are an obvious place to look things that can be cut to create an AI budget.
HolyLampshade
Mortgaging the future to pay for the present.
All of these executives are operating under the pretense that they won’t be held accountable when in 10-15yr their middle bench is a disaster, and they’re probably right.
NoMoreNicksLeft
>All of these executives are operating under the pretense that they won’t be held accountable when in 10-15yr their middle bench is a disaster, and they’re probably right.
If everyone's middle bench is a disaster, there's no one that did it right to contrast their poor decision-making. They're hiding the evidence that will help them skip accountability.
morkalork
These executives are going to get some short-term performance based payout and move to another company while talking up the "Bold AI transformation" they lead waaaay before any fallout kicks in. Notice how there's less "We moved to Cloud / on-prem" slop on LinkedIn? It's because the same people have a new bandwagon to chase.
jordanb
Yep if a hiring manager wants to open a req for a junior, before AI he'd get praise for being tight with budget and hiring someone cheap and trainable.
Now he gets asked: if a junior can do the work why aren't you using AI? So instead of opening the req he says to the team "we need to figure out how to make AI do more."
bcjdjsndon
> Entry-level jobs are an obvious place to look things that can be cut to create an AI budget.
Kitchen potwasher, day labourer, apprentice welder etc none of these entry level jobs are affected by an LLM. But nobody on HN works in those industries.... connection maybe?
tfrancisl
It's not what the article or study are about. Theyre about entry level white collar jobs.
bluefirebrand
I think "junior software engineer" is more like the entry level job that people on HN care about
anoplus
Being young is a big advantage in a changing world. Your brain plasticity is high and you see stuff in fresh perspective. Everyone has reasons to be worried, which is absurd because AI is supposed to make us all free and happy.
throwayay4929
1. The papers author's never claim causality. 2. There are other large macro forces at play, like firm consolidation, proliferation of NDAs, interest rates*, lack of growth (without Nvidia, the US economy would basically be in a recession?) and probably many more that are putting the job market into a low hire/low fire state.
Consider how we're actually not seeing much layoffs (some, but not much). So what were seeing in tech specifically is more like hiring freeze, so people with experience or in jobs aren't feeling much of the pressure, but new grads are hitting a wall.
Im posting this to resist the "ai is taking away people's jobs" narrative. It's definitely a factor but it's probably one of many and it's sloppy thinking to point fingers at ai and not other probably bigger factors.
* To their credit, the papers author's try to factor for zirp.
lotsofpulp
> 1. The papers author's never claim causality. 2. There are other large macro forces at play, like firm consolidation, proliferation of NDAs, interest rates*, lack of growth (without Nvidia, the US economy would basically be in a recession?) and probably many more that are putting the job market into a low hire/low fire state.
And the backdrop of an aging population that needs asset prices to keep rising to meet benefit and retirement obligations, so stagflation it is.
suriyaG
this is a super non-popular take on HN.
but the entry-level job market has always been tough.
with AI, outside the big tech world, it is hard to justify hiring entry level engineers as the time to train them ( 1 year+ ) to be productive enough is such a drag on the seniors, when the agents deliver things more care and more edge cases.
cosmic_cheese
From personal experience, back in the 2010s it was particularly harsh for those with a non-standard background. What few "opportunities" that existed were a handful of unpaid or grossly underpaid internships which were closed off to those who weren't students or recent graduates. Everybody wanted employees who were ready to start pumping out code with little or no training.
That's not to diminish how much more difficult it's become since then but breaking into the industry has never been easy.
ghaff
That sounds about right. There was a well-established funnel from schools directly into entry-level positions. Absent that funnel, it's not clear how getting those entry-level positions was ever especially straightforward outside of a very robust tech hiring environment over the past decade.
y-curious
I got my first dev job by moving laterally within a company from customer support. Helpdesk aka “Helldesk” was a common pipeline for people. I don’t think those jobs are easy to get either now.
tayo42
I feel like I never see anyone else say this. That was about when I got my career started and it was always difficult for me. And now it seems over despite all that work in the begining.
CBLT
I've been telling people the same thing. The tech industry has been cargo-culting "scaling the organization" where people are rewarded for org size. That zeitgeist has ended, and we've not even overcorrected much the other way.
lovich
The United States corporate culture has reached a failure mode of game theory. The average corporation is allergic to spending any money on training and has pushed all of the costs onto labor.
They hope that some other moron will take up the costs and then they can poach the trained employee for cheap, while any corporation that does actually train feels like they should get the employee for cheap afterwards instead of compensating the employee at market rate.
Simultaneously the average corporation refuses to do something like have a contract with the employee for X years of labor at a set rate in the exchange for the training because they are also allergic to not being able to change their minds and lay off half their staff the next year.
This would be a place for the government to come in and force everyone to pick the good square on the prisoner’s dilemma, but yet again, our corporate culture is allergic to regulation or cooperation.
You can still get through a winter or two by eating your seed corn so I guess we’ll just continue barreling down this path.
fny
The implosion in junior quality exacerbates this.
The cohort that started during COVID were first knee-capped by remote classes and exams, and then they lobotomized themselves with ChatGPT.
hamzac98
I have no sympathy for those that relied on ChatGPT to get through their entire education
bpavuk
I consider myself a high-quality junior, rivaling my senior industry peers on flexibility, systems thinking, low-level engineering, and understanding of user experience. yet all I found this year was a place I got fired from 2 weeks after getting hired. the reason? I called Claude Code "a decent search engine" on a meeting. perhaps I would have been fired anyway because the heatwave was building in Ukraine and I had absolutely nothing but a basement (where I can't move my desktop to) to cool off.
theredsix
If you're getting fired in 2 weeks, it's likely not because of a single comment.
harvey9
Some percentage of engineering is actually people and politics. The more power (or alternative options) you have, the more you can speak your mind. But if you need the job then argue your case just to the boss, discreetly.
d_burfoot
Partly this is because the big companies are diverting vast amounts of money towards building data centers, instead of hiring new grads. I expect young people who learn AI skills will be fine, once the data center spending binge is over.
boshalfoshal
What does "learning AI skills" even mean? You're typing into a prompt box. You are not applying any skill, the model is. At best, the skill you need is discernment about _what_ to type in this magical box. But if that gets cheaper and the output of your company doesn't necessarily scale horizontally that well. Why would I need as many people as before?
vanuatu
- knowing what to prompt
- directing the model and knowing when its going off the rails
- verification
- setting up the right loops, harness, graphs around the models
economics still apply to hiring people. if all your competitors are using ai and there's market share to fight over and people still are a productivity positive vs. only ai, hiring will increase as we've seen recently with swes
8cvor6j844qw_d6
Could agree with some of the points.
I noticed the newer batch of interns tends to have less mechanical coding skills but does well on understanding and planning on the design, DB design, etc.
bogzz
Again though, these recommendations are so vacuous. If you already are a capable developer, then you can pick all of that up within a week. "Learn AI skills" is such a low effort reflexive response that I'd expect it from a non-technical executive, not from an HN commenter.
vanuatu
You'd be surprised, I used to do a first round technical screen where we let the interviewee use any ai tool they want to build a simple api (and they can oneshot the problem if they just pasted it into any capable agent). I quite liked the problem, it was really a system design problem for senior+ but more algorithmic for junior/mid
The more senior the candidate the less they took advantage of the tools. Most commonly they would manually copy/paste error or syntax errors and then run out of time. One candidate only copy pasted his questions into google and used the AI overview
Junior candidates tended to be overly ai eager, a lot of them oneshotted the problem but were unable to explain any of the details
That being said I think 80% of the skills should come easily to a capable dev that is willing to put in the effort to learn and get used to managing agents. Building agents that perform work themselves is a lot harder (and still pretty unsolved)
schnevets
Upvoting this for asking the candid question that so many commenters dance around. I can't imagine a 22-year-old confidently walking into an interview (or getting introduced to a team) and assuring everyone that they have the "harness" or "guardrails" to confidently contribute at the level of a 10x engineer.
If we apply the Gartner Hype Cycle to this disruptive technology, I do believe AI will hit a "slope of enlightenment" where an AI-assisted Analyst is properly understood in industries and can take productive roles. Conveniently, this will probably coincide with a lower interest rate where companies have funds for a talent acquisition spree/rapid growth.
With that being said, today's graduates are stuck in an awful market with a lot of charlatans selling crappy online courses and bad ideas.
y-curious
I imagine the meta will be “build a micro saas product that’s marginally successful” for younger folks. It’s trivial to make a product but you learn a lot seeing what the AI does wrong.
dominotw
they really dont need to divert. They are sitting on historical unfathomable amounts of money.
joey9prints
I built a digital internship for this very reason, to help the pre-entry level interns get work experience. Given ai has mostly replaced their admin work load. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48914589
1970-01-01
When do we declare this status-quo? It was expected for several years, and new data is just piling up with the same conclusions from the last study.
jiaosdjf
Robots will be the real status-quo changer. Information/office jobs have never really felt real to society, we are all living in a bubble of corporate daycare. Half the jobs being replaced are jobs that didn't exist a decade or two ago that the average person on the street doesn't even know exist.
The rest of society unfortunately have to work "real" jobs where they have to turn up early to do things like stocking, cleaning, cooking, harvesting, assembling.
When a robot can be a drop-in replacement hire for these roles it's apocalypse time. It is coming.
1970-01-01
Full self driving is next. Gig delivery jobs such as Doordasher and Lyft have single digit years remaining.
jambalaya8
Most of these jobs were already essentially taken away by outsourcing. It is so disturbing that countries like Australia only offer work visas for jobs that are difficult to fill, and only in certain locations as needed, but America actually encourages the ouster of skilled local talent for immigrants.
heathrow83829
i remember seeing the stats presented on moonshots podcast about 3 months ago. they said every quarter, the percentage of CS fresh grads decreased their placement roughly 10% or so and it was down to about 19% at last count and entry level salaries down from 96K to 61k, if i recall.
ghaff
So revert to more of a mean for white collar work in other words.
Alien1Being
AI VENDOR HYPE
deadbabe
It’s not just juniors in CS. If you lose your job, you’re not getting another one. You better not quit your job without having a new one lined up. Many have had to retire early.
ofjcihen
So we have a crunch of expiring/retiring workers on the senior end and a cutoff of the flow of new talent from the junior end.
They’d better pray that we see automation gains above and beyond what we’ve seen so far or else we’ll be paying the price in a single generation.
bluefirebrand
My really big worry is that the people making these choices just do not care about a single thing beyond this single generation
Not a psychologist but my take on most of the wealthy people in the world is they are essentially narcissistic hedonists. They only care about growing wealth as a means to the end of maximizing the amount of fun they can have and to keep their egos happy that they have the most.
They don't seem to care about the future at all
ofjcihen
You’re probably not wrong. I’ve gone from being essentially destitute as a child to what people would call “well-off” and having the context of both experiences is…eye opening.
I have moneyed acquaintances now that I never would have had before. For some of them the mere hint of their income being reduced in any way is enough to send them into spasms. These are people with enough money for their next 3 generations to live off of. Luxuriously.
I just don’t get it.
bluefirebrand
I had a similar trajectory to you. Not destitute as a child but my family was lower class. Pretty well off now though
I have a rough idea of how much it would cost me to retire immediately and maintain my life in a way I'm happy until I am 100 if I lived that long
I see executives get bonus packages yearly that are more than that number would be for me. Their bonus nevermind their actual salaries.
And yet they act like their lives are hard and their jobs are hard.
I don't get it either
jdw64
I wish there were studies on when this situation will normalize. Will the lost jobs ever come back? Or not?
augment_me
You have market theory saying that at some point, you will not have enough seniors because no juniors were trained. So seniors will become more and more expensive due to lack of supply. At some point, it will be cheaper to take the risk and train the junior entry person again, and things will stabilize out. The sad part is that there will be a generation of 10 years or so of lost juniors while seniors are abundant.
RivieraKid
At that point AI will be significantly more advanced than today.
augment_me
Sure but we can't work on hypotheticals. Otherwise we can also say that information work is 90% automated, society has 50% unemployment of white-collar workers and capitalism is over because there is no purchasing power. There is enough incentives from people in power to keep status quo(bread and circuses) that if we are trying to answer the question using another framework than the current one we are just speculating
FpUser
>"At some point, it will be cheaper to take the risk and train the junior entry person again"
I think they will have big problem finding people who will actually train those juniors by then.
nemomarx
What kind of study could predict the future like this? Every technological change is different each time, I think.
For example - at first ATMs created more jobs in banking because employees could move to more complex services. But banks are back to downsizing after further advancements streamlined those services too, aiui.
pianopatrick
I would plan based on the lost jobs not coming back. I would also plan that the trend of AI getting better and taking more jobs will continue. Plan for the worst, hope for the best.
A lot of people may have to transition to careers that people do not want to have AI do, like nursing. The earlier you start such a transition the easier it is because you still have resources to make moves.
FpUser
>"A lot of people may have to transition to careers that people do not want to have AI do, like nursing."
Becoming bum or going off the grid would be way more attractive to me than working my ass of in stressful conditions for meager pay so some motherfuckers can buy yet another yacht
vineyardmike
Those jobs aren’t coming back as-is, because AI isn’t going anywhere. Job markets change over time.
I’ve just started transitioning my career closer to management, so I develop/manage roughly 50/50. At this point, if I had to manage a tight budget, I’d rather have an entry level salary as tokens for a senior engineer.
We’ll need a way, as a society, to help new adults transitions from education to productive employee. But individual companies don’t have aligned incentives.
Marsymars
> I’ve just started transitioning my career closer to management, so I develop/manage roughly 50/50. At this point, if I had to manage a tight budget, I’d rather have an entry level salary as tokens for a senior engineer.
A high-potential junior you can at least justify as an investment in the future.
The other people who are going to get squeezed are the later-career developers who are below-average in ability. (I'm not using "below average" here pejoratively - just noting that by definition, half of developers are below-average.) Outside of big tech, there are piles of organizations with devs who don't make big-tech salary and who are only marginally productive for what they're getting paid.
If you're an organization that only has the budget to pay non-junior devs $80k... you can see the implications of having the option to spend your dev budget on seniors + tokens instead.
whatshisface
Masters degrees are a way for people to spend longer in the education-costs-more-than-the-value-to-the-educator phase of their career.
bcjdjsndon
> But individual companies don’t have aligned incentives.
Be realistic. Would you start a business and risk it's viability giving away free training to the public? No, and neither would anyone else.
dominotw
are you incharge of making those decisions at work?
maybe govt can tax ai companies and use that money to prearm juniors with tokens that only they can use.
bcjdjsndon
Did horse and cart operators ever get their jobs back?
da_chicken
I mean... yes.
Blacksmiths, wheelwrights, and wainwrights transitioned to auto mechanic or carpentry work. Not all of them, but for most the skills were portable. Several of the carriage-making businesses transitioned to automobiles. Studebaker and Oakland (which became Pontiac), for example. I'm sure the most experienced people lost big, of course, and we shouldn't minimize the damage done to people's livlihoods.
Unless you mean taxicab drivers, which was the term for them before the automobile. Taxicab = taximeter cabriolet, and a cabriolet is a style of horse-drawn carriage.
It really was the horse people that lost out the most. That's why the idiomatic reference is for buggy whips, not so much for buggies themselves.
boshalfoshal
This is unironically the best comparison.
maybe they became taxi drivers. But that too will be gone soon.
Can't beat capitalism + technological innovation.
drop_star
Ask the people that worked on printing presses
cynicalsecurity
Soft people learn that the world is harsh and you either adapt or die.
asdfman123
*Bane voice*
brid
No, not AI. AI isn't hitting entry level jobs hardest. People and Businesses are by having "AI substituting for labor".
If we do not pursue the common good of humanity with AI, we will destroy humanity with AI.
boshalfoshal
To the surprise of who, exactly? Sometimes it feels like HN has never used an AI model past ChatGPT in 2022. Modern AI is so capable nowadays that it _does_ obviate most of the work you'd normally give an entry level person.
Im mostly speaking about software engineering, but the "juniors" I've seen be hired now are basically the equivalent of mid (maybe even low senior) levels of yesteryear. AI is most certainly raising the bar.
greenowl
The plus side of all this is that entry level software development jobs are typically pursued by recent college graduates. They are young.
While it sucks to have blown a lot of money and accept they've been duped to get a degree in something that is now "worth" a small fraction of what it once was, time is on their side. There is plenty of time to go back to school, or apprentice, or learn a trade or go to trade school in something else with better long term career prospects.
On the opposite side of this, senior level devs should (hopefully) be on target financially and theoretically should be fine, especially if they make adjustments now (lower COL, layoff preparation, prepare for accelerated retirement timeline).
The folks who are really going to suffer are those early to mid level developers. Not as much of a network, not enough traditional expertise, not enough savings, not as much time to invest and pull the trigger on a career change.
It's brutal, my son with a CS degree hasn't been able to get to single live interview ina year. A couple of screens has been it. I've reached out to my network, and the reply is always we're not hiring any juniors.