For some, advances in AI will mark the end of entry-level jobs, which will be a tough road for young workers.
Meanwhile, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman says the opposite is true at his company.
“Kids coming out of college have learned how to program with AI. They’re very good at it, so I think we’ll focus on recruiting new graduates because they’re AI natives,” Huffman said on a recent episode of the podcast “Sourcery with Molly O’Shea.”
In fact, Huffman says there will be fierce competition for new hires.
“I think there are a lot of reasons to hire new graduates, and even if you’re a great graduate, if you don’t hire them as a graduate, you’ll never see them again,” Huffman said. “They will never come into the labor market again. They are too valuable to ever be allowed to enter the labor market.”
Despite his optimistic view, new college graduates are entering the job market at a difficult time.
More people are earning bachelor’s degrees than ever before, and companies are slowing hiring due to AI, creating a less-than-ideal market. The unemployment rate in February was 4.4%, or 7.6 million people, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. This is an increase compared to the same period last year, when the unemployment rate was 4.1% and 7.1 million people were unemployed.
Technology leaders like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei have warned that AI could make half of entry-level white-collar jobs obsolete within five years.
Still, Huffman said the company will continue to hire new graduates, especially in engineering.
“We’re building a company, so we need to know everything we want to make in order to reduce the number of engineers,” Huffman said during an interview. “Say AI increases the productivity of our engineers by 50%, 100%, even 10x. We just build more, not do the same amount of work with less.”
A Reddit spokesperson said the company has an Emerging Talent team focused on recruiting young professionals. The company said it is hiring for a variety of full-time roles across engineering, sales and product. The company also has an open intern, or “snooturn,” role in machine learning engineering.