Anthropic Cuts Share Of Junior Technical Hires As AI Takes Over More Work - BW People

Anthropic has cut the share of junior technical hires as AI "takes over more work," according to BW People — a passive construction of genuine beauty, in which nobody did anything and the work was simply taken over, like a hedge by a neighbouring garden. The consolation prize, offered in the same breath, is that the technical workforce "continued to increase in absolute terms." Absolute terms. That phrase exists so that nobody has to say the relative ones out loud. The pie got bigger; your slice got thinner; please stop asking about the slice.

The supporting evidence is an April survey in which approximately one-third of machine learning managers and one-fifth of software engineering managers reported reducing hiring because of AI. Look at the split. The machine learning managers, one in three, are the most convinced — they have spent the longest looking at the models and are now the quickest to stop hiring the people who might one day look back at them. Software engineering managers, one in five, are merely pacing themselves. You could not design a cleaner measure of which discipline believes its own sales pitch hardest, and the answer is one-third.

What the report declines to mention is how large the cut is, which teams it lands on, over what period the share was measured, or what, precisely, constitutes a junior technical hire — presumably somebody who has not yet had the mission statement read to them. Meanwhile "continued to increase in absolute terms" does the heavy lifting of reassurance while the actual news sits in the word "share." The entry-level rung gets quietly shortened, one intake at a time, by an industry that keeps promising whole new categories of work to the very people whose first rung it has just sawed through. Still, the absolute numbers are up. Do keep that in mind while you sharpen your own ladder.