The Ladder's Been Pulled Up, and It's Not Just AI's Fault

Spent a chunk of my weekend reading through r/auscorp, which is a bit like doom-scrolling but with better production values. There’s always a resignation-or-termination saga to gawk at, but the one that actually stuck with me was from a 40-year-old IT worker who got his start in the early 2000s doing the jobs nobody senior wanted to touch because they refused to learn email. He was asking, genuinely, whether any company out there is still hiring juniors, or whether the door’s basically been welded shut.

I’ve been in IT since roughly that era too, DevOps and dev work, and I recognised the shape of his story immediately. My first proper break was fixing print drivers and explaining what a “cc” field was to a partner who still dictated letters to a secretary. Nobody asked me for three years’ experience to do that. They asked if I could turn the thing off and on again and, crucially, whether I’d stick around long enough to be worth training.

That door isn’t just closing because of AI, although AI is doing its bit. One comment on that thread came from someone managing a thousand-person IT team that’s roughly 70% offshored, heading to 80%. Getting sign-off to hire one local grad takes months and a justification memo up the chain. Standing up twenty new offshore roles takes a week and a purchase order. That’s not a story about robots taking jobs. That’s a story about a spreadsheet deciding a person in Manila is a rounding error and a person in Dandenong is a line item. AI gets blamed for a lot of this because it’s the flashy, novel villain, but a fair amount of what’s actually happening is old-fashioned cost arbitrage wearing a new coat.

And I get the tension here, because I don’t think offshoring is some moral crime either. People overseas doing that work are trying to build the same kind of life we are, and pretending otherwise is a bit grubby. What frustrates me is the dishonesty around it: executives citing “AI transformation” and “efficiency” in the town hall while the actual mechanism is cheaper labour somewhere else, and either way the local graduate intake quietly goes to zero. If you’re going to gut entry-level hiring, at least be straight about why.

The bit that got me sitting up, though, was someone in the comments pointing out that the entry-level jobs of the past, like being “the computer guy” who could set up a work email on someone’s new iPhone, were genuinely small, learnable, low-stakes tasks. They gave a young person a toehold and let them prove they were reliable before anyone trusted them with anything important. What’s replaced that toehold now isn’t a bigger, better task. It’s often nothing, because AI or an offshore team can do the toehold-sized task faster and cheaper, and there’s no obvious next rung for a 22-year-old to climb onto instead.

I don’t have a tidy fix for this, and I’m wary of anyone who claims they do. I’ve watched my own daughter’s cohort navigate a job market that expects “two years’ experience” for jobs literally titled Graduate, and it’s hard not to feel like something structural broke while nobody was elected to break it. At the same time, I use AI tools most days and they’ve made parts of my job genuinely better, so I can’t sit here and pretend the technology itself is the enemy. Both things are true, which is an unsatisfying place to leave it, but pretending otherwise would be a lie.

If there’s a hopeful thread in that whole discussion, it’s the number of people saying they’ve started pushing for traineeships and internships wherever they’ve got a say in hiring, specifically because they remember being the office junior who got a chance nobody strictly owed them. That’s not policy, it’s not going to fix the graduate labour market on its own, but it’s something a person can actually do on a Tuesday. I don’t know what the broader answer looks like. I do know that if the people currently in charge of hiring decisions don’t remember what it felt like to be let in the door, nobody else is going to open it for the next lot.