Entry-Level Tech Roles Shrink with Automation; Senior Talent Harder to Acquire and Afford

Dave Sobel (0:02)

A managed service provider announced this month that its service calls now become three things automatically. Ticket notes, time entries, and coaching data. Think about that last one, twice. The training is still being captured, just not by a trainee. This is the Business of Tech, I'm Dave Sobel.

One number move that nobody in the industry put on a slide, and it describes the first job you hired someone into.

Start with the Center for an Urban Future, which published a report this month on entry-level technology work. In New York City, entry-level tech job postings are down 49 percent since 2022 That is a steeper drop in total jobs posted than any other field they looked at. And they ran a control, which is the part worth it holding on to. Across occupations, with the highest exposure to artificial intelligence, entry-level postings fell 29 percent over that same period. Across occupations with the least exposure, entry-level postings went up 21 percent. Same city, same four years, same economy, opposite directions. Now back it up with the federal numbers, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Computer Support Specialists, that is, the actual job title, the help desk, the person who takes the ticket. 903,000 of them working in 2025 The projection through 2035 is a decline of 3 percent. 24,300 jobs gone. Median pay, $61,860.

And the education BLS lists for it is some college or a high school diploma plus certifications. Then look at the rest of that same federal table the same 10 years. Information security analysts projected up 21 percent. 40,600 jobs added. Software developers up 10 percent. 174,700. Data scientists up 35 percent. 95,400. Add those three together. The top of the ladder gains 310,000 jobs over the same decade. The bottom rung loses 24,000. One source, one data set, and the lines run in opposite directions depending on where you look. One more, and this one is private hiring rather than projection. Signalfire, a venture capital firm, publishes an annual report on technology talent that is their own research about their own market, so wait accordingly. New graduate hiring at the largest technology companies is down about 65% against 2019

At early stage startups, down about 76

Four accounts, every one of them says the same thing about the bottom of the ladder, and not one of them says it about the top. So that's what the counting shows. One of those four sources went further and said, why?

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The Bureau of Labor Statistics does not usually tell you why. On this one, it does. Employment of computer user support specialists is projected to decline, it writes, as organizations continue to implement automated tools such as chatbots for troubleshooting. And then it adds a sentence that reads like consolation and isn't. The automation may free up some of those specialists to handle more complex cases, but fewer are expected to be needed overall.

Here's why it lands exactly there. Fast Company made the argument plainly this month. This technology does not remove jobs, it unbundles tasks, it reaches into a role, pulls out individual pieces of work, and leaves whatever is left still wearing the job title.

So, think about what the junior position in your shop actually is. It was never really a job. It was a bundle. The password resets, the printer, the new hire setup, the ticket with a known answer. Assembled on purpose out of the most repeatable and best documented work in the building. You put those things together because they are the things a person can learn by doing them badly a few times with somebody watching. And repeatable and well-documented is the same specification as Automates First. Not a similar specification, the same one. The criteria that made the work teachable are the criteria that made it the first target. Nobody in the industry sat down to dismantle the apprenticeship. They sat down to clear the easy tickets. And the apprenticeship was made of easy tickets. We watch it land. TeamViewer shipped a support agent called TIA Troubleshooting. That is TeamViewer describing TeamViewer's own product, which no longer recommends the fix. It executes it inside the session with a technician approving each one and the approval logged for audit. The moment where somebody learned by doing is now a moment where somebody senior clicks approve. And RDE Technologies, an MSP in Oceanside, New York, announced it is running a tool called VITE V-I-G-H-T, again the vendor's own release, that takes the recording of every support call, writes the ticket note, posts the time entry to the PSA, and flags the call where a client sounds frustrated. Founder Nathan Spithley says it lets them coach from real calls instead of second-hand accounts. That is a genuinely good thing to be able to do. And I want to be careful here. He is describing coaching the technicians he already has. But the capability underneath it is that the lesson inside a service call can now be captured without anybody sitting next to that call to learn it. So the rung didn't get harder to climb, it got absorbed, and everything above it still requires somebody to have climbed it.