A 24-year-old from Hawaii told a reporter that she used her lunch breaks to apply for jobs in the Home Depot restroom. This was the most candid account of the current Gen Z job market I have heard, and it wasn’t from an economist. Her degree was in business. She had worked as a Red Bull intern. What was available was the power tools section. Something about that detail—the smell of sawdust, the fluorescent light, and a phone screen full of rejected emails—captures the moment better than any quarterly labor report.
Executives and consultancies have been saying the same thing for months now: AI is a tool, not a threat, and the workforce will adapt. Saying it from a stage is neat. Saying it in front of a group of graduates who already know better is more difficult. The wire copy presented Eric Schmidt’s booing at the University of Arizona this spring as a result of a generational misunderstanding. It wasn’t. The students had read the same Goldman Sachs note that everyone else had, which was weighted disproportionately toward their cohort and estimated that AI-related job losses in the US would be about 16,000 per month. They weren’t perplexed. Simply put, they refused to applaud.
The peculiar shape of this market is something that is often overlooked in press releases. Even though hiring has decreased to its lowest level since 2020, the unemployment figures do not appear dire when taken at face value. The harm is concentrated. The Dallas Fed discovered that since the pandemic, there has been a significant increase in the gap between entry-level and experienced unemployment, particularly in jobs that could be replaced by AI. Translation: The economy did not cease to function. One occupation at a time, the bottom rung of the ladder is being silently sawn off, but the rungs above it appear to be in good condition.
The minor changes people are making show the effects. After graduating from USC, Suhit Agarwal applied to Google more than six times but never received an interview. He now refers to himself as a founding engineer, which is a courteous way of saying that he began creating things because no one would employ him to create theirs. London-based Shola West, who now owns her own consultancy, was laid off soon after accepting a new position in 2024. Some variation of “I was forced into it” appears frequently in these stories. Although the entrepreneurship is genuine, it is not the upbeat, garage band-style entrepreneurship that the magazines once praised. It is more akin to triage.
As this develops, there’s a temptation to draw the familiar reassuring comparisons. Every generation must contend with a challenging market. It was a terrible dot-com bust. It was worse in 2008. This will also pass. Perhaps. However, the comparison seems a little strange because demand collapsed during those previous downturns. There is currently a structural change in the tasks that entry-level employees are asked to perform and whether or not they are being performed by humans at all. Up to half of entry-level white-collar jobs could be eliminated by AI, according to Dario Amodei, who runs Anthropic and presumably has reason to know. His voice is not an anomaly. He describes his product as a vendor.
The fundamental emotional truth of it is lost in the corporate framing. A significant portion of the generation that was told a degree would lead to a career in customer service and a side gig did just that. The technology is not being jeered by them. The speech is being jeered by them.