paserbyp | Entries tagged with job

Visitors

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

System, administer thyself.

That’s what’s happening in IT departments as automation takes on more tasks once handled by system administrators. The role has already shifted in recent years with the rise of cloud computing and DevOps. And while experts say many of the tasks that make up sysadmin roles aren’t likely to disappear, the job title could change as the work becomes more big-picture and supervisory.

A survey(More details: https://www.action1.com/2025-ai-impact-on-sysadmins-survey-report) of system administrators published last year found that majorities of respondents expected tasks like log analysis (80%), vulnerability prioritization (67%), and troubleshooting (55%) to be automated by 2027. But the report also showed that wider adoption of AI has exposed some limitations, including problems with accuracy, reliability, data privacy, and security.

IT pros we talked with said they see the job morphing from a reactive monitor of systems to a proactive remediator who plays a more supervisory role to agents and other automation tools.

“It’s not like you can do 100% of your tasks through these automated agents—it’s 10%, 20%. Valuable, but it’s not like you’re going to totally delegate your work to some AI agent that’s gonna do everything for you.”—Pat Casey, co-founder and CTO of ServiceNow.

“From the sysadmin perspective, you’re spending a lot of your time just watching dashboards—eyes-on-glass type of stuff,” Philippe Deblois, Dynatrace’s global VP of solutions engineering, told us. “It has moved a little bit away from that as we’ve added automation over the years. But I see now a path with AI and agents…we’re really moving into this age of…autonomous operations. Maybe that’s still a little pie in the sky in terms of [being] fully automated, but definitely more supervised.”

One of the biggest innovations that AI provides, according to Brent Ellis, principal analyst at Forrester, is the ability to “stitch together disparate metrics” in a way that wasn’t possible before. The next step will be connecting that analysis work to AI agents that perform actual actions within an environment, Ellis said.

“You connect that AI model that basically said, ‘Oh, here’s a problem.’ You connect that to a reasoning model that can then propose an action plan to resolve that situation. And then you connect it to a coding model that creates, say, a Terraform script to go and implement that plan. And suddenly, the role of the human in that is as validator,” Ellis said. “What that human is there to do is to define what the environment should be, what the architecture should be, and to validate that the output of that platform is something that’s not going to cause problems.”

Not all systems have high potential for automation, but those that do are seeing two broad changes, according to Pat Casey, co-founder and CTO of ServiceNow. One is that AI agents are able to help with more of the work, and the other is that the systems themselves might have new AI features that the admin needs to manage, Casey told...

AI agents have been all the rage for over a year now, but there’s still time before the agentic transformation actually begins in earnest. “[It’s] early days, because it’s spotty in terms of which products they’ve made that kind of investment [in],” Casey said. “It’s not like you can do 100% of your tasks through these automated agents—it’s 10%, 20%. Valuable, but it’s not like you’re going to totally delegate your work to some AI agent that’s gonna do everything for you.”

But like many other fields right now, as AI replaces more of the rote tasks involved in sysadmin work, companies worry about how the next generation of people guiding this work will be able to learn the ropes.

Previously, a sysadmin might focus on one particular type of compute or storage. But because AI models are better at understanding how systems interconnect, it could consolidate those roles from, say, three different admins to a single efficient one with an AI tool, Forrester’s Ellis said.

“AI will shrink certain entry-level operation roles, but it’ll expand the extreme high-skill system leadership roles,” Sandeep Kumbhat, head of global field CTO at Okta, said. “Those will be more in number as compared to sysadmin.”

With that expansion of senior level roles, companies will need to be proactive about training new recruits to understand bigger-picture structures and offering younger employees effective mentoring, according to Ellis.

“You want to get those people engaged in operations as soon as possible. You should also expose them more holistically across the environment,” he said. “Don’t force people into silos. Because if they’re forced into silos, the information they create is going to be commodified by the AI very quickly.”

Nobody I talked to for this article thought that companies will necessarily still be hiring for a job called “system administrator” a few years from now. Possible new titles they predicted ranged from simple tweaks like “system owner” or “system governor” to a merging with the role of reliability engineer or platform engineer, and entirely new titles like “AI supervisor” or “AI operator.”

But that doesn’t mean that this type of work is going to vanish soon. “The job is changing, but I have just seen zero evidence that it is going away,” Casey said. “If anything, it’s an exciting time to be in that sort of role, because…you’re getting a chance to do a lot of new stuff, to do the same thing you did before in a different way—hopefully a more efficient, more fun way.”

Today, job seekers often send hundreds of applications into the void of applicant tracking systems, where their materials may never be seen by human eyes. For many, the job search has become a full-time job in itself. Some, though, are outsourcing it. That’s where the reverse recruiter comes in.

Reverse Recruiting Agency helps find, apply to, and secure jobs on behalf of the worker, not the company. It charges $1,500 a month for their services (though clients get their first-month fee refunded), plus 10% of the job seeker’s first-year salary upon job acceptance. That $1,500 gets you personalized résumé editing services, 50 to 100 applications per week, career coaching, interview prep, and several other job readiness services, according to the company’s website.

Today, more than half of U.S. job seekers are spending six months or more shooting out résumés before landing a job, according to LinkedIn’s 2025 Workplace Confidence survey(More details: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/linkedin-news_which-professions-can-hope-for-shorter-job-activity-7321180009732161536-WmCT/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAASwtWABdeP9b_GU7H3PtdcbM26HDeyHv6Y&skipRedirect=true). Some people have even reported applying to hundreds of jobs before landing a single interview. Long-term unemployment rate, or those lacking work for 27 weeks or longer, is also on the rise, at about 25.6% as of last month, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data(More details: https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/unemployed-27-weeks-or-longer-as-a-percent-of-total-unemployed.htm). That’s putting pressure on folks to get a job.

Alex Shinkarovsky, founder of Reverse Recruiting Agency, said in an interview with Fortune that this company has helped 45 clients so far, with 25 more active clients. Most clients, he describes, are high-performers coming from a range of backgrounds, from data science, program management, and engineering. Even a top exec from Apple has consulted for his help, he said.

“Most of the people who are hiring us now are awesome candidates, as in, they’re not struggling now,” Shinkarovsky told...

Although the company helps to submit 50 to 100 applications per week, Shinkarovsky said still may not be enough to beat the odds. On average, he said his company submits 863 applications per client before they land a job offer. For difficult career searches—those facing visa complications, ageism, or location constraints—it takes up to 924 applications.

Still, Shinkarovsky said his company is slashing the time it takes to find a role in half. The average time it takes to score a job offer is about 12.7 weeks for the standard role switch with the company’s help, compared to 24.3 weeks across the market, according to a Reverse Recruiting Agency analysis(More details: https://analysis.reverserecruitingagency.com).

The rules of the game are changing, shifting the knowledge required to score an interview. The logical conclusion of a job market that prizes volume over quality is a flood of AI-generated résumés and cover letters. And recruiting experts say that’s become the norm. In fact, the whole job search ecosystem is rife with AI, as applicants submit AI-generated materials and recruiters use AI to sort through applications, many of whom are ghosting applicants because of the technology.

“It’s fundamentally broken,” Shinkarovsky said. The founder clarified the company’s workers don’t use AI to submit applications on behalf of their clients, save for some résumé optimization functions as well as outreach on LinkedIn.

He suggests that Congress could address the issue by implementing a verification system for job seekers, similar to a voter ID, to add friction to the application funnel. “That would cut out almost all the slop right away,” he said.

Here’s what your unemployed friend is really doing on a Tuesday: In the latest sign of a stagnant job market, white-collar workers are flipping the traditional recruiting model by hiring recruiters to help them land their next jobs—a trend known as “reverse recruiting,” the Wall Street Journal reported this week.

On top of career coaching and résumé building, reverse-recruiting agencies often take the keys and apply to dozens of jobs on an applicant’s behalf. In exchange, these startups can charge monthly fees north of $1,000 and/or take a cut of their clients’ salaries once they find a job...

A conventional recruiter told that he’s somewhat uneasy about people handing reverse recruiters their LinkedIn or Workday logins, as well as the idea of charging job seekers.

The current frigid atmosphere in US employment is known as “low hire, low fire,” which is why you keep hearing seemingly conflicting truths: The unemployment rate isn’t that bad, but it’s also incredibly difficult to find a job.

According to recent federal data:

* Job searches now last an average of six months.

* There were more job seekers than job openings last summer for the first time since 2021.

* The economy added the fewest jobs since 2003 last year (outside of recessions). Tomorrow’s January jobs report is expected to revise the tally even lower and show a continued stall in job growth.

Tariff uncertainty and added costs led some companies to delay hiring. Others are still undoing pandemic-era hiring bonanzas, and some blame layoffs on AI’s productivity. Recent immigration restrictions also mean there are fewer consumers in the US, which can lower hiring needs...

Finally, less than half of workers think they could find a new job in three months, according to a recent Fed poll. Many are staying put in their jobs, which contributes to low openings and slow hiring.

More details: https://paserbyp.dreamwidth.org/817994.html

The labor market is in turmoil, and finding a job is becoming an increasingly impossible task.

Based on my observations, in Silicon Valley, California, age discrimination began to gain momentum after year 2000(before was Internet Buble), and it took almost 20 years for this to become a significant problem. Finding a job after graduating from university or after the age of 50, if you've lost your job, is becoming incredibly difficult, not to mention after the age of 60.

Interestingly, government statistics cheerfully report the number of new jobs created, but discreetly remain silent about the salaries offered and the number of unemployed among young people after graduating from universities and among people who lost their jobs after the age of 50 or 60 and couldn't find new ones.

At the same time, starting in 2020, there has been a boom in AI, leading to mass layoffs(the role of the COVID-19 pandemic in this process should be noted), as well as the use of AI for filtering resumes and automating HR processes for recruitment.

I'm not even talking about the wage gap between companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Roblox, Palantir and other companies, as well as startups that cannot afford to pay such high salaries.

All these factors are leading to an inevitable crisis and collapse of the labor market based on the latest technologies.

Naturally, the middle class is being destroyed, and baby boomers are being actively pushed into retirement, and the gap between the small percentage of wealthy people and the majority of the lumpen proletariat, who lived paycheck to paycheck, is becoming enormous, which is fraught with social upheavals, wars, revolutions, and naturally, mass genocide of the population of planet Earth.

Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan says Gen Z is scared about AI and the job market, but he has words of encouragement.

The bank recently hired 2,000 top grads from 200,000 applications, the executive said... As companies cite AI for widespread layoffs, Moynihan acknowledges that many young people feel scared and uncertain about the future.

“My advice to those kids, if you ask them if they’re worried about, they say they’re worried about—these are kids that we hire, 200,000 applications, we hire 2000 people.” Moynihan added that “if you ask them if they’re scared, they say they are. And I understand that. But I say, harness it … It’ll be your world ahead of you,” Moynihan said.

Moynihan said it’s too soon to say how AI will play out in the job market, but he hopes to use efficiencies created by the technology to invest in more growth.

“We want to drive more growth. So the AI will be spent—the efficiencies from AI will be spent to keep growing the company, I think,” he said.

Moynihan also said Americans are focusing too much on the Fed and its impact on the economy. He argued that the private sector is a more important driver of economic growth.

“The idea that we are, like, hanging on the thread by the Fed moving rates 25 basis points, it seems to me we’ve gotten out of whack,” he said.

So, question is how many from 2000 Gen Z will be laid off after 3 months of probation period and how many will be leaving Bank of America after one year? I don't ask about 198,000 who was left behind...

Jerome Powell and multiple economists have validated that Gen Z is facing a genuine “hiring nightmare,” especially for recent college graduates trying to land their first white-collar job. This is tied to a low‑hire, low‑fire labor market, the rapid automation of entry‑level roles, and a tech industry whose workforce is getting older as Gen Z’s presence shrinks.

In September 2025, Powell used his post‑meeting press conference to highlight an “interesting labor market” where “kids coming out of college and younger people, minorities, are having a hard time finding jobs.” He emphasized that the job-finding rate is “very, very low” even as layoffs remain subdued, creating a stagnant low‑hiring, low‑firing environment that is particularly punishing for new entrants. Asked whether AI was to blame, he called it “probably a factor” but not the main driver, suggesting that slower overall job creation plus some AI substitution is squeezing young workers at precisely the moment they try to get on the ladder.

Employers are using AI to automate the predictable, process‑heavy tasks that once justified many junior roles, especially in corporate and tech settings. Platforms that track early‑career hiring, like Handshake, point to a double squeeze: entry‑level job postings in corporate roles are down roughly 15% year over year, while references to “AI” in job descriptions have jumped about 400% over two years. Economists like Dartmouth’s David Blanchflower tell Fortune that even when young people do find work, they report rising “despair” and a pervasive “this job sucks” sentiment, compounding the effect of higher recent‑grad unemployment rates compared with the national average.

Some unemployed Gen Z grads are piling into additional business degrees or specialized programs to differentiate themselves, effectively delaying full‑time work and reflecting a cohort that feels forced to over‑credential to compete for fewer true entry‑level spots.

Katie Tanner, a human resource consultant in Utah, knew the job would be popular: It was fully remote, was at a tech company and required only three years of experience.

But she was still shocked by the response on LinkedIn. After 12 hours, 400 applications had been submitted. By 24, there were 600. A few days later, there were more than 1,200, at which point she removed the post. Three months later, she’s still whittling down candidates.

“It’s crazy,” she said. “You just get inundated.”

The number of applications submitted on LinkedIn has surged more than 45 percent in the past year. The platform is clocking an average of 11,000 applications per minute, and generative artificial intelligence tools are contributing to the deluge.

With a simple prompt, ChatGPT, the chatbot developed by OpenAI, will insert every keyword from a job description into a résumé. Some candidates are going a step further, paying for A.I. agents that can autonomously find jobs and apply on their behalf. Recruiters say it’s getting harder to tell who is genuinely qualified or interested, and many of the résumés look suspiciously similar.

One popular method for navigating the surge? Automatic chat or video interviews, sometimes conducted by AI. Chipotle’s chief executive, Scott Boatwright, said at a conference this month that its AI chatbot screening and scheduling tool (named Ava Cado) had reduced hiring time by 75 percent.

HireVue, a popular AI video interview platform, offers recruiters an option to have AI assess responses and rank candidates.

But candidates can also use AI to cheat in these interviews, and some companies have added more automated skill assessments early in the hiring process. For example, HireVue offers AI-powered games to gauge abilities like pattern recognition and working memory, and a virtual “tryout” that tests emotional intelligence or skills like counting change. Sometimes, Lee said, “we end up with an AI versus AI type of situation.”

In January, the Justice Department announced indictments in a scheme to place North Korean nationals in IT roles working remotely at U.S. companies. Emi Chiba, a human resource technology analyst at Gartner, told DealBook that reports of candidates who used fake identities had been “growing and growing and growing.”

A report that Ms. Chiba published with other Gartner analysts in April ballparked that by 2028, about one in four job applicants could be made up. Among its recommendations was that companies deploy more sophisticated identity-verification software.

To address the problem, LinkedIn recently added tools to help both candidates and recruiters narrow their focus, including an AI agent, introduced in October, that can write follow-up messages, conduct screening chats with candidates, suggest top applicants and search for potential hires using natural language.

A feature that shows potential applicants how well their qualifications match up with a job description, which LinkedIn introduced to premium subscribers in January, reduced the rate at which they apply to “low match” jobs by 10 percent, according to the company.

Concerns that using AI in hiring can introduce bias have led to lawsuits and a patchwork of state legislation. The European Union’s AI Act classifies hiring under its high-risk category, with the most stringent restrictions, and while no U.S. federal law specifically addresses AI use in hiring, general antidiscrimination laws can potentially come into play if the result of any process is discrimination.

“You’re not allowed to discriminate, and of course most employers are trying not to discriminate, but easier said than done,” said Marcia Goodman, a partner at Mayer Brown who primarily represents employers.

A lawsuit claiming Workday’s AI algorithm discriminated based on age is being allowed to proceed as a collective action, and could potentially include millions of disappointed job seekers.

The problem is less that candidates are using AI — a skill many employers say they want — than it is that they’re being sloppy. Alexa Marciano, the managing director of Syndicatebleu, a recruiting agency, said job seekers were reacting to recruiters’ use of automated screening. “It’s really frustrating for the candidates because they spend all this time creating very catered cover letters, very catered résumés,” she said.

Jeremy Schifeling, a career coach who regularly conducts technology-focused job-search training at universities, said he could see this back-and-forth going on for a while. “As students get more desperate, they say, ‘Well, I have no choice but to up the ante with these paid tools to automate everything.’ And I’m sure the recruiters are going to raise the bar again.”

He argues the endgame will be authenticity from both sides. But, he said, “I do think that a lot of people are going to waste a lot of time, a lot of processing power, a lot of money until we reach that realization.”