[HN Gopher] Why I may 'hire' AI instead of a graduate student
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Why I may 'hire' AI instead of a graduate student
Author : doener
Score : 70 points
Date : 2026-03-16 08:59 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.science.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
| throwaw12 wrote:
| Just like DEI, sustainability efforts, I predict we will see new
| initiatives for forced hiring of Juniors.
|
| Implementation can differ (e.g. ratio of interns vs total
| headcount and so on), but it is the time for governments to
| intervene and force corporations to train people, humans are
| resource for the government, they need to polish that resource to
| thrive.
| nicman23 wrote:
| i mean they could train them for free in universities. just pay
| them to go to majors that actually matter for the economy
| throwaw12 wrote:
| Yeah, could be, some problems I see with this implementation:
|
| 1. the wait time is too long for the company to fill a
| position, it is difficult to predict what happens in the next
| 4 years
|
| 2. difficult to match the students with companies. For
| example, you are interested in CS, but company wants
| specifically React developer (assuming there was no AI and
| there was still demand), would the student change all their
| courses based on the requirements and live like a robot who
| is forced to take courses they are not much interested in.
| Now imagine when gap is higher between topics (CS vs React is
| closer, compared to MBA vs procurement, both are somewhat
| subset of same topic)
| muspimerol wrote:
| The point is that we will still need senior level employees,
| but the way fresh grads get to that level is generally
| through entry level positions, experience and mentorship. I
| don't think we can expect the university system to start
| pumping out senior level graduates.
| Gigachad wrote:
| We could but it would be something more like the medical
| system where education lasts much longer, and expected
| wages at the end are much higher.
| nicman23 wrote:
| i dont mean to just enroll them in a undergrad. make them
| work in gov projects
| meta_gunslinger wrote:
| Humans are a resource for the government? Jesus man, slavery
| has been abolished in the West.
| mittensc wrote:
| > Just like DEI, sustainability efforts, I predict we will see
| new initiatives for forced hiring of Juniors.
|
| The professor's jobs are to TEACH students.
|
| Research grants are given by governments mainly to first TEACH
| students and secondly to get something useful.
|
| If they are not doing their job they should be fired.
|
| That's not DEI or anything of the sort. That's common sense.
|
| They can do their research at private companies if it's worth
| it.
| throwaw12 wrote:
| > Research grants are given by governments mainly to first
| TEACH students
|
| Government's goal is obvious and correct, but if you have
| done a research and tried to get a grant you should know
| grants are very "political" as well, if you are researching a
| thing which is not trendy or takes another 10 years to yield
| results, but there is another lab who is telling we are
| researching LLM, it will be very difficult to get a grant
| even if you promise to TEACH/hire 20 students for that
| research.
|
| Justifying long term benefits is difficult problem
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| As someone who both recoils at DEI and is at least a decade too
| old to benefit from a policy like this personally, I have to
| say this honestly sounds like a great idea.
|
| Both avoids the tragedy of the commons (why would a corporation
| pay to train a junior when they can just let their competition
| do it then poach the experienced senior) and gives more
| opportunity to a new generation that are frankly getting
| economically screwed over enough as-is.
| peyton wrote:
| > I'm not sure where that will leave students who start with no
| research experience.
|
| What is wrong with this guy? Of course he knows where that will
| leave those students. Why did he even choose to be in the
| business of developing people? Nobody forced him. Anyway, the
| ladders were pulled up in 2020-2021.
| darkwater wrote:
| Reading the piece I _hope_ they are trying to make a point and
| not really thinking they are not going to help novices become
| juniors. But who knows, nowadays...
| servo_sausage wrote:
| Research is a very abstract field, not everyone with an
| interest also has an interest in teaching for it's own point.
|
| The motivation to take on juniors to grow your long term
| capabilities equation is shifting, to the point where its
| harder to justify.
| shakow wrote:
| "I'm not sure" is academic jargon for "I don't give a damn".
| ares623 wrote:
| It's one thing to be forced to use the damn things, but this guy
| gives it very serious thought, much more than others I've seen
| and known, he even writes a science.org article about it, and
| ultimately chose wrong.
| CraftingLinks wrote:
| It says a lot about US academic culture that they think in terms
| of hiring. There is an important educational commitment
| requirememt to the role of professor, at least in Europe. Hiring
| is to the betterment of your own goals and almost orthogonal to
| the educational mission. A lot of unethicalities fond their root
| in this schizophrenic mission statement of doing professional
| competitive scientific research and at the same time education of
| graduates.
| __bjoernd wrote:
| Over here in Germany, professors' job is "research and teaching".
| According to the internet, the author's university is a publicly
| funded university as well. I can see how AI can make you faster
| on the research side, but you give up 100% of the
| teaching/developing people part.
|
| As a tax payer, I am very concerned if the people I fund with my
| taxes to do a job unilaterally declare they are no longer going
| to do the half of it.
| fasterik wrote:
| Teaching and research should be decoupled. Professors are hired
| and granted tenure primarily based on their ability to produce
| original research. The skillsets are different; often good
| researchers are bad teachers, and good teachers are bad
| researchers.
| coolness wrote:
| This used to be the case: research was conducted mostly at
| academic institutions that did not provide degrees [1]. The
| "research university" is a relatively new thing
|
| [1] https://asteriskmag.com/issues/10/the-origin-of-the-
| research...
| alvah wrote:
| You probably need to step outside of your US-centric bubble
| if you are to comment on how university works outside of the
| US. There was a fairly large clue in the parent comment.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| To my knowledge the view is correct for places outside the
| US.
|
| UK universities do currently hire people to do research and
| teach. And tenure _is_ based on research not teaching.
| Teaching is seen as something that funds the operation to
| an extent. Some are excellent teachers. Some merely provide
| the material.
|
| It works as is because researchers are not meaningfully
| impacted by having to do a few hours a week. And student
| get access to people in touch with the field. But it is not
| optimal having people who often are not good at teaching
| and/or don't particularly want to do it, taking lectures
| and tutorials.
| fasterik wrote:
| "Often good researchers are bad teachers, and good teachers
| are bad researchers" is a statement about humans, not a
| specific country, as far as I can tell. Sure, I happened to
| use the word "tenure" which is generally used in a U.S.
| context but you should be able to take a charitable reading
| of what I said and understand the broader point.
| jcattle wrote:
| That's not entirely the case in Germany. Applicants need to
| give a lecture which is public. Usually members of the
| student union will be present and will have a say later
| within the hiring committee about the quality of teaching.
|
| But I do agree that the ability to produce and procure
| research is not at all coupled with the ability to teach.
| maxnoe wrote:
| Absolutely not. You could argue this for entry level
| lectures, but not at the PhD level. PhD is learning how to do
| original research, how could you separate teaching that from
| doing that?
| rcarr wrote:
| There is a case to be made that teaching improves the
| understanding and insight of the teacher which in turn can
| increase their research ability. For starters, it provides a
| less boring way of drilling fundamentals. But more
| importantly, having to answer questions from students which
| very likely will be coming from odd and unexpected
| directions, helps the teacher clarify their thinking. It
| could well be that one of these odd questions, the answer for
| which the teacher takes for granted, may actually hold some
| insight or raise questions into what they are working on
| outside of class.
|
| In a similar vein, it is recommended that if you are in a
| business meeting you hear what the junior positions have to
| say about something first and work your way up the chain of
| command rather than the other way around due to the junior
| positions being less familiar with internal processes and
| thus more likely to flag or suggest something completely out
| of left field that the higher ups might miss.
| fasterik wrote:
| I tend to agree that teaching can clarify one's ideas, but
| I don't think the benefits are equal across the board. I
| think the argument for benefits to research are stronger
| when it comes to supervising graduate students and teaching
| seminars. I'm far less convinced that we should have math
| professors teaching Calc 1 if they're not really passionate
| about it, and I'm especially not in favor of tying up their
| salary and performance evaluation with it.
|
| Note, I'm saying all of this as someone outside of academia
| who is passionate about science and had a very mixed bag of
| teachers in undergrad.
| jleyank wrote:
| No, they're usually rated on the ability to bring in grant
| money.
| skywhopper wrote:
| In this sort of case the "teaching" happening with graduate
| assistants is teaching how to do research. That's
| inextricably part of the job of a research professor, is to
| teach others how to do the job.
| cherryteastain wrote:
| Teaching an undergraduate class or even a graduate class is
| still teaching. The author does not say he won't do that
| anymore.
|
| The problem is about the fresh talent pipeline for researchers
| (i.e. PhDs). In many ways, elementary school and a Master's
| degree are more alike than a Master's and a PhD in the sense
| that you're learning prior art with clearly defined
| exam/project assessments and no expectation of making something
| truly novel in both elementary school and the Master's, while a
| PhD is all about discovering something nobody uncovered before.
| So, calling this a problem of not wanting to teach isn't quite
| right.
|
| IMO, the article is rather highlighting a different problem;
| the former problem in this area was that only a tiny sliver of
| the best engineering/CS undergrads wanted go into research
| given the far more lucrative industry careers, and now the
| supply part of that market is about to vanish too due to
| agentic AI. This will basically kill the concept of an academic
| career as we know it and the point of the article is that we
| need to find a different model of advancing and funding
| science.
| Molitor5901 wrote:
| My experience at a research university, albeit 12 years ago,
| was that many of my professors loathed teaching. Some openly
| expressed disdain for the time they wasted teaching when they
| could be researching. I think a better framework in the future
| would be to have researchers, and lecturers/teaching professors
| separate. One is to teach, the other is to research.
| servo_sausage wrote:
| This is something that will have to be solved through the way
| research is funded.
|
| At least for publicly funded work, it was always an assumption
| that you would need students to hit some goal; so by funding it
| you would get both the outcome, and more people skilled in that
| field. If the scope of what one team/senior can handle has grown
| with ai, we will either need explicit staff numbers as a
| requirement or bigger scope to the point where the ai can't
| handle it.
|
| Or we find that AI can do so much the whole system implodes...
| EdNutting wrote:
| And here we see you've hit upon Jevon's paradox. The scope of
| work will grow to use more than it did before, now that human
| labour achieves more for the same money. Employment will
| ultimately go up not down (over the long term - we are seeing a
| lot of short term instability and noise, although there's much
| said about AI without it yet showing up in the data, as per
| articles recently shared on HN about employment figures across
| the US and the world).
| Peroni wrote:
| > _In the process, they may bypass the valuable experience of
| struggling through early tasks and learning from their mistakes.
| Students, I worry, could simply become an intermediary between
| the raw idea and the AI's output._
|
| Even if all AI progress grinds to a permanent halt today, there's
| already enough utility in its current capability to force these
| questions. As a result, how we train and educate graduates and
| young people needs to change.
|
| I have no doubt you need to have actual experience to be able to
| ensure AI output is at a production standard but if we accept
| that reality, then a shift in how we educate and train young
| people could make an enormous difference in ensuring employers
| still see value in hiring people with no real commercial work
| experience.
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| I wonder if this could be solved by student worker unions?
| SirHumphrey wrote:
| Students are not only workers, they are also disciples of your
| work and, once forced to read it, will likely use it in the
| future even when they leave your lab.
|
| Even completely egoistically replacing students with AI is
| shooting yourself in the foot in the long term.
| asdff wrote:
| I think also at the end of your career in science, you are
| going to care a lot more about the people you've uplifted and
| turned into flourishing scientists themselves vs however many
| papers you've gotten your name under. At least for every
| professor I've come to be close with in my years in academia
| that is certainly the case.
| teekert wrote:
| We measure scientific output as nr of publications. And that is
| the cause of bs like this.
|
| These institutions have a duty to educate humanity. PhDs are also
| supposed to be able to help the public understand complicated
| science. To guide ethical decisions.
|
| But no, we measure the number papers, and not even their quality
| (very well).
|
| It's all a matter of incentive alignment, what gets measured gets
| done. The state of academic science is sad in most places. This
| contemplation by OP being case and point.
| csvm wrote:
| Why not hire a graduate and empower them to use AI? Much better
| interfacing with an actual human who will then go and do the work
| using all AI tools at their disposal.
| saltysalt wrote:
| Exactly! So many commentors are wrongly framing this as an
| either/or choice, while companies can choose to have both.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Why not hire a graduate and empower them to use AI?_
|
| A lot of my work with AI involves questions where I have an
| intuitive direction and sense of the data or model, but where
| explaining why takes almost as much work as doing it.
| (Commonalities: weird interdisciplinary nexuses and
| idiosyncratic data sources.) Adding a human translator, much
| less someone without field experience, seems worse than giving
| the task to a human or AI wholesale.
|
| Where humans still reign supreme is in interacting with other
| humans. Paradoxically, this might make grad students' roles
| attending staff meetings as their professors' proxies and/or
| filling out paperwork.
| EdNutting wrote:
| 10 years from now, the people that stopped hiring novices and
| juniors are going to be deeply regretting their past decisions.
| The people that kept hiring are going to be working with their
| newly-promoted-to-senior colleagues and be making significantly
| more progress than those that didn't keep hiring.
| daymanstep wrote:
| Except they won't. They will just hire those new people away
| from the firms that trained them. That's what happens now and
| there's no reason why it won't happen in the future.
|
| This is why firms that do actual training have clauses written
| in the employment contract that says if you receive x months of
| training from them then you have to work for them for at least
| y number of years otherwise if you leave then you have to pay
| them for the cost of training you (which is written as a dollar
| amount in the contract).
|
| Companies that don't have that kind of clause in the contract
| are going to get screwed over when their newly trained
| employees get poached by other firms.
| EdNutting wrote:
| That dynamic is nothing new. Years of experience to become a
| senior engineer is not "training" and not covered by what
| you're describing.
|
| The shortage of senior engineers will be even worse than it
| is today.
|
| Not sure your argument really holds any water over a 10+ year
| period as I originally described.
| mschild wrote:
| Yes and no.
|
| I started my career with a graduate program from a larger
| company. I stuck around in that company for close to 5 years
| and would have liked to stay longer. My reason for leaving
| were the absence of a career progression. The first 3 years,
| the company had a great career progression path. Clear
| outlines what it needs for a promotion, fair and transparent
| pay, etc.
|
| That changed and despite hitting/exceeding my goals, I was
| denied a promotion twice with no good reason. My boss, who is
| fantastic, told me that he cannot give me a good reason
| because he himself did not receive one. So I left.
|
| Generally speaking, my cohort of the program was part of the
| company much longer than most employees. I don't think a
| single person left in the first 3 years. Attrition only
| started now that there was a general shift in the companies
| culture and communication.
| mxkopy wrote:
| It honestly seems a little control freakish to think this
| way. People leave companies and that's a good thing, they
| explore the industry and generally become more capable. If
| you leave on good terms there's nothing holding back a
| renewed relationship, now with the added benefit of new
| perspectives; maybe meeting at conferences or working on a
| project. My gut is telling me these companies don't part on
| good terms with their employees.
| EdNutting wrote:
| (IBM figured this out a couple of months ago, and explicitly
| announced tripling their hiring of juniors/grads in order to
| avoid ending up with a massive gap in the management/senior
| layers in future).
| kkapelon wrote:
| Link? Source?
| EdNutting wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47009327
|
| > "The companies three to five years from now that are
| going to be the most successful are those companies that
| doubled down on entry-level hiring in this environment,"
| Nickle LaMoreaux, IBM's chief human resources officer, said
| this week.
| adrianN wrote:
| Ten years from now the people making these decisions have moved
| on to different companies and cashed their quarterly bonuses.
| pezgrande wrote:
| Will they? Just because you developed them that doesn't
| guarantee they will stay with you. It's been always the same
| issue tbh, but big companies could accept the risk because they
| pay the most competitive salaries anyways.
| 0xpgm wrote:
| To beat to death a well-known quote:
|
| You may be able to go fast with AI, but you can only go far with
| humans.
| ludicrousdispla wrote:
| AI hits the sweet spot for the 'bring me a rock' management
| style.
| oncallthrow wrote:
| This is morally wrong and it should be embarrassing to publish
| such an article
| lkm0 wrote:
| This sounds misguided. In the little experience I had, I've seen
| that models get basic knowledge so absolutely wrong that giving
| them any sort of independence will not result in publications
| that positively impact a professor's reputation, or contribute to
| science. Or at least the reviews and papers I read that had AI
| content did not give me the impression that we should have more
| of this. And they require much more supervision, with the added
| issue that they cannot learn in the long term through your
| interactions, and without the enjoyment of teaching something to
| someone. They're really good at finding papers though. Perhaps
| because navigating search engines has become a pain. Perhaps this
| will be the case in the future, but saying you're tempted right
| now is like saying you're being tempted to replace your HPC with
| quantum computers. It's a bit early.
| EdNutting wrote:
| Also 90% of citations generated by AI are wrong or straight up
| don't even exist. It's got such a long way to go to be able to
| reliably write credible papers.
|
| [Source:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/o6hlry/statistic...
| ]
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| Your source is a 5 year AMA post that it itself claims is
| made it.
|
| While funny, it does nothing to prove your assertion.
| localuser13 wrote:
| >While funny, it does nothing to prove your assertion.
|
| Unless that citation was generated by AI.
| karmakaze wrote:
| Upon reading this:
|
| > The issue is not whether my students are valuable. In the
| long run, they are invaluable. The issue is that their value
| emerges slowly, whereas AI delivers immediate returns.
|
| I had the thought that it's more like hiring only autistic/on-
| the-spectrum employees that will on whims do exactly what their
| interpretation was, or possibly worse literally what you said
| without considering further consequences.
| oncallthrow wrote:
| This is morally wrong and it should be embarrassing to publish
| such an article.
|
| It doesn't surprise me to see such articles coming from academia,
| in which juniors are treated like dirt to such an extreme that is
| unimaginable in any other industry, save for maybe Michelin star
| cuisine.
| eeixlk wrote:
| To drive your car, to build your software, to run the government.
| But not to change the oil in your car. Ya ok.
| kang wrote:
| The title is not relevant to the article, not even for a single
| line. The author straightup assumes, does not answer the 'why',
| cause I was here to give Lady Lovelace argument to Turing, that
| you would NEVER (hire an ai instead of a student) unless you
| making directionless slop. You can share goals, but not the
| vision, and mission is different. Ai learns from experience,
| humans are needed to build that experience due to their extremely
| large 'context windows' going as deep as the constant evolution
| of the DNA(as long as it serves human-centric goals, which
| circles back to the mission part).
|
| The article really is about "education seems directionless
| without economic goals", and again as comments have pointed out,
| it only seems so.
| tigermafia wrote:
| Reading this article makes me happy for the graduates that are
| spared from working for an absolute imbecile.
| ttanveer wrote:
| It's interesting that this dilemma (of getting quick and easy
| wins) is occurring at multiple levels. Even as a junior
| researcher, its often tempting to hand off actuall thinking and
| reasoning about one's research to AI (e.g. blindly accepting AI
| code) to quickly make 'progress'.
|
| Apparently the same question is being asked at different levels
| and abstractions...
| josefritzishere wrote:
| Rage bait. AI is incompent compared to the average freshman. If
| you are struggling to train a grad student the problem is you.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| It's interesting in the ways AI mania and psychosis manifest
| AFF87 wrote:
| Those who can, research. Those who can't research, teach. Those
| who can't teach, make inflammatory statements on the press to
| gain the spotlight
| akomtu wrote:
| In other words "why I prefer machines over humans and how I've
| replaced my moral compass with productivity metrics".
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