I am not really seeing how the first chart can be construed as AI disrupting the junior job market...
The 22-25 red line had plateaued before the release of ChatGPT and was already trending downwards by the time ChatGPT appeared.
Additionally, it took a quite a while before vibe and agentic coding appeared and gained traction, and I cannot really see how the precipitous decline between say Jan 2023 and Jan 2024 can be attributed mainly to AI.
The "other" reasons mentioned later in the post seem much more convincing.
There are non technical people building and shipping software. That’s fine, but not all software is equal: the software you release and it’s behind an ecommerce platform (or a bank, or a hospital, or the train system) is not like the software behind your custom-made productivity app. I think for the former software we still need people with the title “software engineer”
And as systems become more complex with time, we will need more people with the title “software engineer”
I'd like to see a larger date range. The Stanford dataset starts in 2021 (covid, work from home, low interest rates, govt stimulus), which is one of the weirdest economic times in the last 100 years. It would be useful to see how Jrs are doing compared to ~10 years ago.
We don’t need to rebuild the ladder, and we don’t need juniors. By the time the seniors leave the job market, the software engineer profession as we know it simply won’t exist. I very much doubt that there will be the higher level architect position either. If Fable 5 is anything to go by, we’re all replaceable within 12 to 24 months. The rest is social inertia.
I don't get why people care about "the death of junior SWEs" and "its a big issue if there are no junior programmers to be the senior SWEs of tomorrow"
Just look at the writing on the wall, there will be no need for senior SWEs of any type within 1-2 years anyway, and shortly after that we won't need Staff SWEs, etc. People here are way too myopic. AI is progressing very fast. We went from hiring juniors in droves 3-4 years ago to basically proclaiming the death of junior SWEs. Who is to say this won't continue up the ladder?
AI will be good enough to replace all SWEs in any capacity - there is no point in "investing" in rebuilding this ladder when you can just invest in more GPUs (in the case of oai/ant/meta/google/etc). or just pay those aforementioned companies more in tokens if you are a smaller outfit. The cost effectiveness of those tokens will only get better over time, until they are competitive in cost : intelligence when compared to any human SWE.
I've interviewed a ton of junior engineers. Our company was senior-heavy and we're just now diversifying.
80% of them should reconsider their career paths. They glaringly cheat during interviews, they can't answer basic software questions, and they're clearly in it just for the money.
They were never interested in software. They just saw the success of software engineers that put in a lot of work, and were fooled by the 2021-2024 hiring spree to think it would be easy.
Would be interesting to see how this affects the service companies.
Typically for a project you’d have something like 1 senior, 1-2 mid and 2-3 juniors and sell the team to the client.
The junior/mid is where the margins are, as seniors knew their value and commanded a bigger salary with little margin for profit, but juniors aren’t paid as much, yet you can still comfortably bill the client.
Nowadays it’s 1-2 seniors for the whole thing and the service company is expected to pay for the tokens the seniors use to replace the lucrative juniors, so it’s a double hit for the company.
The timescale of this analysis is a big issue IMO- Covid hiring was all kinds of whacked out - with FANG companies competing to hire literally entire graduating cs classes.
> These are marketers, founders, teachers, analysts, and product managers, and they are writing software, which in my book makes them developers. They just don't identify that way, and more importantly it's not their job title, and job titles are what labor statistics count.
This makes perfect sense and is a net good. There were a ton of awful bloodsucking SaaS startups destroying progress for these niches.
People who understand their niche best have taken it upon themselves to build exactly what they need.
The question about junior devs is a red herring. There are no "junior devs" because the title is obsolete. If you want to get hired as a dev, you need to at least show off some projects that pass scrutiny. This is the way hiring always was anywhere that wasn't a coding sweatshop.
> In early 2025 I predicted that AI will create many, many more programmers, and that new programming jobs would look different.
Turns out that as admitted, the opposite was true and was predictable. Such that, in late 2024 [0], I predicted that there would be more layoffs in 2025.
> In March I checked in and found startups substituting compute for labor at record rates, with the wave of new jobs nowhere in sight.
Of course they would. Why hire a junior software engineer when you can replace them with an offshore remote mid engineer at 1/10th of the cost and give them Claude?
Surely that makes all of this even cheaper? False. Just ask Apple. [1] Or Boeing [2] [3] with their expensive offshoring and their trade secrets either leaked or the quality degraded.
And those drunk on token usage are now limiting it because it is expensive. Ask Meta, Tesla, Amazon and Microsoft why they are not "tokenmaxxing".
The article makes the false assumption that you can only get better at software engineering by a 1:1 interaction when someone better. It doesn't address that AI can take this role. It doesn't address that there doesn't have to be a job market for junior developers for more senior developers to be created. There are other ways like reading or creating your own software to become senior level.
Junior devs will need different skills. One will actually like being near a keyboard, and doing it as much for passion as profession/profit.
The people who are succeeding are learning and playing and building their own experience they can demonstrate.
There's few shortcuts if any that last. It comes out in the wash quicker.
On the senior end there remains a gap and advantage between understanding of human vs understanding of AI on how best to approach or work through things.
> We are watching programming stop being a job title and become a capability, the same way "typist" stopped being a job title when it became a thing everyone was expected to know.
Casually pretending that decades of software engineers comparing programming to typing and saying "you are not a programmer, that is not a job" long before chatbots, didn't exist.
The job was always "software architect", "software engineer", "web developer", etc.
I feel it has rather created an opportunity for a junior programmer to deliver 5x faster than before and it has lowered the barriers to be a decent junior developer. Perhaps in today's job market for junior devs what changed are the metrics against which they are judged for. It's not just knowing theory of coding, it's about speed at which you ship and most importantly quality. Ultimately, how good is such a developer to push code with agents. What do you think?
I am not really seeing how the first chart can be construed as AI disrupting the junior job market...
The 22-25 red line had plateaued before the release of ChatGPT and was already trending downwards by the time ChatGPT appeared.
Additionally, it took a quite a while before vibe and agentic coding appeared and gained traction, and I cannot really see how the precipitous decline between say Jan 2023 and Jan 2024 can be attributed mainly to AI.
The "other" reasons mentioned later in the post seem much more convincing.
There are non technical people building and shipping software. That’s fine, but not all software is equal: the software you release and it’s behind an ecommerce platform (or a bank, or a hospital, or the train system) is not like the software behind your custom-made productivity app. I think for the former software we still need people with the title “software engineer”
And as systems become more complex with time, we will need more people with the title “software engineer”
I'd like to see a larger date range. The Stanford dataset starts in 2021 (covid, work from home, low interest rates, govt stimulus), which is one of the weirdest economic times in the last 100 years. It would be useful to see how Jrs are doing compared to ~10 years ago.
We don’t need to rebuild the ladder, and we don’t need juniors. By the time the seniors leave the job market, the software engineer profession as we know it simply won’t exist. I very much doubt that there will be the higher level architect position either. If Fable 5 is anything to go by, we’re all replaceable within 12 to 24 months. The rest is social inertia.
In silicon valley, apartment rents are up 20% relative to one year ago. People are getting hired, clearly. Not sure who.
I don't get why people care about "the death of junior SWEs" and "its a big issue if there are no junior programmers to be the senior SWEs of tomorrow"
Just look at the writing on the wall, there will be no need for senior SWEs of any type within 1-2 years anyway, and shortly after that we won't need Staff SWEs, etc. People here are way too myopic. AI is progressing very fast. We went from hiring juniors in droves 3-4 years ago to basically proclaiming the death of junior SWEs. Who is to say this won't continue up the ladder?
AI will be good enough to replace all SWEs in any capacity - there is no point in "investing" in rebuilding this ladder when you can just invest in more GPUs (in the case of oai/ant/meta/google/etc). or just pay those aforementioned companies more in tokens if you are a smaller outfit. The cost effectiveness of those tokens will only get better over time, until they are competitive in cost : intelligence when compared to any human SWE.
I've interviewed a ton of junior engineers. Our company was senior-heavy and we're just now diversifying.
80% of them should reconsider their career paths. They glaringly cheat during interviews, they can't answer basic software questions, and they're clearly in it just for the money.
They were never interested in software. They just saw the success of software engineers that put in a lot of work, and were fooled by the 2021-2024 hiring spree to think it would be easy.
Would be interesting to see how this affects the service companies.
Typically for a project you’d have something like 1 senior, 1-2 mid and 2-3 juniors and sell the team to the client.
The junior/mid is where the margins are, as seniors knew their value and commanded a bigger salary with little margin for profit, but juniors aren’t paid as much, yet you can still comfortably bill the client.
Nowadays it’s 1-2 seniors for the whole thing and the service company is expected to pay for the tokens the seniors use to replace the lucrative juniors, so it’s a double hit for the company.
The timescale of this analysis is a big issue IMO- Covid hiring was all kinds of whacked out - with FANG companies competing to hire literally entire graduating cs classes.
On the flip side, IS this a good thing for senior engineers?
> These are marketers, founders, teachers, analysts, and product managers, and they are writing software, which in my book makes them developers. They just don't identify that way, and more importantly it's not their job title, and job titles are what labor statistics count.
This makes perfect sense and is a net good. There were a ton of awful bloodsucking SaaS startups destroying progress for these niches.
People who understand their niche best have taken it upon themselves to build exactly what they need.
The question about junior devs is a red herring. There are no "junior devs" because the title is obsolete. If you want to get hired as a dev, you need to at least show off some projects that pass scrutiny. This is the way hiring always was anywhere that wasn't a coding sweatshop.
> In early 2025 I predicted that AI will create many, many more programmers, and that new programming jobs would look different.
Turns out that as admitted, the opposite was true and was predictable. Such that, in late 2024 [0], I predicted that there would be more layoffs in 2025.
> In March I checked in and found startups substituting compute for labor at record rates, with the wave of new jobs nowhere in sight.
Of course they would. Why hire a junior software engineer when you can replace them with an offshore remote mid engineer at 1/10th of the cost and give them Claude?
Surely that makes all of this even cheaper? False. Just ask Apple. [1] Or Boeing [2] [3] with their expensive offshoring and their trade secrets either leaked or the quality degraded.
And those drunk on token usage are now limiting it because it is expensive. Ask Meta, Tesla, Amazon and Microsoft why they are not "tokenmaxxing".
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42490692
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-investigating-tata...
[2] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2025/06/12/boeing-...
[3] https://www.computerworld.com/article/2513787/boeing-and-the...
The article makes the false assumption that you can only get better at software engineering by a 1:1 interaction when someone better. It doesn't address that AI can take this role. It doesn't address that there doesn't have to be a job market for junior developers for more senior developers to be created. There are other ways like reading or creating your own software to become senior level.
Anecdotally we haven’t hired junior engineers in over a year and do not plan to.
Junior devs will need different skills. One will actually like being near a keyboard, and doing it as much for passion as profession/profit.
The people who are succeeding are learning and playing and building their own experience they can demonstrate.
There's few shortcuts if any that last. It comes out in the wash quicker.
On the senior end there remains a gap and advantage between understanding of human vs understanding of AI on how best to approach or work through things.
> We are watching programming stop being a job title and become a capability, the same way "typist" stopped being a job title when it became a thing everyone was expected to know.
Casually pretending that decades of software engineers comparing programming to typing and saying "you are not a programmer, that is not a job" long before chatbots, didn't exist.
The job was always "software architect", "software engineer", "web developer", etc.
[dead]
[flagged]
I suspect that the last white collar workers have been trained outside of regulated fields.
If it can be taught, an AI can do it. The only work left is either manual or inherently new.
I feel it has rather created an opportunity for a junior programmer to deliver 5x faster than before and it has lowered the barriers to be a decent junior developer. Perhaps in today's job market for junior devs what changed are the metrics against which they are judged for. It's not just knowing theory of coding, it's about speed at which you ship and most importantly quality. Ultimately, how good is such a developer to push code with agents. What do you think?