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.
I was just about to comment the same. It’s like a hammer in need of a nail. Here’s where ChatGPT released and jobs dovetails so it must be true.
It will also be interesting to see 2019 through 2021. There was a glut of hiring post COVID and companies have to think about every dollar they spend post ZIRP.
Junior level employees are always the worst off during a market downturn, and employers need to justify to shareholders why they are laying off or not hiring, because a shrinking business is worth less than a growing one, so they'll come up with an excuse why they don't actually need employees. Currently, that excuse is AI.
Indeed. Their single most important piece of evidence not providing any strong indication the decline is from LLMs does not bode well for their argument. If it were the case you would expect the slope to become more negative with increasing LLM capability, and it in fact does the opposite.
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”
That does make it sound like there are only 2 types of software. The “serious” and the “unserious”. There’s probably a few dozen types rather, it’s much less black and white. At a client we have non-technical people ship “serious” software based on their 20+ years of experience in their respective field that definitely doesn’t need the same approach as a banking or health care application, but it would also be an insult to group that with productivity apps. No juniors or coding knowledge needed; LLMs fill that gap.
I as a senior am still called in to consult and shoot down attempts to actually integrate it into the wider system without triggering a full technical review.
i suspect many licensed civil and other engineers may be looking at the currant situation as the moment when software people stop being able to just call themselves “engineers “ because they can type source code into an editor just like drawing a plausible bridge on paper doesn’t qualify you as being able to actually build one.
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.
This is one of the problems with a lot of the data in this area. So many different things were/are happening in the space. Gold rush because tech is profitable including bootcamps, AI and companies planning for AI in the future, interest rates/overhiring, etc. etc.
That said, I find a lot of anecdotal information from many people in the space that tech was flooded by a lot of junior programmers who were basically in it for the money with minimal training and they're having a hard time of it. The same thing happened to webdev during dotcom.
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’m always struck by a bit of wonder at comments like this. It seems everyone’s experience is all over the place. Curious, what types of things are you working on where you see these results?
I’m at 90%+ code AI generated by stats. I work in embedded systems. It still goes off the rails all of the time and needs a heavy hand to guide it. It does not currently feel like it will ever be truly able to operate independently. It’s a very useful tool, but it’s just not there yet in my day-to-day.
just the other week I asked Fable 5 to diagnose the cause of some intermittent latency spikes on an API that queries an OpenSearch cluster at work. I encouraged it to look at the datadog metrics, splunk, the whole works. I let it loose to look at whatever it wanted.
End result - 2 hours later it produced a convincing theory with lots of references, and burned a bunch of tokens too of course. just for fun we tried its suggestions and deployed them to prod. Guess what? Didn’t fix the issue. Alas, a human was needed after all.
either everyone’s working on toy problems, or they’re working on very cookie-cutter code. I’m really not sure. I DO remain impressed with Fable 5 but the idea that we’ll all be unemployed in 2 years is hilarious delusion. we’re already at the point where many organizations are scaling back some of their AI spend.
Actually I believe these agentic models will teach you the value of software engineering faster. You can vibe entire code bases in days and learn more quickly.
In my experience with all agents, including Fable, is that they work great when there is automated validation. But as soon as it needs to design something, it just keeps adding so much slop.
Fable 5 will be genuinely weak compared to what's coming, I mean, we need to remember this is kinda the beginning still, we will genuinely reach a point where all benchmarks will score 99.9%. Think Opus 10, GPT-10... :)
Also Fable 5 isn't "that impressive" as a lot of people have that kind of intelligence since 6 months+ by using combo of models and loops (I scored better on HLE than gpt-5.5 xhigh last January with some good tooling and 6x the cost), but for a lambda Claude Code user, I can see why it looks that good.
wow an actual ai-pilled comment on here for once, I agree with your sentiment. People opining about "rebuilding the ladder" have no idea whats coming for the software industry, and the general populous of white collar work.
"Models can code well now but they cant do high level architecture" is just a logical fallacy. Its literally only true in this particular moment in time. But if they can code well, whose to say they wont architect well? And at that point, what do SWEs do? If anything, SWEs are in the critical path of automation for these AI labs anyway, so theres a very strong incentive to automate us out vs other professions, and it'll happen soon. All these random 1-off datapoints of "Fable 5 can't do X very idiosyncratic thing" are completely missing the point. 6 months ago, even attempting that problem with any "tool" would be totally intractable, and now it _just_ writes a slightly subpar solution. You can do some basic extrapolation here, its not that complicated.
Your best bet is to just chose a different career, or, if you still want to be in the software industry, be more enterprising.
Or people who were remote got called back to the office. Or they lost their job while living elsewhere and had to move to the Bay to find a new one. An increase in the net number of jobs is not the only possible explanation. The jobs might just be changing their geographic requirements.
Anecdotally, I know one couple who is selling their house to move back to a tech hub for better job opportunities. Another couple working from a rural location recently had one partner lose their big tech job. If the laid-off partner doesn’t get a new job in the next few months, I expect that they will start talking about moving, too.
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.
> The jobs disappearing are the ones where the work product is code written to spec. The jobs growing are the ones where the work product is judgment about what code should exist.
AI is happy to follow instructions, no matter how stupid, unoptimal or unnecessary those are. To be successful, you need someone to understand the details and make the decisions.
And while that "someone" could be a person that does not go in the details and doesn't understand the code, they would be equivalent of non-technical CEO - sure, those exist, but they have a much harder time creating successful products.
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.
To be fair junior developers almost universally kinda suck and you have to teach them the job. They'll take 10x the time to do a job a senior would, and do it in a way that is much more complicated than it needs to be.
The reason you bother with them is and has always been to create future senior engineers that understand your business well enough to ensure business continuity.
That's often how jobs work. I happen to like my job, but let's not pretend like everyone is going to make sufficient money following their most passionate interests.
That’s every profession. I interviewed someone once that claimed Linux skills on his resume. I asked a couple basic questions and his response was, “well I don’t know that but my dad does”.
I got a degree in mechanical engineering. There's these two technicians under me that for years I thought we just hired off the street and maybe they graduated high school. I have to show them how to use terminal. I have to show them how to fix a Python script.
Imagine my horror when I found out recently both of them have a computer science bachelor's degree from a UC Santa Cruz.
I've been programming for 25 years now because I really like it. But if it didn't pay, I'd do something else, because I really like not being poor even more.
I have no doubt any junior, no matter their background or degree, will break into tech fine like all of us did if they are in for the reasons we got in - being nerds and fascinated by software. You can't fake that.
I do think that's part of it. A lot of people jumped into the roles when they saw it as an alternative to other types of STEM or, heck, any work and was likely to pay a lot more money.
Going back 29 years to the beginning of my career, I'd say maybe 50% of the graduates in my class, probably more, either were not cut out to be engineers or didn't really have any passion for it(or both).
I can't imagine what the ratio is now after everyone was pushing their kids into coding and every douchbag chasing a high salary tried to enter the field. Maybe close to 90%?
I can't imagine there is much of an issue for bright, passionate folks just starting their career if they can manage to communicate their passion and skills to a company. Sure, they might not go directly to a fang, but there are literally tens of thousands of companies who staff engineers and if I were new that's where I'd target to get started.
honestly at this point putting out a software-coded job requisition is getting the interview cheaters full stop now.
our noob to hero pipeline these days is just requisitions that cover some basics but flat out say its an entry position and a chance to step into something new. we quickly weed out the overqualified and find candidates who seem like theyre genuinely just looking to find a way to break into something new, and our interview process is largely centered around getting to know them as a person what they're all about and we seem to do an okay job triangulating "this kid is curious, seems like they'd glue well with everyone here". mildly grill on some technical stuff but mostly just to get a read on where they're at & make assessments on what we're willing to teach. we actually don't do whiteboarding coding exercises or any of those challenges, not really a fan of those and i've never felt like they were a useful litmus test on whether or not someone will be successful in a role. people can hide a lot of insufficiencies/ego/insecurity/toxicity behind coding exercises, polished resumes and mastering interviews. it is of our opinion that the journey to expertise/excellence also involves having a good grasp on who you are as a person & who you want to be, and a solid moral compass you can navigate with. because there will be highs and there will be some very low lows, any journey to excellence sails these seas & we're very interested in people who can be open and honest about where they might be.
at this point we've reasoned out that the normal requisition is just going to get an influx of people who think they're charmers and can rehearse an interview and then pan out to be a nothingburger. we've had a couple of those in the past few years and it's annoying. we don't hire often do but when we do we're just interested in having someone around that we like and seems eager to learn, we've had great luck with this formula and this seems to pluck out people who get lost in a sea of incredible looking resumes, we give them a good learning track and goals and they seem to leapfrog past every goalpost we've put in front of them. as far as juniors go, we like hearing about other weird non-computer problems they've solved in life. when we find the right candidate we kind of just know when we talk with them, they universally are pretty open about their own shortcomings but just demonstrate some sort of very passionate need to build or solve things and find a community where their contributions are valued. we see the mission as needing to build them up as a person first and the nerdy stuff is the fun sidequest they can join us and chase dopamine with. we all enjoy teaching & watching people grow so it works out pretty well and we've transitioned a couple to senior positions in the past 4-5 years. people who, when we first interviewed them years ago, may have not had any business on paper being in this field. people we're proud to have watched pan out to be incredible resources, some of the heaviest hitters our org has seen, and if im being real at this point really great friends.
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.
For the past couple months I've been "managing" Codex to do plenty of grunt work. Granted I'm not one to produce thousands of lines per month(systems engineer, mostly bug fixing and extending a large library which sits on top of proprietary HW), but I think my SOTA model use for the period is under $200. Getting a jr to do the work would have been more frustrating and cost 100x more. Sure, it would have been in society's interests to train a junior dev, I'm not arguing against external benefits to it. But damn, I am now convinced coding is going away as a skill and certainly in 5 years I will never deal with code directly ever again. Oh and I've learned, or relearned, a lot while working with LLMs. I am a better engineer now than I was a few months ago.
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?
Doubtful.
You'll be expected to produce much more, you aren't likely to see raises commensurate with the increased productivity, and the AI tide is still rising and will likely eventually put downward pressure on your pay at an increasing rate.
I think it depends on what kind of senior you are. Juniors are by their nature mostly order fillers. Seniors can be anywhere from more complex code order fillers to fairly well developed experts in business logic.
> 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.
> These are marketers, founders, teachers, analysts, and product managers, and they are writing software, which in my book makes them developers.
We've always had people developing, in many forms. Scientists of all kinds, usually with Python, finance people with Excel, etc.
I think that yes, they can go a lot farther now. So this will make the bottom of the software curve grow 10-100x.
Now, the real question for developers is: what does this do to the middle and top or the curve? In my experience that's where maintenance comes in and anyone who's not a trained software developer (and even many SDEs) break their necks. "Casuals" will build what their need, but even with AI guiding them, it's still spaghetti.
It's going to be interesting keeping an eye on this, for sure.
> 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.
Juniors can't become seniors without doing real work and using their brains to do it. There is no profession, trade, or skill that you can get good at without doing it.
In my experience, I learned software engineering myself. I didn't get much mentorship or a lot of one-on-one attention. There was some interactions with my coworkers, but it was not as amazing as people think it was back then and I came with a lot of personal experience before my first job. The main skill of software is learning and figuring out things by yourself and proactively asking for help.
I'm about to get a junior engineer to work with at my Big Tech company. This used to be normal, it's now slightly extraordinary. I've not worked with a junior engineer in literally years. Even typing this, I think: this must be hyperbole, it's true though.
Wouldn't you be losing out on the fresh ideas and perspectives new entrants into this field brings ?
I had read "Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley" a few months ago and most of the disruptions in the industry came from engineers who brought in fresh perspective or had the energy to try something different.
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.
Lots of software engineers were just stack overflow copy pasters. No offense, it’s also a good way to learn, I’ve also done my fair share of stupid programming, but let’s not pretend the value to humankind was huge there
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 see the opposite economic problem. Guys in their 50s with a house for 120K and a 2.0 mortgage and no kids in the house or graduated cost less than a young junior with a wife and kids and a house
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.
I was just about to comment the same. It’s like a hammer in need of a nail. Here’s where ChatGPT released and jobs dovetails so it must be true.
It will also be interesting to see 2019 through 2021. There was a glut of hiring post COVID and companies have to think about every dollar they spend post ZIRP.
Junior level employees are always the worst off during a market downturn, and employers need to justify to shareholders why they are laying off or not hiring, because a shrinking business is worth less than a growing one, so they'll come up with an excuse why they don't actually need employees. Currently, that excuse is AI.
Indeed. Their single most important piece of evidence not providing any strong indication the decline is from LLMs does not bode well for their argument. If it were the case you would expect the slope to become more negative with increasing LLM capability, and it in fact does the opposite.
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”
That does make it sound like there are only 2 types of software. The “serious” and the “unserious”. There’s probably a few dozen types rather, it’s much less black and white. At a client we have non-technical people ship “serious” software based on their 20+ years of experience in their respective field that definitely doesn’t need the same approach as a banking or health care application, but it would also be an insult to group that with productivity apps. No juniors or coding knowledge needed; LLMs fill that gap.
I as a senior am still called in to consult and shoot down attempts to actually integrate it into the wider system without triggering a full technical review.
i suspect many licensed civil and other engineers may be looking at the currant situation as the moment when software people stop being able to just call themselves “engineers “ because they can type source code into an editor just like drawing a plausible bridge on paper doesn’t qualify you as being able to actually build one.
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.
This is one of the problems with a lot of the data in this area. So many different things were/are happening in the space. Gold rush because tech is profitable including bootcamps, AI and companies planning for AI in the future, interest rates/overhiring, etc. etc.
That said, I find a lot of anecdotal information from many people in the space that tech was flooded by a lot of junior programmers who were basically in it for the money with minimal training and they're having a hard time of it. The same thing happened to webdev during dotcom.
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’m always struck by a bit of wonder at comments like this. It seems everyone’s experience is all over the place. Curious, what types of things are you working on where you see these results?
I’m at 90%+ code AI generated by stats. I work in embedded systems. It still goes off the rails all of the time and needs a heavy hand to guide it. It does not currently feel like it will ever be truly able to operate independently. It’s a very useful tool, but it’s just not there yet in my day-to-day.
Obviously, YMMV.
How will AIs train on new tech without new data to train on?
On the bright side, maybe that means the end of new javascript frameworks every 6 months :)
just the other week I asked Fable 5 to diagnose the cause of some intermittent latency spikes on an API that queries an OpenSearch cluster at work. I encouraged it to look at the datadog metrics, splunk, the whole works. I let it loose to look at whatever it wanted.
End result - 2 hours later it produced a convincing theory with lots of references, and burned a bunch of tokens too of course. just for fun we tried its suggestions and deployed them to prod. Guess what? Didn’t fix the issue. Alas, a human was needed after all.
either everyone’s working on toy problems, or they’re working on very cookie-cutter code. I’m really not sure. I DO remain impressed with Fable 5 but the idea that we’ll all be unemployed in 2 years is hilarious delusion. we’re already at the point where many organizations are scaling back some of their AI spend.
Actually I believe these agentic models will teach you the value of software engineering faster. You can vibe entire code bases in days and learn more quickly.
In my experience with all agents, including Fable, is that they work great when there is automated validation. But as soon as it needs to design something, it just keeps adding so much slop.
I think it’s 24 to 36 until businesses really trust an autonomous developer. But I agree otherwise
Fable 5 will be genuinely weak compared to what's coming, I mean, we need to remember this is kinda the beginning still, we will genuinely reach a point where all benchmarks will score 99.9%. Think Opus 10, GPT-10... :)
Also Fable 5 isn't "that impressive" as a lot of people have that kind of intelligence since 6 months+ by using combo of models and loops (I scored better on HLE than gpt-5.5 xhigh last January with some good tooling and 6x the cost), but for a lambda Claude Code user, I can see why it looks that good.
wow an actual ai-pilled comment on here for once, I agree with your sentiment. People opining about "rebuilding the ladder" have no idea whats coming for the software industry, and the general populous of white collar work.
"Models can code well now but they cant do high level architecture" is just a logical fallacy. Its literally only true in this particular moment in time. But if they can code well, whose to say they wont architect well? And at that point, what do SWEs do? If anything, SWEs are in the critical path of automation for these AI labs anyway, so theres a very strong incentive to automate us out vs other professions, and it'll happen soon. All these random 1-off datapoints of "Fable 5 can't do X very idiosyncratic thing" are completely missing the point. 6 months ago, even attempting that problem with any "tool" would be totally intractable, and now it _just_ writes a slightly subpar solution. You can do some basic extrapolation here, its not that complicated.
Your best bet is to just chose a different career, or, if you still want to be in the software industry, be more enterprising.
In silicon valley, apartment rents are up 20% relative to one year ago. People are getting hired, clearly. Not sure who.
Or people who were remote got called back to the office. Or they lost their job while living elsewhere and had to move to the Bay to find a new one. An increase in the net number of jobs is not the only possible explanation. The jobs might just be changing their geographic requirements.
Anecdotally, I know one couple who is selling their house to move back to a tech hub for better job opportunities. Another couple working from a rural location recently had one partner lose their big tech job. If the laid-off partner doesn’t get a new job in the next few months, I expect that they will start talking about moving, too.
Startups need more than just junior software developers, and AI opened many new opportunities for startups.
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.
Nah, TFA states it very well:
> The jobs disappearing are the ones where the work product is code written to spec. The jobs growing are the ones where the work product is judgment about what code should exist.
AI is happy to follow instructions, no matter how stupid, unoptimal or unnecessary those are. To be successful, you need someone to understand the details and make the decisions.
And while that "someone" could be a person that does not go in the details and doesn't understand the code, they would be equivalent of non-technical CEO - sure, those exist, but they have a much harder time creating successful products.
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.
To be fair junior developers almost universally kinda suck and you have to teach them the job. They'll take 10x the time to do a job a senior would, and do it in a way that is much more complicated than it needs to be.
The reason you bother with them is and has always been to create future senior engineers that understand your business well enough to ensure business continuity.
> they're clearly in it just for the money
That's often how jobs work. I happen to like my job, but let's not pretend like everyone is going to make sufficient money following their most passionate interests.
> they're clearly in it just for the money
It's a job, working for someone else. What other reason is there?
i don’t condone cheating but i also don’t blame anyone who follows a generally benign career path for its financial benefits.
That’s every profession. I interviewed someone once that claimed Linux skills on his resume. I asked a couple basic questions and his response was, “well I don’t know that but my dad does”.
Great, when is he applying?
I got a degree in mechanical engineering. There's these two technicians under me that for years I thought we just hired off the street and maybe they graduated high school. I have to show them how to use terminal. I have to show them how to fix a Python script.
Imagine my horror when I found out recently both of them have a computer science bachelor's degree from a UC Santa Cruz.
I've been programming for 25 years now because I really like it. But if it didn't pay, I'd do something else, because I really like not being poor even more.
I have no doubt any junior, no matter their background or degree, will break into tech fine like all of us did if they are in for the reasons we got in - being nerds and fascinated by software. You can't fake that.
I do think that's part of it. A lot of people jumped into the roles when they saw it as an alternative to other types of STEM or, heck, any work and was likely to pay a lot more money.
> They glaringly cheat during interviews, they can't answer basic software questions, and they're clearly in it just for the money.
I'm curious what they do to cheat during interview?
Going back 29 years to the beginning of my career, I'd say maybe 50% of the graduates in my class, probably more, either were not cut out to be engineers or didn't really have any passion for it(or both).
I can't imagine what the ratio is now after everyone was pushing their kids into coding and every douchbag chasing a high salary tried to enter the field. Maybe close to 90%?
I can't imagine there is much of an issue for bright, passionate folks just starting their career if they can manage to communicate their passion and skills to a company. Sure, they might not go directly to a fang, but there are literally tens of thousands of companies who staff engineers and if I were new that's where I'd target to get started.
Alright, I’m at the start of my career but do have a genuine burning interest in programming. Am I fucked or not?
> They glaringly cheat during interviews
How so? I am curious what cheating you are experiencing and how you detect it.
Exactly my thought. It's the same psychopathic cohort when quant finance was hot. Graduate to a 500k job? Too hard to refuse.
honestly at this point putting out a software-coded job requisition is getting the interview cheaters full stop now.
our noob to hero pipeline these days is just requisitions that cover some basics but flat out say its an entry position and a chance to step into something new. we quickly weed out the overqualified and find candidates who seem like theyre genuinely just looking to find a way to break into something new, and our interview process is largely centered around getting to know them as a person what they're all about and we seem to do an okay job triangulating "this kid is curious, seems like they'd glue well with everyone here". mildly grill on some technical stuff but mostly just to get a read on where they're at & make assessments on what we're willing to teach. we actually don't do whiteboarding coding exercises or any of those challenges, not really a fan of those and i've never felt like they were a useful litmus test on whether or not someone will be successful in a role. people can hide a lot of insufficiencies/ego/insecurity/toxicity behind coding exercises, polished resumes and mastering interviews. it is of our opinion that the journey to expertise/excellence also involves having a good grasp on who you are as a person & who you want to be, and a solid moral compass you can navigate with. because there will be highs and there will be some very low lows, any journey to excellence sails these seas & we're very interested in people who can be open and honest about where they might be.
at this point we've reasoned out that the normal requisition is just going to get an influx of people who think they're charmers and can rehearse an interview and then pan out to be a nothingburger. we've had a couple of those in the past few years and it's annoying. we don't hire often do but when we do we're just interested in having someone around that we like and seems eager to learn, we've had great luck with this formula and this seems to pluck out people who get lost in a sea of incredible looking resumes, we give them a good learning track and goals and they seem to leapfrog past every goalpost we've put in front of them. as far as juniors go, we like hearing about other weird non-computer problems they've solved in life. when we find the right candidate we kind of just know when we talk with them, they universally are pretty open about their own shortcomings but just demonstrate some sort of very passionate need to build or solve things and find a community where their contributions are valued. we see the mission as needing to build them up as a person first and the nerdy stuff is the fun sidequest they can join us and chase dopamine with. we all enjoy teaching & watching people grow so it works out pretty well and we've transitioned a couple to senior positions in the past 4-5 years. people who, when we first interviewed them years ago, may have not had any business on paper being in this field. people we're proud to have watched pan out to be incredible resources, some of the heaviest hitters our org has seen, and if im being real at this point really great friends.
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.
For the past couple months I've been "managing" Codex to do plenty of grunt work. Granted I'm not one to produce thousands of lines per month(systems engineer, mostly bug fixing and extending a large library which sits on top of proprietary HW), but I think my SOTA model use for the period is under $200. Getting a jr to do the work would have been more frustrating and cost 100x more. Sure, it would have been in society's interests to train a junior dev, I'm not arguing against external benefits to it. But damn, I am now convinced coding is going away as a skill and certainly in 5 years I will never deal with code directly ever again. Oh and I've learned, or relearned, a lot while working with LLMs. I am a better engineer now than I was a few months ago.
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?
> On the flip side, IS this a good thing for senior engineers?
Doubtful.
You'll be expected to produce much more, you aren't likely to see raises commensurate with the increased productivity, and the AI tide is still rising and will likely eventually put downward pressure on your pay at an increasing rate.
Unless AI capabilities keep increasing and AI starts usurping more senior roles.
I think it depends on what kind of senior you are. Juniors are by their nature mostly order fillers. Seniors can be anywhere from more complex code order fillers to fairly well developed experts in business logic.
No, because ageism.
[dead]
> 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.
> If you want to get hired as a dev, you need to at least show off some projects that pass scrutiny.
I have several hobby projects. Is that really all it takes to get hired?
By "project" do you mean "product"?
> These are marketers, founders, teachers, analysts, and product managers, and they are writing software, which in my book makes them developers.
We've always had people developing, in many forms. Scientists of all kinds, usually with Python, finance people with Excel, etc.
I think that yes, they can go a lot farther now. So this will make the bottom of the software curve grow 10-100x.
Now, the real question for developers is: what does this do to the middle and top or the curve? In my experience that's where maintenance comes in and anyone who's not a trained software developer (and even many SDEs) break their necks. "Casuals" will build what their need, but even with AI guiding them, it's still spaghetti.
It's going to be interesting keeping an eye on this, for sure.
> 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.
Juniors can't become seniors without doing real work and using their brains to do it. There is no profession, trade, or skill that you can get good at without doing it.
In my experience, I learned software engineering myself. I didn't get much mentorship or a lot of one-on-one attention. There was some interactions with my coworkers, but it was not as amazing as people think it was back then and I came with a lot of personal experience before my first job. The main skill of software is learning and figuring out things by yourself and proactively asking for help.
Anecdotally we haven’t hired junior engineers in over a year and do not plan to.
I'm about to get a junior engineer to work with at my Big Tech company. This used to be normal, it's now slightly extraordinary. I've not worked with a junior engineer in literally years. Even typing this, I think: this must be hyperbole, it's true though.
Us either, at least any team I work with (reasonably large public software company worth several hundred billion dollars)
Anecdotally I hired a junior and it was a net loss
Wouldn't you be losing out on the fresh ideas and perspectives new entrants into this field brings ? I had read "Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley" a few months ago and most of the disruptions in the industry came from engineers who brought in fresh perspective or had the energy to try something different.
Same. I don't think it will happen for as long as my company exists.
Same here.
[flagged]
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.
> the same way "typist" stopped being a job title when it became a thing everyone was expected to know
The same way "computer" and "calculator" stopped being a job title when they became devices might be a better way to reason about what is happening.
Lots of software engineers were just stack overflow copy pasters. No offense, it’s also a good way to learn, I’ve also done my fair share of stupid programming, but let’s not pretend the value to humankind was huge there
[dead]
[flagged]
Did you write these 2 sentences with AI too?
> It's not replacement, it's democratization.
At this point every statement that contains "democratization", coming from a tech person, is almost guaranteed to reduce our rights in the long run.
This reads like an ad for Anthropic, written by Claude itself.
[dead]
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.
Ai can't even take a McDonald's order as well as a low paid human yet
> If it can be taught, an AI can do it.
Absolutely not the case now. Maybe it will be in future, but that's basically impossible to predict.
you sound like a CEO.
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 see the opposite economic problem. Guys in their 50s with a house for 120K and a 2.0 mortgage and no kids in the house or graduated cost less than a young junior with a wife and kids and a house
The problem is that someone has to oversee the junior and the multiplier on productivity also applies to the overseer.
So you could have the senior oversee the junior or just have them oversee Claude.