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AI has torched the market for junior programmers
- vatsachak 3mo ago[flagged]
- novok 3mo agoDid you write these 2 sentences with AI too?
- vatsachak 3mo agoNah I've actually gotten really good at sounding like an AI to bait lol
- georgemcbay 3mo agoThis reads like an ad for Anthropic, written by Claude itself.
- hackboyfly 3mo ago[dead]
- oblio 3mo ago> 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.
- deadbabe 3mo agoAnecdotally we haven’t hired junior engineers in over a year and do not plan to.
- tokioyoyo 3mo agoSame here.
- fer 3mo agoHere we are, and it's big tech. Had quite a few interviews scheduled over the last few weeks, literally more than in the last 2 years.
- akmarinov 3mo ago+1 Used to have an “academy” where we pick people up from first year in uni and get them to learn from zero. Haven’t had one in ~3 years, no plan to. Also half the company was downsized. No hiring in 3 years, cutting tons of people and tons of people leaving, we’re now at a point where in the tech i work in, our most junior person is a senior with about 10 YoE
- onraglanroad 3mo ago[flagged]
- echelon 3mo agoStop the moral grandstanding. This is a legitimate observation. We're also not hiring juniors. Only seniors who can use LLMs and evaluate the outputs.
- rvz 3mo agoGlad we were never "juniors" either, nor would we ever hire them. Here is the reason: We just layoff the expensive engineers and offshore all our work to very cheap remote staff engineers (at least 2 in Mumbai), give them the Claude chatbot to do the work of 20 engineers. So now we have reduced our costs by 90%. No need for juniors at all.
- MattGaiser 3mo agoI 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.
- cyanydeez 3mo agoyou sound like a CEO.
- MattGaiser 3mo agoNot at all. I’m a run of the mill dev who would like to stay ahead of the AI wave.
- pigeons 3mo agoAi can't even take a McDonald's order as well as a low paid human yet
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- 3mo ago
- alunchbox 3mo agoOn the flip side, IS this a good thing for senior engineers?
- cyanydeez 3mo agoNo, because ageism.
- MattGaiser 3mo agoI 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.
- bayarearefugee 3mo ago> 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.
- compiler-devel 3mo agoIndeed. Things are looking very bleak for software engineering as a specialization. It's been clear for years that Capital has been desperate to crack the software development nut, so to speak. Starting about 15 years ago, the intensity of Capital to destroy software engineering as a lucrative discipline really began in earnest: bootcamps, special certificate programs, the "learn to code" movement, and now AI. For at least 20 years I've heard Capital banging on the door to invade and drive wages down and now they've finally won.
- charcircuit 3mo agoThe 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.
- novok 3mo agoIn 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.
- gwerbin 3mo agoJuniors 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.
- charcircuit 3mo agoPeople don't have to be employed to do real work. Keep in mind even senior developers take time to ramp up at a job and learn the ropes of the position.
- icedchai 3mo agoI'm being told by the corporate leadership that the future of software is basically babysitting agents. "You won't write code anymore, everything will be done through agents. Your job is to direct and review." It is deeply, deeply depressing.
- jack1689 3mo agoI 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?
- MattGaiser 3mo agoThe 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.
- calvinmorrison 3mo agoI 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
- jack1689 3mo ago100% would echo that - but I'd say it's a wide problem across job markets not just for junior programmers
- ShinyLeftPad 3mo ago> 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.
- ttoinou 3mo agoLots 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
- sublinear 3mo agoLots of people are now writing much worse code with AI. I'm not sure what you're saying other than "experience is valuable".
- ttoinou 3mo agoIf it's prototypes or throwaway scripts, then it's fine and it's still valuable experience
- ShinyLeftPad 3mo agoSure, now when they are LLM copy-pasters things are going to suddenly improve
- ttoinou 3mo agoWith AI LLM, the power of smart copy pasting is now also in the hands of non-geeky people. And also more senior developers can spin up and manage dozens of juniors via agentic AI Juniors now need to be more skilled than before
- rvz 3mo ago> 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42490692 [1] https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-investigating-tata-data-leak-that-exposed-apple-iphone-secrets-2026-07-03/ https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-investigating-tata... [2] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2025/06/12/boeing-faces-renewed-doubts-after-air-india-787-dreamliner-crash_6742290_19.html https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2025/06/12/boeing-... [3] https://www.computerworld.com/article/2513787/boeing-and-the-perils-of-outsourcing-mission-critical-work.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2513787/boeing-and-the...
- m00x 3mo agoI'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.
- awepofiwaop 3mo ago> 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.
- cosmodisk 3mo agoI'm yet to meet anyone even remotely associated with tech ( let's call it all IT) that is good and only cares about money. Debugging code at for 8 hours straight is most people's hell on earth but some people love it and that love doesn't come through paycheck alone.
- cassianoleal 3mo ago> is good and only cares about money I do the job for money. Period. I also happen to really enjoy computers, systems, etc. I enjoyed most of the jobs I've had, but the reason why I was there doing the job, as opposed to being at home nerding out for my benefit alone, was always the need to pay bills.
- sixtyj 3mo agoEveryone perceives the world differently. For example, I like to look for mistakes and I spot them (in a text while editing), but I have a friend who’s hopeless at that. On the other hand, he’s good at seeing projects through to the end, which is something I’m not good at. So it really is good to find people who are a good fit for a specific position - and who, in the worst-case scenario, would do the work even for free or without anyone supervising them. The question is whether the younger generation has grown up with the motto “money first and at any cost”… Not everyone, of course, but when I see how everything everywhere is reduced just to monetary value, it makes me feel a little down sometimes.
- sublinear 3mo ago> 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.
- oblio 3mo ago> 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.
- sublinear 3mo agoYes, and to be fair, I'm not saying those people that used to be behind the wheel at the "bloodsucking SaaS companies" are out of luck, or necessarily had bad intentions either. This is just the natural next step towards a more mature kind of consulting. The client needs help scaling up their project or deploying it to the rest of their business. This is massive opportunity for any entrepreneur since the client is coming much better prepared.
- matheusmoreira 3mo ago> 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"?
- akmarinov 3mo agoWould 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.
- 01100011 3mo agoFor 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.
- bluescarni 3mo agoI 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.
- variadix 3mo agoIndeed. 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.
- thisisit 3mo agoI 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.
- disgruntledphd2 3mo agoHonestly, we need maybe ten or more years of data to see any real patterns. And I typically work as a data scientist, but my role has involved more and more software engineering over time, so that might be driving some of the changes also.
- dlcarrier 3mo agoJunior 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.
- petilon 3mo agoIn silicon valley, apartment rents are up 20% relative to one year ago. People are getting hired, clearly. Not sure who.
- petra 3mo agoStartups need more than just junior software developers, and AI opened many new opportunities for startups.
- BadCookie 3mo agoOr 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.
- petilon 3mo ago> Or people who were remote got called back to the office. That's not the explanation according to this article [1]. > Or they lost their job while living elsewhere and had to move to the Bay to find a new one. It is hard to afford Bay Area rents -- even if you have a job. I can't see someone looking for a job signing a 1-year lease at these rates. Also, unlike the old days, interviews are remote, being physically present in the Bay Area doesn't give you an advantage. [1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/remote-work-stabilizing-22308152.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/remote-work-stab...
- j45 3mo agoJunior 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.
- sdevonoes 3mo agoThere 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”
- coderatlarge 3mo agoi 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.
- ghaff 3mo agoVery few mechanical engineers for example are licensed.
- fbrncci 3mo agoThat 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.
- Chance-Device 3mo agoWe 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.
- pixel_popping 3mo agoFable 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.
- Chance-Device 3mo agoAre you using it or are you just going off benchmarks?
- pixel_popping 3mo agoYeah, saturating 8 Claude Max 20 subscriptions a day, what about you?
- PestoDiRucola 3mo agoWhat makes you think that models will improve with the same pace that they have been improving in the past few years?
- petra 3mo agoA few reasons: -2.5 years is a pretty short time for a new tech development, even if it fails eventually - usually when a new tech is introduced, the biggest gains happen when the environment is changed to fit it. That takes time: libraries, api's, verification tooling, rl environments, skilling users, etc. - possibility of orders of magnitude hardware cost reduction - Optical. Analog. Rram. Many others. Something will work. And internal improvements in the model architecture. And there's scaling in reasoning time.
- taf2 3mo agoThe 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.
- dataplumb3r 3mo ago[dead]
- WillPostForFood 3mo agoI'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.
- ghaff 3mo agoThis 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.
- boshalfoshal 3mo agoI 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.
- theamk 3mo agoNah, 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.
- boshalfoshal 3mo ago> The jobs growing are the ones where the work product is judgment about what code should exist. And how many people do you need for this? There are many roles where people are literally hired for their programming/engineering skill. Modern LLMs _largely_ commoditize that skillset. There are not that many novel things to do, and even if there are, you don't need too many people to do them as LLMs give you more and more leverage over execution details.
- 3mo ago