Somewhere right now, a hiring manager is looking at a requisition for a junior developer and asking a question that did not exist two years ago: why would I hire someone to do what my senior developers and their AI tools already handle?
Across the industry, a CS graduate is staring at a job board that looks nothing like the one their professors described. Entry-level postings are down 60% since 2022. The career path they were promised has a gap where the first rung used to be.
Both of them are right to be concerned. Neither of them has a good answer.
The Numbers Are Not Subtle
A Harvard study tracking 62 million workers across 285,000 U.S. firms found that companies adopting generative AI cut junior employment by 7 to 12 percent within six quarters. Senior employment stayed flat. The decline was driven by slower hiring, not layoffs. The juniors were not fired. They were never hired in the first place.
