Entry-level software engineering postings dropped 67% between 2023 and 2024. The pipeline that turns students into engineers is collapsing.

AI coding tools are replacing entry-level programming jobs faster than anyone predicted. The traditional path from junior to senior developer is collapsing, and the consequences for the entire industry could be devastating. If you mentor juniors or hire them, this one hits different.

  • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip
    7·
    2 hours ago

    Until the bubble bursts. Then, we have lot’s of not-so-senior developers who don’t even know about code debt. Oh, wait, we have that already now.

  • thisisbutaname@discuss.tchncs.de
    15·
    4 hours ago

    I saw signs of reversal of this trend as companies realise that without junior developers they’ll soon find themselves without senior ones too.

    • Ghostie@lemmy.zip
      4·
      2 hours ago

      It’s wild to me that companies think experienced professionals just grow on trees with all the experience already there.

  • Mikina@programming.dev
    21·
    5 hours ago

    Tbh from my experiences, AI is also turning current senior devs into juniors. The skill erosion is real, and I could see it on myself just after a week of trying out Claude (since we’ve gotten access at my job).

    The skills I’ve spent a great part of my life acquiring are really not worth whatever advantages AI use may have, even if I just did my job to earn a paycheck and didn’t care about the quality of my output, as long as it’s acceptable. It may feel easier now, but eventually you will have to pass another interview, and good luck when the last time you actually coded without AI was a year ago.

    • lichtmetzger@discuss.tchncs.de
      1·
      8 minutes ago

      The skill erosion is real, and I could see it on myself just after a week of trying out Claude

      While it took me a few months to really notice it, that still shocked me. Using AI extensively makes you depend on it - and that’s exactly what the big players want. A customer paying a recurring subscription just to do their job.

      Since I am not forced to use it, I deleted my OpenAI account and started to code without LLM assistance again. It’s much more fun to solve problems by myself (and get a dopamine kick out of that) anyway - and when the bubble inevitably pops, I can still go on as I did before.

    • mspencer712@programming.dev
      3·
      1 hour ago

      I’m with you, stuck at a billion dollar software company with an AI fetish. It’s a great search tool, can write some decent unit tests. But God help you if you let it write production code, for any of the “you won’t find this on stackexchange” stuff we all work on.

    • pulsewidth@lemmy.world
      4·
      4 hours ago

      If you believe the AI hype there won’t be any programming jobs soon - so those that do (believe) think they need to become highly-proficient AI-wranglers to maintain employability.

      I too think it’s the wrong approach, but it’s hard to say what hirers will be looking for in the medium to long term, and devs whom adapt to ‘the new thing’ faster have typically been more hirable.

      Personally hoping the big players crash and burn asap because the benefits just haven’t been anywhere near worth the costs across various domains.

  • Avicenna@programming.dev
    6·
    3 hours ago

    This is not the only effect. It is turning programming based jobs effectively into slavery. CEOs who buy into this hype are obsessed with producing 10 times more with half the work force. So mid level programmers, instead of coding (for most the fun part) spend most of their time checking AI code (for most the boring part) and at quantities probably 2-5x more than before.

  • FaceDeer@fedia.io
    3·
    4 hours ago

    Five years from now, AI will still need humans who understand what it cannot: why a system was built a certain way, what trade-offs were made, where the edge cases live that no training data covers.

    Unless, perhaps, AI five years from now understands that too.

    All of this current change has happened over fewer years than that. Hard to predict when it will slow back down again.

    • lichtmetzger@discuss.tchncs.de
      1·
      11 minutes ago

      Unless, perhaps, AI five years from now understands that too.

      LLMs have already hit a ceiling, the improvements between new model releases are pretty much negligible. They had to come up with very expensive agents checking the output to reduce hallucinations. The best example for that is GPT-5 from OpenAI, which was extremely underwhelming.

    • Avicenna@programming.dev
      3·
      3 hours ago

      I think most companies who replace junior coders with AI are coders are betting on that. If this really becomes the dominant approach but the bet fails, it is probably gonna take down whole lot of infrastructure with it making programming even more highly sought after skill. The other option is the bet will hold and classical programming will become mostly obselete, perhaps remaining mostly as an academic research topic.