Why Junior Developer Jobs Actually Disappeared
People often say that artificial intelligence killed entry-level developer jobs. While this is true to a certain extent, it's not the complete picture.
The numbers
For developers between the ages of 22 and 25, there has been a near 20% decrease in the number of available jobs since the launch of ChatGPT. There has been a roughly 40% decrease in job postings for junior and entry-level developers compared to the rate before 2022. Furthermore, there has been a more than 50% decrease in the number of graduate developers that top tech companies have recruited in the past year.
It's not a blanket collapse
Tech job postings are up in the double digits this year, and 80% of those job postings are requesting skills in the area of AI. The job market has not diminished, rather it has split. The type of jobs that require more routine tasks are contracting. Yet the jobs that require judgment calls and decisions are still in demand.
The tasks that junior developers typically get hired for are the types of tasks that AI tools excel at. The type of work that junior developers used to be hired to perform includes writing boilerplate code, performing scripted tests, and fixing common bugs. Companies used to hire junior developers to perform this type of work while they were learning how to code. A senior developer with an AI coding tool can directly perform this work, avoiding the need to hire someone that is still learning the codebase.
That's the actual mechanism. Not that AI writes better code than a junior engineer would eventually write. It's that AI removed the reason for companies to pay someone to learn on the job.
Internships are the clearest signal in the data
65% of CS graduates who had an internship before graduating ended up with a job offer before they even finished their degree. For those without internship experience, the percentage dropped to 30%. There has always been a difference between people with and without internship experience, but the gap is wider now than in previous years. One of the few ways to prove to a company that you can do more than perform routine tasks without ever having had a job is through an internship.
What this means practically
The fact that engineers can perform routine coding tasks is no longer the differentiating factor in the job market. What is more valued are engineers who can exhibit judgment in coding when faced with problems that may not have a well-specified solution. This is precisely what AI still struggles with, which makes it the best use of an engineer's time.
