Author(s): Rubab Ashfaq

Originally published on Towards AI.

AI didn’t just make junior developers less necessary. It broke the training system that turns them into senior engineers — and nobody’s built a replacement yet.

Erik Brynjolfsson’s team at Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab didn’t use surveys or LinkedIn scraping to study what AI was doing to junior developer jobs. They used ADP payroll data — the actual paychecks of millions of American workers. What they found, published in August 2025, is the closest thing the industry has to a smoking gun: employment for software developers aged 22 to 25 fell nearly 20% from its late-2022 peak. Over the same stretch, employment for workers 30 and older in the same AI-exposed fields grew 6–12%.

The article argues that AI isn’t merely displacing junior engineers; it’s dismantling the entry pipeline that converts juniors into seniors by shifting hiring criteria, reducing onboarding time, and changing how companies manage training costs. It points to tightening “experience requirement” thresholds and to public acknowledgments that AI tools are taking over routine support and engineering tasks—leading companies to avoid hiring new engineers at all. It also describes subtler hiring behavior where “entry-level” roles are filled with laid-off mid-level workers willing to take pay cuts, meaning mentorship and generational knowledge transfer are being delayed. While demand for AI-related roles continues, the piece warns that the industry is effectively borrowing against future talent supply, projecting long-term shortages as fewer students and entrants reduce the mid-level bench. The author notes that some companies are still investing in junior pipelines, but concludes that the big cost will surface later, when the next generation that should have been mentored in 2026 is missing from teams in the early 2030s.

Read the full blog for free on Medium.

Join thousands of data leaders on the AI newsletter. Join over 80,000 subscribers and keep up to date with the latest developments in AI. From research to projects and ideas. If you are building an AI startup, an AI-related product, or a service, we invite you to consider becoming a sponsor.

Published via Towards AI