Junior Dev Job Postings Dropped 60%. AI Didn't Fire Them. It Just Made Companies Stop Hiring.

Between 2022 and 2024, job postings for entry-level developers decreased by 60%. AI wasn't the one to let go of juniors, it just made companies stop hiring them. A QCon London presentation a couple of weeks ago neatly summed it all up: it's not that the ladder doesn't have steps, it's that we're missing the process of building the steps in the first place. Here's what happened. The Numbers Everyone's Quoting Dario Amodei predicted AI would write 90% of all code within six months. A Redwood Research analysis found the actual number was closer to 50% when you count committed code. Google reports 25% of internal code is AI-generated. Microsoft says around 30%. Those numbers are real. But they hide something. The code AI writes best is the same code juniors used to write. Boilerplate. Unit tests. Simple bug fixes. CRUD endpoints. The boring stuff that nobody wanted to do but everybody needed to learn from. The Hiring Freeze Nobody Talks About Harvard researchers analyzed 62 million workers