AI has torched the market for junior programmers | Seldo.com<br>artificial intelligencesoftware developmentprogramming jobslabor marketjunior developerstech employmentai impact<br>AI has torched the market for junior programmers
July 4, 2026·8 min read<br>In early 2025 I predicted that AI will create many, many more programmers, and that new programming jobs would look different. In March I checked in and found startups substituting compute for labor at record rates, with the wave of new jobs nowhere in sight. This post is the next check-in, and I have good news and bad news.
The bad news: AI has torched the market for junior programmers. The good news: the long tail of new programmers I predicted has materialized, but with a big twist: they don't call themselves programmers . Let me show you the data, and see if you believe me.
The market for young programmers has collapsed
Here's the single most important chart about AI and programming jobs, built from ADP payroll data by Stanford's Digital Economy Lab. It tracks employment of US software developers by age, indexed to October 2022:
Developers aged 22 to 25 are down 19% from their late-2022 peak. Every cohort over 30 grew over the same period, with 41-to-49-year-olds up 14%. This isn't a firm-level fluke: after controlling for shocks at the individual company level, the Stanford team still finds a 16% relative employment decline for young workers in AI-exposed jobs, and the decline concentrates specifically in occupations where AI automates work rather than augments it. Software development is just the poster child.
Other data points in the same direction. Entry-level software postings are down 28% from their 2022 peaks. Computer science graduates now have a 6.1% unemployment rate, higher than liberal arts majors, a sentence that would have gotten you laughed out of any career counseling office in 2019.
One detail worth noticing in that chart: the junior line doesn't fall off a cliff when ChatGPT launches. It peaks a couple of months before, drifts down through 2023, and then deteriorates fastest in 2024 and early 2025, which is when coding assistants stopped autocompleting lines and started completing tickets. Agentic programming is what really turned up the heat, not ChatGPT.
There are other suspects, of course. The same period saw the ZIRP unwind, the Section 174 tax change, and a post-pandemic hiring correction, and only about 4.5% of 2025's announced layoffs were actually attributed to AI by the companies doing the laying off. But the Stanford results survive controls for firm-level shocks and interest rate exposure, and none of those confounders explains why the damage is so precisely concentrated among 22-to-25-year-olds in AI-automatable occupations while their 40-year-old colleagues thrive. With ageism in tech being alive and well you would certainly have expected the opposite if the market were just tough for programmers in general.
And yet nothing else is down
Further evidence that this is specifically about programming jobs comes if you look at the wider economy, and in fact even if you look at only<br>"computer jobs" without specifying programming specifically.
Total US employment grew 0.8% from May 2024 to May 2025. Computer and mathematical occupations grew 1.3%, faster than the economy. The count of employed software developers, per the BLS, went from 1.53 million in May 2022 to 1.69 million in May 2025, up 10% right through the AI era. Careful studies in the US, Denmark, and by Anthropic itself find no relationship between AI exposure and aggregate employment; the Danish study, using government payroll records, can rule out effects bigger than about 1%.
How can both things be true? Weight the age bands by their share of the workforce and you get your answer:
Total developer employment is up 4.4% since October 2022. Juniors (here defined by age rather than experience, a big caveat) are only about 8% of the developer workforce, so a catastrophe for them barely moves the average. Even if you double what percentage of the workforce you think they are, the aggregate stays positive. This is why every study that looks at averages finds nothing and every study that looks at juniors finds carnage. They’re looking at different parts of the same data.
The title is dying, not the work
It gets more interesting when you look at which job titles are shrinking. Same BLS data, May 2024 to May 2025:
The occupation "computer programmer," the BLS category for people who write code to someone else's specification, fell 16% in a single year. The BLS had projected that occupation to decline 6% per decade. My people, the web developers, fell 11%, and QA testers 6.5%. Meanwhile data scientists grew 12%, systems analysts 4.4%, and the broad "software developer" category grew 2%.
The jobs disappearing are the ones where the work product is code written to spec. The jobs growing are the ones where the work product is judgment about what code should exist....