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.

  • FaceDeer@fedia.io
    43·
    8 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
      5·
      5 hours 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.

      • Merlin@lemmy.zip
        3·
        4 hours ago

        So. I’m a developer and I really dislike ai, am having pretty bad anxiety about the future because I’m also a bit older and I think pivoting to another career would be unlikely.

        I started using agentic ai because there has been a massive push at work, with the usual talk saying that workers who use ai will replace workers who don’t

        While I dread it and would love it to completely go away, I’ve been very surprised with the newer models like opus 4.6. The older gpt models were a bit “dumb” but opus feels different. Which makes me terrified of the future.

        I really hope they hit a wall soon and don’t get any better than that

    • Avicenna@programming.dev
      5·
      8 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.