AI is wiping out entry-level tech jobs, leaving graduates stranded

The expectations for juniors, and how seniors work with them, will certainly change, but it's way too early to be making doomsday predictions.

Of course, that's easy for me to say when I'm not the one who just spent thousands of dollars and 4 years of their to land in an environment where getting a job is going to be challenging to say the least.

Maybe there was some idea that if AI actually solved software engineering in a few years you wouldn't need any more SWEs. Industry is moving away from that idea this year.

But a big part of it to me is looking at the job data[0]. If you look at devs during this period you can see that during the pandemic they hired more in early to mid 2022 but currently are lower than any other industry.

Tech loves booms and busts, with hiring and everything else. But more than anything the tech industry loves optics. The market has rewarded the industry for hiring during the pandemic and in the past year it has rewarded them for laying people off "because AI". And as the new year comes around they'll get rewarded for hiring again as they "accelerate development" even more. Our industry is really good at metric hacking and getting those numbers to keep going up. As long as it looks like a good decision then people are excited and the numbers go up.

I think the problem is we've perverted ("over optimized") the market. You have to constantly have stock growth. The goal is to become the best but you lose the game by winning. I think a good example of this is from an article a read a few months ago[1]. It paints AWS in a bad light but if you pull out the real data you'll see AWS had a greater increase in absolute users than GCloud (you can also estimate easily from the article). But with the stock market it is better to be the underdog with growth than the status quo with constant income[2].

What a weird way to optimize our businesses. You are rewarded for becoming the best, but you are punished for being the best. Feels like only a matter of time before they start tanking on purpose because you can't go up anymore, so you need to make room to go up[3]. I mean we're already trading on speculation. We're beyond tech demos pushing stock up (already speculative) and now our "demos" are not even demonstrations but what we envision tech that hasn't been built to look like. That's much more speculative than something that is in beta! IDK, does anyone else feel like this is insane? How far can we keep pushing this?

[0] Go to "Sector" then add "Software Development" to the chart https://data.indeed.com/#/postings

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/amazon-target...

[2] Doesn't take a genius to figure out you'll make more money had you invested $100 in GCloud vs $100 in AWS (in this example). The percentile differential is all that matters. Being percentile punishes having a large existing userbase. You have double the percentile growth going from 1 user to 100 than from 10 million to 500 million, yet any person who isn't severely mentally incapacitated would conclude the latter is a better business.

[3] Or at least play a game of hot potato. Sounds like a collusion ring in waiting. e.g. AWS stagnates, lets Azure take a bunch of users, Azure stagnates and users switch to AWS. Gives both the ability to "grow" and I'm sure all the users will be super happy with constantly switching and all the extra costs of doing so...

"We’ve seen this act before. When companies are financially stressed, a relatively easy solution is to lay off workers and ask those who are not laid off to work harder and be thankful that they still have jobs. AI is just a convenient excuse for this cost-cutting. "

Seems to me the companies are mostly in a holding pattern: sure, if an important project needs more bodies, it's probably okay to hire. I suspect that lots of teams have to make do until further notice.

Are some teams using AI instead of hiring junior engineers? I don't think there's any doubt about that. It's also a trial period to better understand what the value-add is.

Based on listening to engineers on various podcasts, almost all of them describe the current level of AI agents as being equivalent to a junior engineer: they're eager and think they know a lot but they also have a lot to learn. But we're getting closer to the point where a well-thought out Skill [1] can do a pretty convincing job of replacing a junior engineer.

But—at the rate AI is improving, a company that doesn't adopt AI for software engineering will be at a competitive disadvantage compared to its peers.

[1]: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/equipping-agents-for-t...

    Meta (Facebook)

    2022: ~11,000 employees (13% of workforce)
    2023: ~10,000 employees plus 5,000 open positions eliminated
    2024: Multiple smaller rounds totaling ~100-200 employees
    2025: ~3,600 employees (5% of workforce, performance-based cuts)
    Total: Approximately 24,700-25,000 employees

    Amazon

    2022: ~10,000 employees
    2023: ~17,000 employees (split between multiple rounds)
    2024: Smaller targeted cuts
    2025: ~14,000 employees announced
    Total: Approximately 41,000+ employees

    Google (Alphabet)

    2023: ~12,000 employees (6% of workforce)
    2024: Multiple smaller rounds, hundreds of employees
    2025: Several hundred in Cloud division and other areas
    Total: Approximately 15,000-20,000 employees

    Apple
    Apple has been an outlier among FAANG companies:

    2022-2023: Minimal layoffs (hiring freeze instead)
    2024: ~700+ employees (primarily from canceled Apple Car project and microLED display teams)
    2025: Small cuts in sales and other divisions
    Total: Approximately 800-1,000 employees (significantly less than peers)

    Netflix

    2022: ~450 employees across two rounds (150 + 300)
    2023: Smaller targeted cuts in animation and drama divisions
    2024-2025: Minimal additional cuts
    Total: Approximately 500-600 employees

    Overall FAANG Totals

    Across all five companies over the past 5 years: approximately 81,000-87,000 workers
    have been laid off, with the vast majority occurring in 2022-2023
    during the post-pandemic correction period.

I think college is useless for the ones out there whom already know how to code, collaborate and other skills the industry is looking for. Many out there are developing high level projects on GitHub and other places without having any degree.

Also, most of the stuff you learn in college has absolutely no relation to what you will do in the industry.

Since the workers are hired for cost over quality, they're typically incompetent. Though many have learned to parasitize SME and support staff expertise by asking highly specific questions in an extended sequence. It's a salami-slicing strategy where the majority of the work ends up being performed by those SMEs and support staff while the incompetent workers collect the paychecks and credit. I'm pushing my teams to more aggressively identify and call out this behavior, but it's so systemic that it's an endless battle with every new project coming in the door.

Personal frustrations aside, it's very dangerous from both economic and national security perspectives for India to be building and administering so much of the West's IT infrastructure. Our entire economy depends on it, yet we're voluntarily concentrating that dependency in a single foreign nation. A Pacific conflict alone could sever us from the majority of our IT workforce, regardless of India's intentions.

It possible that your job is simply not that difficult to begin with?

Really weird.

Enterprise software is different beast - large fragile [quasi]monoliths, good luck for [current] AI to make a meaningful fixes and/or feature development in it. And even if AI manages to speed up actual development multiple times, the impact would be still small as actual development takes relatively small share of overall work in enterprise software. Of course it will come here too, just somewhat later than at places like FAANG.

I work in FAANG, none of my colleagues are dropouts.

Many BigTech founders are dropouts, but that’s a separate game altogether.

No business cares about that question, just like the Onceler didn't care how many Truffula trees were left. It's not their problem. Business is business, and business must grow, regardless of crummies in tummies, you know.

Since this isn't the 1800s anymore there won't be any major revolutions but I expect way more societal violence going forward. If you have no hope for the future it's not hard to go to very dark paths quickly, usually through no fault of your own sadly.

Now add how easy it is for malicious actors to get an audience and how LLM tech makes this even easier to do. Nice recipe for a powder keg.

Other than that, I am guessing junior roles will move offshore to supply the body shops where the corporate IT work has been going.

Blame the article for using suboptimal numbers, but the "wiping out" part is definitely justified when talking about jobs for graduates

https://www.signalfire.com/blog/signalfire-state-of-talent-r...

Job openings for graduates are significantly down in at least one developed nation: https://www.theguardian.com/money/2025/jun/25/uk-university-...

It's like if you waited until college to start learning to play piano, and wonder why you can't get a job when you graduate. You need a lot of time at the keyboard (pun intended) to build those skills.

I don’t think we’ve seen any amount of a net drop in tech jobs on account of LLMs (yet). I actually think they’re (spending on projects using them, that is) countering a drop that was going to happen anyway due to other factors (tightening credit being a huge one; business investment hesitation due to things like batshit crazy and chaotic handling of tariffs; consumer sentiment; et c)

I only want to point out that evidence of less hiring is not evidence for AI-anything.

As others have pointed out, here and previously, things like outsourcing to India, or for Europe Eastern Europe, is also going strong. That's another explanation for less jobs "here", but they are not gone, they just moved to cheaper places. As has been going on for decades, it just continues unevenly.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/11/big-tech-microsoft-amazon-go...

> Over $50 billion in under 24 hours: Why Big Tech is doubling down on investing in India

https://news.microsoft.com/source/asia/2025/12/09/microsoft-...

> Microsoft invests US$17.5 billion in India to drive AI diffusion at population scale

It's not a secret companies do not want to hire Americans. Americans are expensive, demand too many benefits like fair pay, healthcare, and vacations. They also are (mostly) at-will. H1B solves all these problem. When that doesn't work, there's 400 Infosys-likes available to export that labor cheaply. We have seen this with several industries, the last most prominent one being auto manufacture.

All that matters is that the next quarters earnings are more than the last. No one hates the American worker more than Americans. Other countries have far better worker protections than us.

I see no reason H1B couldn't be solved by having an high barrier to entry (500k one time fee) and maintenance (100k per year). Then, force them to be paid at the highest bracket in their field. If H1Bs are what it's proponents say - necessary for rare talent not found else where - then this fee should be pennies on the value they provide. I also see no reason we can't tax exported labor in a similarly extreme manner. If the labor truly can't be found in America the high price of the labor on tax and fee terms should be dwarfed by their added value.

If it is not the case that high fees and taxes on H1B and exported labor make sense then the only conclusion is the vast majority of H1Bs and exported labor are not "rare talent" and thus aren't necessary. They can come through the normal immigration routes and integrate into the workforce as a naturalized American.