But if the decline is surprising, the reason for it is fairly straightforward: Young people are responding to a grim job outlook for entry-level coders. In recent years, the tech industry has been roiled by layoffs and hiring freezes. The leading culprit for the slowdown is technology itself. Artificial intelligence has proved to be even more valuable as a writer of computer code than as a writer of words. This means it is ideally suited to replacing the very type of person who built it.
I’m not sold on this narrative that AI is replacing JR engineers. There’s a lot more evidence that international competition in the form of wage arbitration and saturation of the discipline is the root cause of job collapse.
If AI was truly offsetting JR engineers. Why have layoffs also targeted management and Sr engineers? This reeks more of the simply law of supply and demand.
There is less demand for a role and a surge in supply of candidates with those skills. As someone who graduated in the early 2000s I asked more than once why I was studying computer science given the meltdown of the 2001 tech bubble. Well here I am plugging away..
Quote Citation: Rose Horowitch, “The Computer-Science Bubble Is Bursting - The Atlantic”, June 21, 2025, https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/06/computer-science-bubble-ai/683242/