Entry-level tech hiring has dropped roughly sixty percent since 2022. That is not a typo. A Stanford study analysing millions of payroll records found that employment for software developers aged 22 to 25 fell nearly twenty percent from its late-2022 peak — while older developers in the same roles saw growth of six to nine percent. The ladder into this industry is losing its bottom rung.

The arithmetic feels obvious to anyone running a team. Why hire a graduate at ninety thousand dollars when GitHub Copilot costs ten dollars a month? Fifty-four percent of engineering leaders now plan to hire fewer juniors thanks to AI copilots. Salesforce announced it would hire no new engineers in 2025. Klarna froze developer recruitment entirely.

The trouble is that nobody seems to be asking the five-year question. I wrote about this obliquely a few weeks ago — the pattern-matching work that juniors traditionally cut their teeth on is exactly the work that LLMs do well. But that work was never pointless busywork. It was training. Microsoft's Mark Russinovich and Scott Hanselman published a paper in February warning that AI coding agents impose what they call "AI drag" on early-career developers — the tool does the thinking, and the human never learns to think.

Companies that cut entry-level roles are already reporting senior burnout and a drying talent pipeline. Seventy-one percent say recruiting future leaders has become harder. The saving feels real until you realise you have eaten the seed corn.

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