Little Girl in Blue Armchair - Mary Cassatt, 1878
For a long time, we were all hand-wringing over the shortage of software developers. School districts rolled out coding curriculums. Colleges debuted software “labs”. “Bootcamps” became a $700m industry.
Today, we have the opposite problem. Thousands of trained, entry-level engineers that no one wants to hire.
How we got here
Just as software finished eating the world, zero interest rates ended. Companies optimized for cash and slowed hiring. The market didn’t shrink, but stopped growing at the breakneck pace we all expected.
The result: a glut of entry level talent groomed for jobs that never materialized.
This would explain a more competitive entry level market. But it doesn’t explain the entry-level market shrinking, despite overall industry growth.
Demand for senior talent is rising, but has fallen off a cliff for juniors. (If you’re a senior engineer struggling to find work: read this. )
In short: demand for senior talent is rising, but has fallen off a cliff for juniors.
AI didn’t create this trend - there was already a bias for senior talent pre-2022 - but it gave leaders a convenient justification to exacerbate it.
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