A lot gets covered in today's discourse about AI in software development. Most of it is noise, ranging from nihilism that we're all writing mediocre code anyway so why does it matter to endless wannabe AI influencers doing engagement bait on Twitter. Every new model release gets a bunch of threadicles 👇 amounting to the 2025 version of "Safari feels snappier". Some of it is useful, mostly crafty developers in the community sharing novel ways they're using it to solve hard problems or draw inspiration. A lot of it is slop, 80% of it is marketing.
There's something pretty important missing in this discourse though: the downward pressure it and out-of-touch executives at tech companies are having on junior developers in our industry. It's not a trend that started with AI, but it's certainly being accelerated by it.
What follows is my own perception of recent events. I am not an economist, I am not a CEO, my views are often shaped by what I see in the mobile engineering world and living in the US. I do feel confident in my read here though, even if some of finer details might be off.
COVID -> Inflation -> Layoffs
It's been going on ever since the red-hot labor market tech had during COVID. Nothing stirs large companies into action more than hot labor markets, the last thing they want to do is relinquish power to employees or have to meaningfully compete for talent. It's a recurring theme, the tech industry runs into labor suppression issues over and over and over and over. It's a core value that's always lurked behind the veneer of free lunches and ping pong tables. Tech employees, despite their progressive leanings, seem largely allergic to unionizing for reasons that mostly seem to boil down to "not enough people in SF/SEA/NYC are worried this will some day come for them."
Rising interest rates during inflation in the US saw companies tighten budgets and reign in spending. At the same time, this gave them an out to collectively reclaim the labor market power they'd been ceding, pointing vaguely at "macroeconomic conditions" in their all-hands to explain their layoffs and hiring freezes. This was also accelerated by Musk's mass layoff of thousands of employees at Twitter, creating a sort of model other companies eagerly followed. If you can do it while everyone else is doing it, your negative press might fly under the radar in the noise.
The market has changed and improved since then, inflation has cooled, but you can bet that leash has continued to tighten and will continue to for as long as companies can get away with it. Junior engineers are particularly affected by this: in a world where money's no longer free, companies start treating cultivation of junior talent as a risky investment rather than standard practice. The job market for junior engineers is bleak.
Shrinking Mentorship Vectors
Other factors came into play around the same time, particularly in the form of loss of mentorship avenues.
Twitter is Dead
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