Post #1145661

2026-04-13 15:36 UTC

Not really a sneer, just wondering what to make of it, if it doesn’t belong here please remove. The Financial Times goes with a study which ostensibly demonstrates that ca. half a million of potential coding jobs were directly eliminated by AI, not any other factors or general industry slowdown. The idea is it’s mainly junior positions which aren’t tightly “bundled” with other domains or just years of programming experience & intuition which are harder for AI to replace. So is AI really fully replacing juniors in the hundreds of thousands, or is there more going on?

Replies (4)

@dgerard@awful.systems 2026-04-14 09:26

that looks like a heaping pile of correlation, without mentioning the general downturn

Open ##1145659
@scruiser@awful.systems 2026-04-14 22:09

or is there more going on? One idea I’ve read about (heavily developed by Ed Zitron, but also a few other news sources and commentators have put it forward) is that SaaS (Software as a Service) businesses were heavily over invested in expectation of basically infinite growth over the past decade. SaaS growth has exponential in its early days, but then various needs of the market were basically saturated, so SaaS companies squeezed more growth out cutting cuts or upping how much they charged, and now it is finally catching up to them. The AI hype means almost everyone tries to interpret everything the lines of AI causing it. The recent price correction in many SaaS companies was (mis)interpreted as the threat of vibe-coded replacements forcing them to cut costs. The SaaS companies trying to cut costs and going through layoffs is being misinterpreted as AI successfully replacing junior devs.

Open ##1151122
@mlen@awful.systems 2026-04-13 17:16

And seniors obviously grow on senior trees (assuming that this take is actually true)

Open ##1360989
@YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 2026-04-13 23:49

So I don't have time to read the full paper and I probably don't have the background to make an informed critique of the methodology once I do (not that that's gonna stop me). But I feel like the challenge here is in mapping the distinction between junior and senior coding roles. To what extent do the senior coders get treated like a distinct job as opposed to being junior-but-seasoned? Based on a quick amateur read of the abstract it looks like they're assuming the first option, that junior and senior developers are separate roles that can be largely disentangled. But if the other option is true, then in the event of a general industry downturn (say, after over hiring during recent periods of unsustainable growth) then it might make sense to look at the cuts to junior roles as simply removing the less efficient and effective people from the development role, rather than specifically cutting the juniors because they're uniquely exposed to AI replacement. I don't know which model is more accurate to how the industry treats these roles or whether it varies by organization or what, but that's what seems like the most likely alternate explanation for the observed shift towards a very senior-heavy workforce.

Open ##1360990