The Junior Developer Job Is Dead. The Industry Killed It on Purpose.

My project: Hermes IDE | GitHub Me: gabrielanhaia A Comfortable Lie There's a story the tech industry keeps telling itself. "AI won't replace developers. It'll just make them more productive." Sounds great. Sounds like something a staff engineer with RSUs and a fifteen-year track record would say over craft beer at a conference afterparty. The data disagrees. Violently. Stanford's Digital Economy Lab published research showing that developers aged 22 to 25 lost nearly 20% of available positions since ChatGPT shipped in November 2022. Not 20% more rejections. Twenty percent of the jobs themselves vanished from existence. Programmers over 30? Their employment numbers held steady. Some segments even grew. The knife only cuts in one direction, and it points squarely at people who just finished their CS degrees. 52,050 People in Three Months Q1 2026 brought 52,050 tech layoffs. That's a 40% increase year-over-year, according to Layoffs.fyi tracking data. March was particularly ugly. AI got