AI vs Gen Z: How AI has changed the career pathway for junior developers

I grew up during a very special time on the internet. I’m an older Zoomer—or as TikTok likes to call it, a geriatric Zoomer. When I was a kid, the internet of the late 2000s was still evolving rapidly, still quite rough around the edges even as it began to show a level of sophistication. Customization and creativity in your web presence made you cool. I was handwriting HTML code onto my Tumblr and tweaking the embeds on my page’s music player at 13 years old. I developed burgeoning video production skills because I liked making funny Club Penguin music videos. I owe much of my writing ability to the Spiderman fanfiction communities of an early Archive of Our Own.

For kids who were trying to make their cursors have a rainbow tail on MySpace, coding was part of growing up. Even the adults knew this. In high school, one of my teachers offered extra credit for completing a beginner coding class. I even did a business report on Girls Who Code, whose popularity skyrocketed when I was a teen, partially because of excellent branding.

In college, being a CS major afforded many of my peers an early sense of career security. Everyone knew that the CS kids would get high starting salaries; some of my friends even dated CS majors because of this. And while I never envied their stressed late-night study sessions and “hackathons,” there was something of a shine to the promise of software engineering. It was the same sort of shine that a four-year college degree had—a promise that the world would see you as promising, and that would open doors for you.

Much of that shine and promise has changed for my generation. Perhaps it’s gone away entirely. The job market has proven itself volatile post-pandemic, with job cuts reaching their highest midyear total since COVID. This has spurred on the heightened concerns about layoffs experienced by Gen Z—64% of us are worried about being laid off, as compared to the 45% of our millennial counterparts. We’re also the generation most concerned about a recession. For people ages 22-27—coincidentally the age group I fall into—the unemployment rate is nearly double the national average of 4.2%, sitting at a high 7.4% as of June 2025.

So, yes, the job market is rough for young people, but it’s not just because of the usual economic ups and downs of the past. AI has made many lower seniority roles automatable, as entry-level tech hiring decreased 25% year-over-year in 2024.

Anecdotally, I experienced a layoff just last year and struggled to even get an email back from a recruiter while I was looking for work. To be fair, I have a career path that was immediately and greatly affected by GenAI. A great writer isn’t as valuable to a company when you can get an LLM trained on every publicly available New York Times article for just $20 a month. And unlike me, ChatGPT probably finished and understood Infinite Jest. That is difficult to compete with. Luckily, some folks still see the value in a handcrafted story, which is why I write here.

But the struggles aren’t just for writers like me. My partner works in operations and took a six month sabbatical earlier this year. Sitting beside him for much of his job search, it’s become clear that six months was a long enough time that upskilling on new technical tools was necessary for him to secure a role. AI has changed how every job is done, from finance to law to engineering to medicine, and to miss even a few months means missing at least a few very important skills to include on your resume. If you think your job is safe, it probably isn’t.

And this is especially true for junior software developers, whose career rival is no longer just the best and brightest from the elite colleges or the nepotism hires, but also the AI-powered coding tools that are supposedly making the work of junior developers redundant. A recent Stanford Digital Economy Study found that by July 2025 the employment for software developers aged 22-25 has declined nearly 20% from its peak in late 2022.

The use of AI has increased rapidly over the last few years. We only started tracking AI usage via our Developer Survey in 2023, and AI tool usage during the development process has increased 14% as of our 2025 survey, now at a whopping 84% for developers. This rapid adoption has made certain skills, even entire career pathways, obsolete. And because AI is constantly evolving, what you know now may be out-of-date in just a few months. Industries at large have had a hard time keeping up; imagine what it’s like for someone my age who is just now getting their footing in their careers.

This is probably a no-brainer, but AI has greatly affected the educational experience for Gen Z. I’ve only been out of school for a handful of years, but in the time since I’ve graduated, the simple act of studying has changed drastically. One survey of high school and college students found that 97% of them have used AI at some point for their education, with 66% of them using it for studying.

This, of course, only makes sense. In a society that perpetuates educational elitism, school has become the Roman Coliseum where we put our youngest and brightest to the test. While I was looking for work earlier this year, I found that many applications still asked for my GPA; one recruiter was overly impressed by the university I had attended, unknowing that I spent most of my time there surviving off of canned yerba mate and writing poetry instead of studying.

The cultural currency that comes with a degree from one of those lauded institutions, paired with the insanely high cost of attending one of them, makes schooling more about getting a competitive edge than it does about simply learning. Who could blame a gladiator for wanting to bring the sharpest possible sword into the fighting pit? And it seems to work for them. Students who use AI had a 10% improvement on their exams over peers who didn’t use it, according to a recent Microsoft report. When it comes to grades, there is no Maximus the Merciful.

So we have to ask, is using AI cheating? Whatever your answer is, students think so, with 3 in 4 believing that the use of ChatGPT constitutes cheating. And according to one survey, 75% of students stated they would still use AI tools for school even if their institution bans them. ONe report by plagiarism detection service Turnitin found that 11% of the 200 million papers they reviewed were written at least 20% by AI.

Ethical dilemmas aside, an overreliance on AI obviously causes an atrophy of skills for young thinkers. Why spend time reading your textbooks when you can get the answers right away? Why bother working through a particularly difficult homework problem when you can just dump it into an AI to give you the answer? To form the critical thinking skills necessary for not just a fruitful career, but a happy life, must include some of the discomfort that comes from not knowing. AI tools eliminate the discovery phase of learning—that precious, priceless part where you root around blindly until you finally understand.

Not all students have lost the ability to search and discover; real learning is certainly not a lost art. But clearly there is a very sharp and shiny sword they could bring into the Coliseum if they wanted.

For today’s students, they know that the competition will just get tougher once they join the workforce. Because of this, internships have been a mainstay of the college experience, no matter what you’re studying. I was one of those kids that did internships every summer, and often during the school year, starting my Freshman year.

Internships were always seen as necessary if you wanted to get a competitive job. It’s why myself and so many peers did legal unpaid child labor for companies that forgot about us the very next semester. But, and forgive me if I’ve said this before, the landscape has changed dramatically because of AI. In fact, the landscape has all but disappeared.

A 2024 survey of hiring managers found that 70% of them believe that AI can do the jobs of interns. And 57% of those surveyed said they trust AI’s work more than the work of interns or recent grads. If an AI can do it, why bother spending the time and energy teaching a student how to do the same thing?

Year-over-year, internships across all industries have decreased 11%, according to Indeed. Handshake, an internship recruitment platform, reported a whopping 30% decline in tech-specific internship postings since 2023. Meanwhile internship applications have risen 7%. And the need for early career—or I might argue, pre-career—experience hasn’t gone away just because the internships have.

Indeed’s Career Guide says that most entry-level jobs list two to five years of experience as a requirement by hiring managers. When I first started applying for jobs, most competitive roles asked for one to two years of experience at the entry-level. For me, and for most of my peers, that experience came from internships and part-time summer gigs that we proudly displayed on our resumes.

In August, the New York Times released an article bleakly titled, Goodbye, $165,000 Tech Jobs. Student Coders Seek Work at Chipotle. One story detailed in it is of a 2023 computer science graduate who has applied to 5,762 tech jobs, but has yet to receive any full-time offers. You can find stories like this from pretty much any source talking about AI’s effects on early career pathways.

As per the Stanford Digital Economy study, for jobs with the most AI-exposure—read: IT and software engineering jobs—employment has declined 6% for workers aged 22-25, while it’s increased 9% for workers aged 35-49. Hiring is happening, just not for people my age.

This does not bode well for the increasing number of computer science graduates, a number which has more than doubled in the US since 2011, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Per this year’s Federal Reserve report on labor market outcomes, computer engineering graduates had one of the highest rates of unemployment across majors. At a 7.5% unemployment rate, fine arts degree holders are more employed than computer engineers. Computer science graduates are also taking a hit when in the labor market with a 6.1% unemployment rate. This is almost one point higher than a liberal arts graduate.

If you’re keeping up with any of the news around AI, it’s probably not difficult to see why. Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei predicted that AI could someday wipe out 50% of entry-level jobs. We have to take his guestimate with a grain of salt since this happens to be the guy making one of those entry-level-wiping AI tools, but perhaps there’s something to his psychic abilities. Already, employers are hesitant to hire new talent, with 37% saying they’d rather “hire” AI than a recent graduate. And when they do hire Zoomers for roles, their turnover rate is high. As of 2024, 60% of employers had fired new hires within a year.

The truth is that AI has made much of what junior developers of the past did redundant. Gone are the days of needing junior developers to manually write code or debug, because now an already tenured developer can just ask their AI assistant to do it. There’s even some sentiment that AI has made junior developers less competent, and that they’ve lost some of the foundational skills that make for a successful entry-level employee. See above section on AI in school if you need a refresher on why this might be happening. But even if you are competent, in the words of one Head of Data and AI, “Being good isn’t good enough.”

So what does this all mean for the promising college graduates who thought their degrees meant a promising future? It’s hard to tell now when the decline in early career opportunities has just begun to fully show. There’s no doubt that the computer science graduates of the last few years are going to continue feeling the squeeze for a while longer, as companies continue to bet on AI’s rapid growth above young talent acquisition.

But I expect there will be an equilibrium point. Just look at OpenAI, whose recent job posting is promising a content strategist almost $400,000 a year, a job that I, a content writer, was told would be completely eliminated by AI.

More optimistic outlooks on the AI job market see this disruption as an opportunity for early career professionals to evolve their skillsets to better fit an AI-driven world. If I believe in nothing else, I believe in my generation’s ability to adapt, especially to technology. As the full picture of AI’s ability to change entire industries starts to become clearer, the hope is that the junior developer role will not disappear, but instead shift to complement these changes. Our very own CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar told the BBC that AI will not be without problems and challenges, and that this will open a whole new career pathway for Gen Z developers.

And it’s in companies’ best interest to tend to their talent pipelines, supporting new talent to better prepare for the inevitable future where they’ll be needed. I’m not the first to say this, but it’s true: if you don’t hire junior developers, you’ll someday never have senior developers.

There’s still something to mourn here—the shine that coding once had for my generation, when being a developer was something the most gifted among us strived towards. There was a beauty to that clear and promising pathway to success that is no longer being offered to my peers. But maybe a new pathway is being cleared for us, one where we are not replaced by AI but are the shepherds of it. I believe my generation will actually be the one to clear that path for ourselves.