In February 2025, Stanford University released a study that confirmed what many in tech had suspected but few wanted to say aloud: developers aged 22-25 had lost nearly 20% of their jobs since late 2022—precisely when ChatGPT and AI coding tools went mainstream.

Meanwhile, developers over 26 saw stable or growing employment.

The message was clear: AI isn’t coming for programming jobs. It’s already here. And it’s starting with the people who can least afford to lose them.

The Numbers Tell a Brutal Story

Let’s be direct about what’s happening in 2025:

209,838 tech workers have lost their jobs so far this year across 716 layoff events
27.5% decline in programmer employment between 2023 and 2025 in the United States
Programmer employment is falling at 14.3% annually—five times faster than before generative AI arrived
40% of employers plan to reduce their workforce due to AI automation by 2030
50,000+ layoffs have been directly attributed to AI by companies making the cuts

This isn’t speculation. This is Bureau of Labor Statistics data, company SEC filings, and cold, hard severance packages.

Who’s Getting Cut?

The pattern is unmistakable. Here’s what the data reveals about who’s losing their jobs:

Junior Developers: The First Casualties

Entry-level programmers are bearing the brunt of AI displacement. The Stanford study found that while senior developers maintained employment, those aged 22-25 experienced dramatic job losses.

Why? AI excels at exactly what junior developers do: writing boilerplate code, implementing well-documented algorithms, and handling routine programming tasks. The traditional path into software development—starting with simple tasks and learning on the job—is being eliminated.

As one recruiter told Rest of World: “Five years ago, there was a real war for coders and developers. There was bidding to hire, and 90% of hires were for off-the-shelf technical roles. Since the rise of AI, it has dropped dramatically. I don’t even think it’s touching 5%. It’s almost completely vanished.”

Entry-Level Hiring Has Collapsed

The numbers are staggering:

Big Tech companies reduced new graduate hiring by over 50% in the last three years
Only 7% of new hires in 2024 were recent graduates
37% of managers say they’d rather use AI than hire a Gen Z employee
At one top Indian engineering college, fewer than 25% of students have secured job offers

The pipeline that once funneled computer science graduates into stable careers has been severed. Students who started their degrees expecting to become programmers are graduating into a market that no longer wants them.

The Microsoft Paradox

Microsoft’s actions in 2025 perfectly illustrate the new reality:

30% of Microsoft’s code is now written by AI, according to CEO Satya Nadella
40% of Microsoft’s layoffs affected software developers
The company cut 15,000+ jobs while posting record revenue of $70.1 billion

This isn’t a company in crisis cutting costs. This is a thriving company discovering it needs fewer humans to produce the same output.

The Companies Making the Cuts

Every major tech company has cited AI as a factor in 2025 layoffs:

Amazon announced 14,000 corporate job cuts in October—its largest ever—with executives explicitly citing AI as enabling “leaner” operations.

Microsoft eliminated 15,000+ roles while Nadella spoke of transforming from “a software factory to an intelligence engine.”

IBM replaced its HR department with an AI chatbot called AskHR, eliminating 8,000 positions and stating it would not rehire for those roles.

Salesforce cut 4,000 customer support roles after finding that “the benefits and efficiencies of Agentforce” reduced the need for human agents.

Accenture removed 11,000 employees who could not be “retrained” for AI roles, with CEO Julie Sweet describing it as “reshaping its workforce for the AI era.”

CrowdStrike laid off 500 employees, with CEO George Kurtz stating directly: “AI flattens our hiring curve.”

The Rise of the AI Prompter

As traditional programming jobs disappear, a new role is emerging: the AI prompter.

Companies are discovering they can replace teams of junior developers with a single person who knows how to effectively communicate with AI systems. These “prompt engineers” or “AI operators” don’t write code in the traditional sense—they describe what they want and guide AI to produce it.

Y Combinator’s Winter 2025 batch revealed this shift: 25% of startups had codebases that were 95% AI-generated, with highly technical founders choosing to prompt rather than code.

The economics are compelling:

One person with AI tools can now produce what previously required a team
Development cycles that took weeks now take hours
Companies can ship products without maintaining large engineering departments

As Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted: AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years.

The New Hierarchy

The tech workforce is reorganizing into distinct tiers:

Tier 1: AI Architects and Supervisors

Senior engineers who understand systems at a deep level, can design architecture, and know when AI-generated code is dangerous. These roles are growing.

Tier 2: AI Operators

People skilled at prompting AI to produce code, reviewing output, and integrating AI-generated components. This is the new “entry-level” that requires different skills than traditional programming.

Tier 3: Specialists

Security experts, ML engineers, and domain specialists whose knowledge AI can’t easily replicate. These roles remain in demand.

Tier 4: Traditional Programmers

Developers who write code line by line without AI assistance. Increasingly seen as inefficient and being replaced.

Tier 5: Junior Developers

Entry-level programmers hoping to learn on the job. The role is being eliminated faster than any other.

The Skill Atrophy Problem

A troubling pattern is emerging among developers who heavily use AI tools.

Luciano Nooijen, an engineer at Companion Group, used AI tools extensively at work. When he started a side project without those tools, he found himself struggling with tasks that once came naturally.

“I was feeling so stupid because things that used to be instinct became manual, sometimes even cumbersome,” Nooijen told MIT Technology Review.

This skill atrophy creates a dangerous dependency:

Developers lose the ability to code without AI assistance
When AI produces errors, they struggle to identify and fix them
The foundational knowledge that makes senior developers valuable erodes

As one engineering mentor warned: “The downsides are so obvious. You’re introducing hallucinations into the codebase.”

What Companies Are Really Saying

Tech executives are becoming remarkably candid about their intentions:

Mark Zuckerberg, Meta CEO: Predicted AI would replace mid-level engineers by 2025.

Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO: Described the need to “reimagine” the company’s mission, with AI tools like GitHub Copilot writing 30% of new code.

Andy Jassy, Amazon CEO: Said the company would “hire fewer software engineers thanks to AI.”

Dario Amodei, Anthropic CEO: Believes AI will soon write 90% of all code.

Sundar Pichai, Google CEO: Stated that more than 25% of new code at Google is now generated by AI.

These aren’t vague predictions about the distant future. These are statements from people actively reducing their workforces.

The Geographic Reality

The displacement isn’t limited to Silicon Valley. It’s global:

India: IT services companies have reduced entry-level roles by 20-25% due to automation. At top engineering colleges, fewer than a quarter of students have job offers.

United States: Programmer employment has fallen 27.5% in two years. IT sector unemployment jumped from 3.9% to 5.7% in a single month.

Europe: Job platforms noted a 35% decline in junior tech positions across major EU countries in 2024.

China: Engineering graduates face similar pressure as AI automates entry-level tasks.

The promise that everyone could learn to code and find prosperity has collided with the reality that AI can now do much of that coding.

The Uncomfortable Questions

As we enter 2026, the tech industry faces questions it has avoided:

What happens to the computer science graduates? Hundreds of thousands of students are pursuing degrees that may not lead to the jobs they expected. Universities can’t adapt curriculum fast enough to match AI-driven industry demands.

Who maintains AI-generated code? When no one fully understands the codebase because AI wrote it, debugging becomes nearly impossible. The technical debt is accumulating.

Where do displaced workers go? The traditional advice to “learn to code” rings hollow when coding jobs are disappearing. The skills that make someone a good prompter aren’t necessarily what made them a good programmer.

How do people enter the field? If entry-level jobs no longer exist, how does anyone gain the experience needed for senior roles? The industry risks cutting off its own talent pipeline.

Preparing for What’s Coming

For those still in tech—or trying to enter—the path forward requires brutal honesty:

If You’re a Junior Developer

Develop skills AI can’t easily replicate: system design, architecture, security
Learn to work with AI tools rather than compete against them
Build domain expertise in areas that require human judgment
Consider adjacent roles: DevOps, security, ML engineering

If You’re a Senior Developer

Your experience has never been more valuable—AI can’t replace deep system knowledge
Learn to supervise and validate AI-generated code
Develop skills in AI integration and oversight
Position yourself as someone who makes AI useful, not someone AI replaces

If You’re a Student

Question whether a traditional CS degree is the right path
Develop “AI-adjacent” skills: prompt engineering, AI evaluation, ethics
Build a portfolio that shows what you can do with AI, not without it
Be realistic about the job market you’re entering

If You’re a Manager

Understand that teams will shrink but remaining roles will change
Invest in upskilling people who can adapt
Don’t assume AI will do everything—know its limitations
Plan for the technical debt AI-generated code creates

The Truth No One Wants to Hear

The tech industry sold a dream: learn to code, and you’ll have a career for life. That dream is dying.

This doesn’t mean programming is worthless. It means the industry is being restructured in ways that will create winners and losers. Senior engineers with deep expertise will thrive. People who learn to leverage AI effectively will find new opportunities. But the masses of junior developers who thought they were joining a stable profession are discovering that AI has rewritten the rules.

In 2025 alone:

209,838 tech workers lost their jobs
Programmer employment fell at five times the pre-AI rate
Entry-level hiring collapsed by over 50%
Companies posted record profits while cutting thousands of positions

The question isn’t whether AI is replacing developers. That’s already happening. The question is what comes next—for the displaced workers, for the students in the pipeline, and for an industry that’s automating itself.

The great displacement isn’t coming. It’s here.

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