Comment by ZeroConcerns
14 days ago
The 'recent graduates' quoted in this article all seem to be from (for lack of a better description) 'developing countries' hoping to get a (again, generalizing) 'high-paying FAANG job'.
My initial reaction would be that these people, unfortunately, got scammed, and that the scammers-promising-abundant-high-paying-jobs have now found a convenient scapegoat?
AI has done nothing so far to reduce the backlog of junior developer positions from where I can see, but, yeah, that's all in "Europoor" and "EU residency required" territory, so what do I know...
For the last few decades its been offshoring that filled the management agenda in the way AI does today so it doesn't seem surprising to me that the first gap would be in the places you might offshore a testing department to, etc.
Offshoring has the exact same benefits/problems that AI has (i.e: it's cheap, yet you have to specify everything in excruciating detail) and has not been a significant factor in junior hiring, like, ever, in my experience.
My experience is that it is not a reduction in work in the place being offshored, but it changes the shape of the labor market and certainly in the places being offshored to. Replace offshore with something cheaper and a lot of juniors in top offshore locations are the quickest to feel it. Local juniors might be worth hiring again if they need a lot of oversight once agents make them questionably productive.
Currently helping with hiring and can't help but reflect on how it changed over past couple of years. We are now filtering for much stronger candidates across all experience levels, but junior side of the scale had been affected much more. Where previously we would take top 5% of junior applicants that made it past first phone screen, now it's below 2%.
> AI has done nothing so far to reduce the backlog of junior developer positions from where I can see
Job openings for graduates are significantly down in at least one developed nation: https://www.theguardian.com/money/2025/jun/25/uk-university-...
"This article was amended on 26 June 2025 to clarify that the link between AI and the decline in graduate jobs is something suggested by analysts, rather than documented by statistics"
Plus, that decline seems specious anyway (as in: just-about visible when you only observe the top-5% of the chart), plus, the UK job market has always been very different from the EU-they-left-behind.
Am I reading this article correctly: the job market was worse in 2017?
Was Ai also responsible for that market? This seems a bit unsupported.
Consider what happened in the UK in 2016.
And, as usual, no mention of the massive shortsighted overhiring during the post-covid bull market.
Again, in my experience, that simply never happened, at least not with regard to junior positions.
During COVID we were struggling to retain good developers that just couldn't deal with the full-remote situation[1], and afterwards, there was a lull in recent graduates.
Again, this is from a EU perspective.
[1] While others absolutely thrived, and, yeah, we left them alone after the pandemic restrictions ended...
Huh. It sounds like your perspective isn't just EU focused but N=1, based solely on your company.
The post-pandemic tech hiring boom was well documented both at the time and retrospectively. Lots of resources on it available with a quick web search.
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