Labour market for early-career developers is shot

A recent Stanford paper states there’s about a 20% relative decline in employment for early-career software developers.

The unemployment rate for college graduates has risen above the rate for non-graduates.

Employment declines are concentrated in occupations where AI is likely to automate, not augment, human labor, and that explains why software development is disproportionately affected.

Even if AI’s net productivity gain at the org level is under 5%, its impact on hiring and entry-level roles in software is much larger.

The AI Index Report shows a dramatic jump on SWE-Bench: AI systems solved 4.4% of coding problems in 2023, rising to 71.7% in 2024.

That said, AI struggles to replace tacit knowledge with the idiosyncratic tips, tricks and judgment that accumulate with experience.

Read the full paper here.