Go look at job boards. Filter for junior or entry-level developer positions. Notice anything?
There are barely any. And the ones that exist have requirements that would have been mid-level a few years ago. Two years of experience for an entry-level role. A portfolio of shipped projects. Knowledge of seventeen different technologies. The junior developer job, as a category, is disappearing.
We have not admitted this yet. Bootcamps are still selling the dream. Universities are still churning out CS graduates. Everyone talks about the skills shortage.
But the jobs that used to absorb new developers, the ones where you learned on the job while delivering value, are evaporating. AI ate them. And we are pretending it did not happen.
Here is what a junior developer used to offer: time and enthusiasm in exchange for training. You hired someone cheap, taught them how things worked, and after a year or two they became productive. The economics made sense because the alternative was hiring expensive seniors for work that did not require seniority.
AI broke this equation. A senior developer with AI assistance can now do the work of a senior plus two juniors. The grunt work that juniors used to handle, the simple bug fixes, the boilerplate code, the repetitive tasks, AI does that now. Faster. Cheaper. Without needing mentorship or making learning mistakes.
Why would a company hire a junior when a senior with Copilot is more productive and requires less management overhead? The maths stopped working. So the hiring stopped.
This creates a terrifying problem that nobody wants to talk about. If there are no junior roles, how do people become seniors?
The traditional path was: graduate, get junior job, learn for a few years, become mid-level, learn more, become senior. Each stage built on the last. You could not skip steps because each step taught you things you needed for the next.
Without junior jobs, that pipeline breaks. The new developers have nowhere to go. They cannot get experience because nobody will give them experience. They cannot demonstrate competence because nobody will let them try.
Meanwhile, the existing seniors are getting older. They will retire eventually. And there will be nobody to replace them because we eliminated the entry point to the profession.
I feel genuinely bad for people in bootcamps right now. They are paying money and spending months learning skills for jobs that barely exist. The bootcamp marketing has not caught up to reality. They still show employment statistics from 2021 like those numbers mean anything today.
The bootcamp model worked when companies were desperate for anyone who could code. Take a twelve-week course, learn the basics, get hired, learn the rest on the job. That was a real path. It worked for thousands of people.
It does not work anymore. The companies are not desperate. AI has reduced the need for human volume. The bootcamp graduates are competing for a shrinking pool of entry-level positions against people with actual computer science degrees and portfolios of real projects.
Some bootcamp graduates will still make it. The ones with exceptional talent or connections or luck. But the median outcome has gotten much worse, and nobody is being honest about that.
If you are trying to break into development today, the path is harder but not impossible. You need to come in looking more like a mid-level than a junior. That means building real projects, not tutorial projects. Real things that solve real problems, ideally for real users. Put them on GitHub. Deploy them. Write about what you learned.
Learn to work with AI, not against it. The developers getting hired know how to use Copilot and Claude effectively. They can produce more output because they have leverage. This is a skill that can differentiate you from other candidates.
Find alternative entry points. Freelancing for small businesses. Contributing to open source. Building in public and attracting attention. The traditional job application funnel is broken, so you need to go around it.
Network relentlessly. Most jobs come through connections now. Cold applications into job board black holes do not work. You need to know people who can vouch for you and refer you.
None of this is fair. The path used to be: learn some skills, apply for jobs, get hired. That path barely exists now. The new path requires entrepreneurial effort just to get your first role.
Senior developers do not want to admit this because it means acknowledging that their industry is pulling up the ladder. Companies do not want to admit it because they like the image of creating jobs, not eliminating them. Bootcamps cannot admit it because their business model depends on the old reality.
So everyone pretends. The skills shortage narrative persists even as entry-level hiring collapses. Companies post job listings they have no intention of filling because it looks good for morale. Bootcamps keep enrolling students and pointing to outlier success stories.
Meanwhile, a generation of would-be developers is stuck in limbo. They did everything they were told. They learned the skills. They built the portfolios. And they cannot get hired because the jobs do not exist anymore.
Junior developer jobs are gone. We have not admitted it yet. But the people trying to break in have noticed, even if nobody else wants to talk about it.