Comment: AI is eating up junior jobs – and our future?
Companies are cutting junior positions and hoping for AI – but without young talent, there will be no senior developers of tomorrow. A risky game.
(Image: Me dia/Shutterstock.com)
Anyone browsing through job advertisements in the IT sector these days will come across a clear pattern: senior developer wanted—with ten years of professional experience, in-depth knowledge of numerous frameworks, and, ideally, practical experience in machine learning. Junior developer? Not a chance!
The latest figures confirm this impression, because while senior positions are only declining slightly, junior positions in the IT sector are shrinking dramatically. Entry-level positions in Germany have fallen by more than half since 2020, according to the job portal Indeed. And this in an industry that has been preaching to us for years that there is a shortage of young talent. Irony of the digital age. We are eliminating the jobs from which this new generation can emerge in the first place.
Thinking too short-term
Of course, artificial intelligence delivers impressive productivity boosts. It generates boilerplate code in seconds, writes automated tests, and suggests bug fixes or documents interfaces almost autonomously. Routine tasks that were usually carried out by juniors can now be implemented more efficiently with a prompt. But there is precisely one area where AI remains blind: training people, giving them experience, and allowing them to grow into experienced specialists.
Companies that believe they can use AI to compensate for expensive entry-level positions in the short term are sawing at the branch they are sitting on. Because without the junior developers of today, there will be no senior engineers of tomorrow—no software architects, no tech leads, no CTOs.
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Recognizing and seizing opportunities
What does this mean for young people? Getting started will be harder, but not impossible. Those who get to grips with AI-supported development early on can set themselves apart from others. Companies must learn to use AI to create not only efficiency but also learning spaces. Because if you don't involve junior staff today, you won't have any skilled workers tomorrow.
The future of development lies not only in more efficient programming but also in the ability to develop strategies, design systems, and control these very AIs—tasks that cannot be mastered alone or without experience.
So if the IT labor market in this country is not to become a dead end, we urgently need a rethink: less fear of AI doing work faster, more courage to invest in young talent. Because the biggest upheaval that could threaten us is not AI. It is the lack of people who have to learn to work with it.
(mdo)
