Junior coders are down 19% while total dev jobs grew 10%
Laurie Voss zoomed his employment chart down to a single age band and found the fire: US developers aged 22-25 have lost nearly a fifth of their jobs since late 2022, while every older cohort kept growing.
Developers aged 22-25 have lost 19% of their jobs since late 2022, even as total US developer headcount grew 10% to 1.69 million. Laurie Voss argues the collapse is hiding inside a boom.
His flip: 36 million people joined GitHub last year, and most never call themselves programmers. The job title is dissolving into a skill.
The thread splits on whether the charts even carry AI's fingerprints.
The ladder's bottom rung is on fire
Laurie Voss opens with the chart that names the piece: since their late-2022 peak, developers aged 22-25 have lost 19% of their jobs, while the 41-49 cohort gained 14%. Entry-level postings fell 28%, and new CS graduates now face 6.1% unemployment. The damage sharpened across 2024-2025 as agentic coding arrived, not when ChatGPT first shipped.
The averages bury it. Total US developer employment actually grew 10%, from 1.53 to 1.69 million between May 2022 and 2025, because juniors are only 8% of the workforce. By title, computer programmers fell 16% and web developers 11%, while data scientists rose 12%.
So where did the growth go? Voss points to a hidden boom: 36 million new GitHub accounts in a year, most using Copilot immediately, and platforms like Lovable and Vercel reporting that 60-63% of their users are non-developers. The App Store, in eight-year decline, saw iOS submissions jump 24% in 2025 and 80% year over year in Q1 2026.
Then Voss corrects his own 2025 prediction. The new programmers are real, but they arrive as marketers and founders who write software without ever claiming the title. Programming is becoming a capability, like typing once was, not a job. The cost is a broken apprenticeship: juniors no longer get hired to write reviewed code, and a Veracode study found 45% of AI-generated code fails basic OWASP security tests.
Does the chart even show AI?
In the thread, the sharpest pushback questions the evidence itself. One reader who traced the red line back through the timeline saw the decline starting too early.
"The 22-25 red line had plateaued before the release of ChatGPT and was already trending downwards… I cannot really see how the precipitous decline between say Jan 2023 and Jan 2024 can be attributed mainly to AI." — a commenter reading the first chart
The dataset's start date drew the same suspicion.
"The Stanford dataset starts in 2021 (covid, work from home, low interest rates, govt stimulus), which is one of the weirdest economic times in the last 100 years." — a commenter who checked the data's baseline
From the hiring side, the story looked less like AI and more like a talent glut left over from the 2021-2024 spree.
"I've interviewed a ton of junior engineers… 80% of them should reconsider their career paths. They glaringly cheat during interviews, they can't answer basic software questions." — a director of robotics engineering
Others read the economics coldly, arguing that offshoring plus a chatbot beats a local junior on price.
"Why hire a junior software engineer when you can replace them with an offshore remote mid engineer at 1/10th of the cost and give them Claude?" — a commenter who forecast the 2025 layoffs back in 2024
The unsettling extension: if the bottom rung burns, the fire need not stop there. One reader argued the same logic that erased juniors will climb to seniors and staff engineers next, making a rebuilt ladder pointless. Voss wants the on-ramp restored before the industry runs short of leaders by 2036. The thread is not sure there will be a ladder left to climb.
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