Олександр Кузьменко Work 27 August 2025, 16:26

AI has made it harder for novice programmers to find jobs — study

A new study from Stanford University has shown the negative impact of artificial intelligence on the recruitment of junior software engineers.

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AI has made it harder for novice programmers to find jobs — study

A new study from Stanford University has shown the negative impact of artificial intelligence on the recruitment of junior software engineers.

Researchers Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar, and Ruyu Chen note that their data «may be partly influenced by factors other than generative AI,» but their findings are consistent with the hypothesis that generative AI began to affect employment at the entry-level, Business Insider reports .

Early-career workers, i.e., those aged 22 to 25, working in occupations most vulnerable to the impact of AI, experienced a 13% relative decline in employment after accounting for industry or company-wide shocks such as changes in interest rates.

The study found that entry-level Software Engineers and customer support workers are among the categories most exposed to AI.

In both occupations, the researchers found that employment among the youngest workers declined significantly after 2022, despite increases in other age groups. By July 2025, employment among developers aged 22 to 25 had fallen by almost 20% from its peak in late 2022, they found.

At the same time, employment remained stable or increased for workers in the same occupations who had more experience, as well as for workers in industries less exposed to the impact of AI.

The authors note that these trends were most evident in late 2022, after the launch of ChatGPT by OpenAI. Since then, even more AI-based chatbots have appeared.

The study authors noted that they also found employment growth in jobs where AI was used to supplement human work, rather than automate it.

We will remind you that the head of EPAM Ukraine, Stepan Mytish, believes that the coming years for juniors will be better than the previous two or three. «We have an ambitious goal to transfer even more juniors from our campus to permanent jobs (we do not take beginners from the market). A year ago, we invited 500 Junior specialists to the team. And this year we plan to cross the mark of 700 beginners,» he said.