According to CNBC, since Anthropic's Claude Code debuted in February 2025, job postings for software development in the US have risen rather than fallen. Indeed Hiring Lab data shows that during this period software job postings grew nearly 15% against the trend, while the overall job market shrank 7%. McKinsey's North America chairman Kwech is not surprised: when the total amount of code written by enterprises hits record highs, demand for developers remains strong in the AI era.
However, the growth is highly concentrated in senior and AI-related positions — from the 5th month of 2025 to the 5th month of the following year, senior roles absorbed 71% of the incremental software hiring, while jobs with "AI" in the title accounted for 37%. In other words, the top of the pyramid is expanding while the base is shrinking.
Juniors Squeezed Out, the Talent Pipeline Sounds the Alarm
This structural divide has hit fresh graduates directly. Stanford's 2026 AI Index shows that after the rise of generative AI, employment for the 22 to 25 age group in AI-related fields fell 16%, and early-career software developers saw an even larger decline of about 20%. US Bureau of Labor Statistics data over the same period corroborates this: from 2023 to 2025, data scientists grew 36% while data entry fell nearly 20%. Indeed expert Pugh reminds students to master AI tools but not to neglect core skills like communication and leadership; a sharper warning comes from the talent pipeline itself—"today's entry-level workers are tomorrow's senior experts; without investment now, companies will have no generals to deploy in ten years."
In the long run it is not a dead end: the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that from 2025 to 2035 the total number of software developers will still grow 10%, from 1.72 million to 1.89 million.