> junior developer employment drops by about 9-10% within six quarters, while senior employment barely budges. Big tech hired 50% fewer fresh graduates over the past three years.

This study showing 9-10% drop is odd[1] and I'm not sure about their identification critria.

> We identify GenAI adoption by detecting job postings that explicitly seek workers to implement or integrate GenAI technologies into firm workflows.

Based on that MIT study it seems like 90+% of these projects fail. So we could easily be seeing an effect where firms posting these GenAI roles are burning money on the projects in a way that displaces investment in headcount.

The point about "BigTech" hiring 50% fewer grads is almost orthogonal. All of these companies are shifting hiring towards things where new grads are unlikely to add value, building data centers and frontier work.

Moreover the TCJA of 2017 caused software developers to not count for R&D tax write offs (I'm oversimplifying) starting in 2022. This surely has more of an effect than whatever "GenAI integrator roles" postings correlates to.

[1] https://download.ssrn.com/2025/11/6/5425555.pdf

AI became very popular suddenly. This is something that wasn't in anyone's budget. I believe cost savings from hiring freezes and layoffs are to pay for AI projects and infrastructure.

Hiring was booming until about 2020 though.