> the _perception_ that they can/will replace developers is causing a major disruption in hiring practices.

Bingo.

And it’s causing the careers of a majority of juniors to experience fatal delays. Juniors need to leap into their careers and build up a good head of steam by demonstrating acquired experience, or they will wander off into other industries and fail to acquire said experience.

And when others who haven’t even gone through training yet see how juniors have an abysmally hard time finding a job, this will discourage them from even considering the industry before they ever begin to learn how to code.

But when no-one is hiring such that even students reconsider their career choice, this “failure to launch” will cause a massive developer shortage in the next 5-15 years, to the point where I believe entire governments will have this as a policy pain point.

After all, when companies are loathe to actually conduct any kind of on-the-job training, and demand 2-5 years of experience in an whole IT department’s worth of skills for “entry level” jobs, an entire generation of potential applicants with a fraction of that (or none at all) will cause the industry to have figurative kittens.

I mean, it will be the industry’s own footgun that has hurt them so badly. I would posit it may even become a leggun. The schadenfreude will be copious and well-deserved. But it’s going to produce massive amounts of economic pain.

> Juniors need to leap into their careers and build up a good head of steam by demonstrating acquired experience,

Junior devs at least have the option of building a portfolio of usefully software on their own machine at home, while eating ramens.

They can build websites for mom'n'pop stores. They can participate into open source projects. Etc, etc...

I dread the people who won't get jobs into other fields because managers have been told by corporate that "we don't need people, chatgpt can do everything".