I am not really seeing how the first chart can be construed as AI disrupting the junior job market...

The 22-25 red line had plateaued before the release of ChatGPT and was already trending downwards by the time ChatGPT appeared.

Additionally, it took a quite a while before vibe and agentic coding appeared and gained traction, and I cannot really see how the precipitous decline between say Jan 2023 and Jan 2024 can be attributed mainly to AI.

The "other" reasons mentioned later in the post seem much more convincing.

I was just about to comment the same. It’s like a hammer in need of a nail. Here’s where ChatGPT released and jobs dovetails so it must be true.

It will also be interesting to see 2019 through 2021. There was a glut of hiring post COVID and companies have to think about every dollar they spend post ZIRP.

Junior level employees are always the worst off during a market downturn, and employers need to justify to shareholders why they are laying off or not hiring, because a shrinking business is worth less than a growing one, so they'll come up with an excuse why they don't actually need employees. Currently, that excuse is AI.

Indeed. Their single most important piece of evidence not providing any strong indication the decline is from LLMs does not bode well for their argument. If it were the case you would expect the slope to become more negative with increasing LLM capability, and it in fact does the opposite.