Software developer job postings are climbing. Senior roles lead the surge. AI-focused positions multiply. Entry-level jobs vanish. This makes perfect sense if you've never thought about it for more than three seconds.
AI automates coding now. Companies celebrate. Press releases fly. Then someone asks who's going to debug the AI's work. Silence. Turns out the machine that writes beautiful Python also writes beautiful disasters. Someone needs to fix them. That someone costs $180K and has opinions about Kubernetes.
Entry-level developers face a bloodbath. Junior postings drop because why train humans when you have ChatGPT. Except ChatGPT can't attend sprint planning or explain why it used seven nested loops. So companies hire senior developers to manage the AI. These senior developers then spend forty hours a week rewriting what the AI produced in forty seconds. Efficiency.
The AI-focused roles are the best part. Job description: "Manage AI coding tools and integrate outputs into production." Translation: "Clean up after the robot and pretend this was faster than hiring three juniors." But three juniors would need mentoring. The AI just needs someone to apologize to clients when it hallucinates an entire authentication system.
Retail traders see this headline and buy Palantir. They read "AI" and "job growth" and assume both things point up forever. They don't register that the jobs exist because AI failed at the one task it was supposed to master. They certainly don't notice the entry-level market collapsing. Why would they? Most of them still think Python is a snake.
The rebound in senior hiring proves one truth: companies would rather pay six figures to clean up automation than admit the automation needs cleaning up. Which means software development has achieved perfect corporate form. Maximum spending, minimum efficiency, and a press release calling it innovation.
Photo by Hitesh Choudhary on Unsplash
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