Preparing Entry-Level Job Seekers
Wealthy parents are hiring career coaches for their kids | LinkedIn
- Post-secondary education doesn’t seem to be enough to land entry-level jobs these days as wealthy parents are hiring career coaches for their kids
- The career-coaching industry reports that a quarter of coaches now consider students and new grads core-clientele… when they were just 5% of clientele back in 2019
- School career centers are also available for free, offering similar services
Doom and Gloom
Inside the AI Index: 12 Takeaways from the 2026 Report | Stanford HAI
- Many articles and news pieces on junior developer jobs quote the Standford University’s annual AI Index report, specifically the section titled “An Entry-Level Squeeze”
- They zoom in on this quote:
- “Employment among software developers aged 22–25 has plummeted nearly 20% since 2024, even as their older colleagues' headcount grows.”
Entry-Level Positions Are Growing
Entry-level job market is showing signs of recovery | LinkedIn
- Employers are planning on ramping up graduate hiring by 5.6% this spring (in comparison to one year ago)
- Major companies include IBM and McKinsey
7 Companies That Are Increasing Entry-Level Engineer Hires - Business Insider
- Several companies are committing to hiring entry-level engineers including:
- LinkedIn
- IBM
- Cognizant
- Cloudflare
- Dropbox
- ThreatLocker
- Invisible Technologies
- Some of the main reasons include:
- Concern for the future of the industry (no juniors… no new seniors)
- AI-fluency
- Entry-level developers are steeped in AI right form the beginning
- From Dropbox’s Chief People Officer: “comes to entry-level workers using AI, "it's like they're biking in the Tour de France, and the rest of us still have training wheels,”
- Matt’s Takeaways:
- AI-fluent newbies could help senior devs use more AI while the senior developers can help juniors level up their coding knowledge
- If AI is the “the future” then leadership would naturally want workers that aren’t stuck in “non-AI methods”
Navigating The Chaos
Companies are Rehiring Developers, what about Juniors?
- Stefan Mischook on YouTube covered companies rehiring developers, touching on what Juniors need to do
- What he covers:
- The eb-and-flow of technology:
- As a new tool comes out (AI in this case)
- There’s a lot of hype around it and it’s misused due to that hype and inexperience with such a new tool (AI is being overused with no constraints, it can’t just create all software from a single prompt - it needs guardrails and specific guidance from a person experienced with software)
- We’ve been working towards coding less for years
- As coding languages have evolved over the years, abstraction layers were added to make coding easier
- For example, jQuery abstracts away some vanilla JS
- AI is just the next step in “coding less” or “adding abstractions”
- The importance of learning coding basics and then learning AI because that’s what job postings want right now
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