"When publicly available AI tools first arrived, Malan says the expectation was that jobs like call-center roles would be most vulnerable. “But what nobody predicted was that the biggest impact by far would be on programmers,” a trend he attributes to the relatively solitary and highly structured nature of the work. He notes that, while other economic conditions also factor into the job market, the pace of programmer employment decline has accelerated since generative AI came on the scene. In the United States, overall programmer employment fell a dramatic 27.5 percent between 2023 and 2025, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics. But employment for software developers—a distinct, more design-oriented position in the government data—only fell 0.3 percent in the same period.
At the same time, some positions, such as information security analyst and AI engineer are actually growing, Malan says. “There’s been this pretty dramatic readjustment of the job landscape, even with as narrow a field as IT. Within IT, some jobs have exploded, like InfoSec analysts have grown in double digits, whereas programmers declined double digits” over the past few years, he says. (Eventually, Malan says he expects generative AI to affect all intellectual work.)
Job responsibilities also appear to be changing. For recent graduates pursuing roles labeled as software-engineering jobs, “they’re not necessarily just coding,” says Jamie Grant, senior associate director for the engineering team at the University of Pennsylvania’s career services. “There tends to be so much higher-order thinking and knowledge of the software-development life cycle,” as well as a need to work with other parties, such as understanding user and client demands, she says."
https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-effect-entry-level-jobs
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