Stop Waiting for “Junior” Roles: The graduate 'Jobpocalypse'
The Empty Mall Effect
Open your favorite job board. Notice the silence? It feels like wandering an abandoned mall: the food court is still lit, a couple of anchor stores survive, but the ground floor, the kiosks, the first rung, is empty. Not because tech collapsed. Because the roles that used to teach beginners were the easiest to automate.
Data backs it up: entry level tech hiring cratered 73% in 2025 across 1,400 companies1. Seniors stayed, mid layers held, juniors vanished. That’s the Hollow Pyramid: solid top, dashed base. (Visual: a pyramid with strong mid and top layers, but a hollow, dashed out base.)
Why the Base Got Hollowed Out
Think of work as two piles:
Codified: repeatable, documented, easy to scope. CRUD UIs, unit tests, boilerplate, doc drafts. Perfect AI food. Tacit: messy, contextual, full of judgment. Debugging across services, trade offs, risk calls, ethics, stakeholder wrangling. Still human territory.
AI eats codified work, and magnifies tacit work. Seniors look superhuman. Juniors can’t get in the door. The on ramp burned down, and companies never rebuilt it2.
From the Intern’s Seat
I’m not speaking from a pulpit, I’m a design intern. Here’s what actually worked for me:
Ship small, public, and often. One redesign a week. A quick walkthrough video. Recruiters don’t read essays, they click prototypes. Expose the ugly constraints. Case studies aren’t dribbble candy. They show trade offs, compromises, and impact, even if it’s just “support tickets dropped by 10.” Use AI as a co designer, not autopilot. Draft, explore, stress test. Then verify with real humans. The verification tax is real3. Pack context. Persona, brand rules, constraints, edge cases. Feed that before you ask AI anything. Saves hours of cleanup. Go where it’s jagged. Internal tools, agent handoffs, error states, accessibility gaps. Messy = valuable. Valuable = someone cares.
The Experience Paradox, Upgraded
“You need experience to get experience” used to be an eye roll. Now it’s a structural failure. If every company outsources junior work to bots and poaches mid levels, we wake up in five years with no seniors to promote. Even automation maxi execs admit: pipelines matter. Without apprentices, industries collapse from the middle out4.
The Playbook: What Works Now
For Individuals
Pick AI human overlap problems. Privacy flows, error recovery, explainability dashboards. Tacit, not trivial. Build one flagship case study. Problem, constraints, process, results. Proof > polish. Run quick tests. Three tasks, three users, three changes. Fast cycles build credibility. Contribute to systems. Docs, tokens, accessibility sweeps. Even one merged pull request builds trust. Outreach small and sharp. Five sentences, one link, one question. Easy to answer. That’s how trust starts.
For Companies
Rebuild apprenticeships. Ninety day tracks with real deliverables and AI mentors wired into your tools. Instrument onboarding. Track time to first PR, rework rate, question closure time. Surface patterns with AI. Hire by skills, not pedigree. Samples and rubrics scale better than prestige filters. Keep human sized tickets. Let bots clear brush, but give juniors the scars that make seniors.
The New Definition of “Junior”
The old job, manual ticket taker, is gone. The new job is AI orchestrator: framing problems, setting constraints, chaining tools, verifying outputs, and explaining trade offs. That’s not science fiction. It’s learnable. And it’s more interesting than pushing CRUD buttons all day5.
Final Word
If you’re early in your career, stop waiting for a job board miracle. Build above the autocomplete line. Ship proof. Earn trust. Make yourself the kind of “junior” who isn’t replaceable, because you’re not doing the replaceable work.
And if you lead? Rebuild the rung beneath you.
Someone has to take your job later, or the whole ladder breaks.
What’s one “jagged” problem you’re tackling to build your own ladder? Share it, I’d love to see how others are navigating this shift.
References & Field Notes
Market & Labor Data
BLS Occupational Outlook — Computer & IT (2024–2034): overall growth, ~317k openings/yr Indeed Hiring Lab — Tech postings 36% below Feb 2020 Indeed via FRED — Software Dev Postings Index
Entry Level Contraction
Ravio Tech Jobs Report 2025, entry level hiring down 73.4% Sifted summary of Ravio findings
Early Career Impact in AI Exposed Roles
Stanford Digital Economy Lab — Canaries in the Coal Mine? Full paper PDF ADP Research recap
Wage Premium for AI Skills
PwC 2025 Global AI Jobs Barometer, 56% premium PwC full report PDF
Executive Viewpoints
Dario Amodei (Anthropic) on entry level job displacement Jensen Huang (NVIDIA) on AI adoption Matt Garman (AWS) on replacing juniors with AI
Upskilling Resources
AWS re/Start, free cloud training Google AI Essentials Microsoft AI Skills Navigator
About Nischal Skanda
Nischal is a technology enthusiast and designer passionate about the intersection of AI, cognitive science, and human-computer interaction. He explores how emerging technologies impact our daily lives and shares insights on building better digital experiences.
