It’s a tough time to be a young coder.
Early-career professionals across the board are having a hard time finding work right now, and new research from Stanford University shows the impact AI is having on certain professions.
Researchers Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar, and Ruyu Chen wrote that while “the facts we document may in part be influenced by factors other than generative AI, our results are consistent with the hypothesis that generative AI has begun to affect entry-level employment,” according to their new paper published Tuesday.
Early-career workers, defined as those ages 22 to 25, in occupations most exposed to AI saw a 13% relative decline in employment after controlling for industry- or companywide shocks, like interest rate changes.
The paper listed software engineers and customer service workers as some of the workers in the most AI-exposed professions.
In both occupations, the researchers noticed employment of the youngest workers dropped considerably after 2022, despite growing for other age groups. By July 2025, employment for 22- to 25-year-old developers fell by nearly 20% compared to its peak in late 2022, they said.
Meanwhile, employment remained stable or grew for workers in the same jobs who had more experience, and for workers in industries less exposed to AI.
The authors observed these patterns most acutely beginning in late 2022, they wrote. Notably, OpenAI’s ChatGPT had its breakout launch in November 2022, and more AI chatbots have since followed.
But AI isn’t entirely bad news for workers. The authors said that they found employment growth in jobs where AI was used to augment a person’s work, not automate it.
The authors drew upon data from ADP, the largest payroll processing firm in America, writing that they had records for between 3.5 and 5 million workers a month for their main analysis sample.
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Many tech companies have slowed hiring from a pandemic-era boom.
An Indeed Hiring Lab report in July found that tech job opportunities have been harder to come by since mid-2023 after peaking in early 2022. The report said that “automation of some of the tasks performed in these roles could be driving their drop in job postings.”
The report said other factors, including “less supportive economic conditions” like ZIRP, coming out of the pandemic-era tech hiring boom, are also at play.
Separately, a July analysis from the Burning Glass Institute found that the unemployment rate for Gen Z and younger millennials in computer and math occupations has increased from pre-pandemic rates in 2018 and 2019.
Tech executives have hinted, and in some cases outright said, that AI poses some threat to their industry’s talent.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in January that his company and others will likely this year “have an AI that can effectively be a sort of midlevel engineer that you have at your company.”
Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski said his company stopped hiring in 2023, saying he believes “AI can already do all of the jobs that we as humans do.”
Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke told managers earlier this year that before asking for new hires, they’d need to prove AI couldn’t do the job in question better.
Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn delivered a similar message to his staff in an April memo, when he said the company would “gradually stop using contractors to do work that AI can handle.”
