Study: AI is already erasing entry-level coding jobs

There's been a lot of talk in recent years about AI replacing the role of humans in the workforce. It's been unclear exactly if or when that would happen on a broader scale. However, this is already happening in one industry in particular: The tech industry.

Researchers at the venture capital firm SignalFire recently released their "State of Talent Report" for 2025, which analyzes hiring and employment trends across the tech industry.

The big takeaway, according to SignalFire's report, is that new graduate hiring has declined. And the downturn isn't across the board. Hiring levels for experienced roles like mid- and senior-level positions have remained strong, while entry-level tech jobs have taken a big hit.

According to the report, recent graduates made up just 7 percent of hires last year at Big Tech companies, which is down 25 percent from the previous year. It's not going any better at startups either, with new graduates making up just 6 percent of new hires, down 11 percent from 2023.

The report makes mention of a few factors that could contribute to this downturn of entry-level jobs in tech, so it's not entirely the result of AI. Interest rates are much higher than they were during the tech boom during the height of the COVID pandemic. This, combined with other issues, has led to smaller funding rounds for startups and Big Tech companies looking to cut costs.

However, even though there are other factors, AI is a significant factor. 

If there's one thing AI has been pretty good at, it's the more mundane, basic coding tasks that an entry-level worker would likely be assigned. In addition, these tasks can also easily be automated using AI coding tools. In recent months, Google released a new AI coding tool called Jules (which is free to use, for now), while ChatGPT and Anthropic's newest models are particularly good at coding. And Mark Zuckerberg recently said he hopes that AI will write half of Meta's code by 2026.

Even experienced programmers have been affected by the shift to AI. As reported in a recent piece in The New York Times, workers at companies like Amazon say that AI has transformed their jobs into a factory-like assembly line. Other coders welcome AI, as it has freed them up from doing monotonous coding work.

Furthermore, companies have been looking to expand their AI programs and hire more roles in the machine learning and data engineering categories. These tend to be more technical roles and are usually filled by those with more experience than a recent graduate.

On top of that, this reconfiguration to focus on AI has led to less hiring in not just entry-level coding jobs but also non-technical jobs as well. According to SignalFire, many recent graduates break into the industry through non-technical roles like product marketing, recruiting, design, and sales. Companies are simply not hiring as much for those roles as they used to.