“AI is disrupting everything”: Where do entry-level tech jobs go now?

The impact AI is making on the world’s workforce is being felt across every industry, but perhaps nowhere more acutely than in software development and the broader technology sector.

Companies like OpenAI and Google are already redefining what senior technical roles look like: forward deployed engineers — technical generalists who sit between the AI model and the customer, translating complex capabilities into working deployments — are emerging as one of the most sought-after roles in the industry.

Elsewhere, AI-generated code is creating review bottlenecks that are changing what engineering teams must do day-to-day. And entry-level programming jobs — the traditional on-ramp into a software career — are looking increasingly precarious.

“AI is disrupting everything. Models continue to grow in their abilities, and their impact on the tech talent market needs to be properly assessed.”

A report released this month from the Linux Foundation sprinkles a little data on what is often a vibes-driven conversation, and the picture is more nuanced than either side of the debate tends to acknowledge.

The entry-level squeeze

The Linux Foundation surveyed nearly 400 hiring and training managers across Europe and other major markets and found that AI is driving a 27% net increase in tech hiring across Europe. But that headline figure obscures something important: Junior roles are bucking the trend, with European organizations reporting a 3% contraction in entry-level hiring for technical roles — even as the rest of the world sees that category grow by 14%.

The report offers no definitive explanation for why Europe might be diverging from the rest of the world on junior hiring, but it does note that Europe lags on several broader AI readiness measures — including lower deployment of core AI infrastructure, more acute understaffing in cybersecurity, and slower adoption across the technology stack that underpins production AI.

Thierry Carrez, general manager of Linux Foundation Europe, ties the talent question to a broader push for European technological independence — a movement that spans everything from cloud infrastructure and AI development to data sovereignty and the drive to reduce reliance on Big Tech.

“There can be no digital sovereignty without local tech talent,” Carrez says in the report. “AI is disrupting everything. Models continue to grow in their abilities, and their impact on the tech talent market needs to be properly assessed.”

While the narrative that AI is wiping out entry-level tech jobs has taken hold, Sead Ahmetovic, CEO and co-founder of WeAreDevelopers, a global developer hiring and events platform, argues the reality is more complicated, telling The New Stack that the alarm around the contraction in junior hiring misses what’s actually happening.

“Entry-level roles aren’t vanishing, but the work that used to define them is.”

“The panic is aimed at the wrong target,” Ahmetovic says. “Entry-level roles aren’t vanishing, but the work that used to define them is. AI now handles many of the tasks junior developers learned on, so the old definition of a junior role is becoming obsolete. The new one looks completely different and demands a different skill set from day one.”

The report’s own authors acknowledge as much, noting that if the contraction is sustained, it likely reflects AI absorbing the tasks that have traditionally served as entry points into the profession.

“Organizations may be reducing junior hiring while increasing demand for mid- and senior-level roles that require judgment, contextual reasoning, and oversight of AI systems,” the report states — raising questions about how the junior role itself needs to be redefined before the pipeline can be rebuilt.

Put simply, it might just be a case of the European industry needing time to catch up — companies have been slower to redefine these roles than AI has been to hollow them out.

“Everyone is being pushed up the stack”

The pressure on skills isn’t confined to the junior end of the market. The Linux Foundation report found that nearly two-thirds of European organizations say they have significant capability gaps in AI security and risk management — the area of greatest concern across the survey, outranking gaps in technical AI skills. Demand is also growing for cross-domain talent, and that combination is in short supply at any level — a pattern Ahmetovic says he sees playing out directly in hiring.

“The real issue is the skills gap, and it runs across every level.”

“The real issue is the skills gap, and it runs across every level,” he says. “Everyone in tech is being pushed up the stack. Companies want people who combine software engineering, AI fluency, security awareness, product thinking and business understanding, and that mix is scarce at any level.”

That profile — the technically grounded generalist who can operate across engineering, AI, and business contexts — is already emerging as one of the most sought-after roles in tech, with forward-deployed engineers among the clearest examples: Roles that sit at the intersection of deep technical capability and customer-facing judgment.

Fintech giant Ramp is taking that model into the enterprise, announcing on Wednesday a new service that sends its own engineers directly into client finance teams to build and deploy AI agents — a bet that the gap between AI capability and real-world deployment can only be closed with human expertise on the ground.

Ori Daniel, who’s heading up Ramp’s new Applied AI Solutions service, says the impetus came from one key observation: “The bottleneck was never the model but the painstaking upfront work that has to happen to make data and business context legible to agents,” Daniel writes in a blog post.

The pipeline problem

None of this dissolves the entry-level question. The report found that organizations are 3.7 times more likely to invest in training existing staff than to hire new employees, and that when they do hire, new employees take more than half as long to become fully productive — with nearly a quarter of that time gone within six months. On a short time horizon, the economics of bringing in junior talent are getting harder to justify, even as the longer-term need for that pipeline remains unchanged.

Ahmetovic’s argument is that framing this as a binary — hire juniors or don’t — is the wrong question entirely.

“The smart answer isn’t to cut the junior pipeline but to redesign it. Upskill people faster and build a clearer path from entry-level talent to real engineering responsibility.”

“What stays true is that you can’t grow a senior engineer without hiring a junior one first,” he says. “The smart answer isn’t to cut the junior pipeline but to redesign it. Upskill people faster and build a clearer path from entry-level talent to real engineering responsibility.”

What does the new junior role actually look like?

The Linux Foundation’s data points roughly in the same direction: Among European organizations, investment in technical training ranked higher than compensation as a tool for retaining staff, cited by 93% of respondents. The appetite for development is there. What’s missing is a clear picture of what the new junior role actually looks like — and the urgency to build training pipelines that match where the industry is heading before the gap between the roles that exist and the people who can fill them becomes harder to close.

It’s worth noting that these findings should be read with some caution. The survey draws heavily on organizations already active in open-source and AI adoption — a self-selecting group likely to report more positive outcomes than the broader market. It captures how relatively AI-engaged companies expect hiring to evolve, not how the European tech labor market as a whole is likely to move.