Pulling Up the Ladder
When I wrote about the uncomfortable parts of building software with AI two weeks ago, one stat sat with me longer than the others. Stanford's analysis of ADP payroll data (the latest revision, November 2025) shows that employment for workers aged 22–25 in the most AI-exposed occupations has dropped about 16% since late 2022, whilst employment for older workers in the same occupations has stayed essentially flat [1]. For software developers specifically, the 22–25 cohort is down closer to 20% from its late-2022 peak [2]. The senior end of the curve is doing fine, but the bottom end is being quietly demolished.
I'm on the comfortable side of that split, since I'm nearly in my forties with almost two decades of governance, audit, and security experience behind me, and the way I work with AI assumes I already know how to read code that an assistant has just produced. I'm not the person who would have been competing for a junior dev role at a Calgary consultancy in 2026. But I would have been that person twenty years ago, and the version of me who got his first IT job in Johannesburg in the early 2000s would not have had a route in if the entry-level work I did then was being done by AI now. So I think it's worth being honest about what's happening, since the people best placed to talk about it are mostly people who don't have to live with the consequences.
The Stanford paper is called "Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence" (Brynjolfsson, Chandar, and Chen, 2025) [1]. It uses ADP payroll micro-data covering several million workers across tens of thousands of US firms, which is a more granular dataset than the standard BLS releases. The headline finding, after controlling for firm-level shocks, is that workers aged 22–25 in the most AI-exposed occupations have seen a 16% relative decline in employment since the late-2022 onset of widespread generative AI. The earlier draft of the paper (data through July 2025) had 13%; the November update extended the series to October 2025 and the number grew [3].