Someone I know sent out forty applications in two weeks. What came back: two automated rejections and the sound of silence so loud they asked me to email them, just to check their inbox still worked. It did (turns out it's the system that was broken 😞😎)

The tech job market runs like a rigged claw machine (is there any other kind?). You drop in your coin, watch the claw grip that cool Spiderman plushie, then conveniently forget how to hold just before it gets to the chute. Entry-level dev postings dropped from 43% of all software roles in 2018 to just 28% by 2024 (Burning Glass Institute), and a Harvard study of 62 million resumes found junior hiring plummeted the second companies started rolling out generative AI in 2023 — while senior hiring actually climbed. So now mid-level engineers are sweating away at the claw machine, playing for a prize clearly marked for someone three years greener (yes, the Spiderman plushie).

Before you crown AI the villain of the whole arcade: a METR study found the tools actually slow down experienced developers working in code they already know cold.

So I asked senior engineers from Apple, AWS, and Yelp to tell me who's still walking away with something. Ingrid Zhao (senior SWE, Apple) says it's less "AI replaced me" and more "my company stopped paying to train anyone." Dan Ford, who did 15 years as a principal engineer at AWS, is blunter — nobody was ever safe, we just forgot tech was always this volatile.

What we get into:

• Why junior hiring cratered while senior hiring climbed, and what training budgets have to do with it

• The three kinds of developers still getting hired, according to engineers who've actually done the hiring

• Why knowing one industry cold beats another certification AI could've written for you

• The unglamorous roles — buried under titles like "platform engineering" — that are quietly desperate for candidates

The machine's not rigged to screw you specifically. It's rigged against everyone still feeding it quarters.