Decimated Juniors: AI Crashes Hiring of Junior Programmers in the UK to 28%

The productivity paradox has taken on real economic shape. On September 12, 2026, the publication of British labor market data (Guardian University Guide) recorded a severe structural shift: the share of Computer Science graduates finding work as programmers plummeted from 40% to 28%.

Automation has hit the most vulnerable link. Artificial intelligence excels at writing boilerplate code, creating tests, and refactoring—the very tasks on which Junior developers historically cut their teeth. Senior engineers, armed with Agentic AI (like Cursor and Copilot), are handling the workload of entire departments. For the IT industry, this macroeconomic trend carries a delayed catastrophe: companies are saving on payroll "here and now," depriving the market of an entry point for new specialists. In 5 years, Big Tech will face a critical shortage of qualified engineers because there was simply no one to train them.

Source: The Guardian / University Guide