U.S. Software Developer Employment for Ages 22–25 Drops 20% Since ChatGPT Launch as Senior Hiring Surges 20%

Employment among U.S. software developers aged 22 to 25 has fallen 20% since November 2022—when OpenAI launched ChatGPT—underscoring a widening structural divide between entry-level and experienced technology workers, according to payroll data tracked by the Stanford Digital Economy Lab and ADP Research.
Over the same period, developer employment in the 26-to-30 age cohort declined 4%. By contrast, headcount among experienced software developers expanded across older age brackets, rising 6% for workers aged 31 to 34, 11% for those aged 35 to 40, and surging 20% for the 41-to-49 cohort—pushing the cumulative employment growth gap between the youngest and oldest groups to 40 percentage points.
Broader labor market data reinforces the entry-level bottleneck across the technology sector, with new-graduate hiring at major tech firms down more than 50% from 2019 levels and unemployment among recent computer science graduates hovering between 6.1% and 7.0%. As generative AI coding tools and autonomous agents automate routine programming tasks, employers have increasingly concentrated hiring on senior engineers capable of supervising AI output and architecting complex systems.