I can talk about my own experiences. About a year and half ago I dropped everything to get into tech, a couple years out from completing my civil engineering degree because I hated it. I worked very intensely day in day out building many projects, and I had one project go extremely viral, changing my life. That led to me getting hired at a small AI start up, where I learned an enormous amount, but 9 months later, I still got let go as work had dried up for the product I was working on. Not much I was able to do there unfortunately. Still, I really do believe that due to AI there was just far less work that I could meaningful contribute to, speaking as someone who is more junior in the field. Little bug fixes here and there, organization, grunt work tasks, etc - those are completely automated now. The rungs on the ladder of meaningful progression are growing increasingly wider as eac day goes by. A decade ago I think big tech companies would be fighting to get me on board, but now it's different, That said, to end this comment on some silver lining - I know someone who currently works at a big lab who got an enormous amount of work xp by contributing on OSS projects till he became more senior, so maybe there's more to it. Also one other thought - companies will still have job postings for juniors because a "junior" can be an MIT IOI gold medalist.