I don't think this has much to do with AI and has a lot to do with the current grads declaring their major 4-5 years ago when a confluence of factors crashed together to make programming a job straight from utopia for a short while.
The end result of this will be dirt pay for juniors to weed out who is in it for the passion and who is in it for the money.
Considering that ChatGPT was just one month old at the time of data collection, I think that is fairly safe to say.
> major 4-5 years ago
6-7 years ago, really. 4-5 years ago would realistically put us more like in the timeframe of now.
> a confluence of factors crashed together to make programming a job straight from utopia for a short while.
Things weren't horrible in 2018-2019, to be sure, but there were already signs of a coming downturn at that time. That, granted, was temporarily reverted thanks to said confluence of factors, but that came later.
The end result of this will be dirt pay for juniors to weed out who is in it for the passion and who is in it for the money.