As to juniors, first time I heard someone brag about AI removing the need to hire juniors was in 2022. every junior I know is struggling to find work. It's not hard to find reddit threads with people sharing their experience to that effect. The fact that some do get hired is not evidence to the contrary.
They also struggled in 2000, and in 2008. There was no AI at the time.
I dont think much has changed. It has always been who you know. I was fortunate enough to have an uncle.
Every single new hire i see is either the child of two fango mango parents or a visa. I rarely ever talk to someone with a different background.
In startup world, everyone had theater degrees or dropped out. It was amazing. I miss it.
Me, personally, a text adventure game filled with bugs that I did not know how to fix. (I realise only decades later that the index into array I was using to store the location references was probably incorrectly calculated when I moved sometimes.)
I learned a lot of programming from books like these (official links, not pirated):
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bxv0SsvibDMTdGY0VEQzSGZnelU...
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bxv0SsvibDMTb2VxczM3WGNBLUE...
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bxv0SsvibDMTRUl3SFRONGN0MFk...
There were more (one had a game called "Rats" and from the description I thought it would be a 3D game, but alas I never got it entered properly and even if I did, I realise now that it probably wasn't 3d rendered).
Well perhaps now, when AI halves your salary, and then halves it again, and the only people left are those who do it for some reason other than a salary, you'll be happier?
CITATION NEEDED
From my perspective it seems like they're just not hired basically at all anymore