The Missing Rung
For fifty years the advice was simple. Take the entry level job. Get your foot in the door. Every career is a ladder and the bottom rung is where you start.
ISSUE 003 · July 14th, 2026
There is a particular kind of advice that older professionals give to young people trying to break into the workforce. It is well intentioned. It is almost always delivered with genuine conviction. And right now, in the summer of 2026, it is dangerously out of date.
Take the entry level job. Get your foot in the door. Do not worry about the salary. You are not there for the money. You are there for the experience. Do the work nobody else wants to do, learn the systems, prove yourself, and the rest will follow. Every career is a ladder. The bottom rung is where you start. The advice is not wrong. It describes exactly how careers worked for the last fifty years. It describes how the people giving it built their own careers. It is handed down in good faith from one generation to the next because it worked, reliably and repeatedly, for decades.What it does not account for is what happens when the bottom rung is removed.
In 2024, something started happening to the software industry that nobody talked about loudly enough to matter. Entry level developer jobs started disappearing. Not because there were fewer companies building software. Not because the industry was contracting. Because AI coding tools had reached the point where the tasks that used to require a junior developer, debugging, writing boilerplate code, handling routine tickets, could be handled faster and cheaper by a large language model with a senior engineer supervising it. The junior developer was not replaced by another developer. The junior developer was replaced by a tool that did not need health insurance, did not need onboarding, did not need a desk.
Senator Bernie Sanders recently cited in Fortune that software developer employment for workers aged 22 to 25 had fallen roughly 20 percent from its 2024 peak. Twenty percent. In two years. In the industry that was supposed to be the safe harbor. The place young people were told to go to build a career that AI could not touch.
What happens if you’re replaced before you’re ever hired?
The entry level job was never really about the work. That is the thing most people who give career advice forget to say out loud.
Yes, the work mattered. You learned things. You built skills. But the deeper function of the entry level job was something else entirely. It was the mechanism by which a person with potential but no track record could prove they had both. It was the on ramp to every job that came after it. You could not get the mid level job without the entry level job because the mid level job required experience and experience required the entry level job and that circular logic held together for fifty years because the entry level job existed.
Remove it and the circle breaks.
The twenty two year old who graduates in May 2026 with a computer science degree does not just face a difficult job market. She faces a job market that has restructured itself around the assumption that the work she was trained to do can be done more efficiently without her. She has the credential. She has the knowledge. She does not have the one thing every subsequent employer will require before they consider her.
She does not have the experience. And there is no longer a clear path to getting it.
The missing rung is not a software problem. It is the first visible sign of something that is going to move through nearly every industry that employs young people in entry level roles.
Marketing coordinators. Junior analysts. Research assistants. Editorial assistants. Customer support specialists. Administrative coordinators. Every role that exists to give someone with potential their first real professional experience is a role that AI replacement is evaluating right now for the same reason it evaluated the junior developer. Can this be done faster and cheaper without a human being at the bottom of the organizational chart?
In many cases the answer is increasingly yes. And when the answer becomes yes at scale, the ladder does not just get harder to climb. It loses its bottom rung in nearly every industry simultaneously.
Artificial intelligence is going to create extraordinary opportunities for the generation entering the workforce right now. The tools available to a twenty two year old today are more powerful than anything a thirty year old had access to five years ago. The ability to learn faster, build faster, and create things that previously required an entire team is genuinely remarkable. AI is not the enemy of the young professional. Used correctly it is the most powerful career accelerator in history.
But none of that changes the immediate problem. The path that previous generations used to build the experience that careers are built on is being removed faster than new paths are being created. The tools are extraordinary. The on ramp is gone.
So what does the person standing at the bottom of a ladder with a
missing rung actually do?
That is the question this newsletter is going to spend a lot of time on. Not the thirty year view. The Monday morning view. What do you do right now, today, when the entry level job that was supposed to be your first step does not exist anymore.
We are going to figure that out together.
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Further reading: The Fortune article mentioned above on Bernie Sanders, AI ownership, and the proposed American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund: Read it here →