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Which Roles Vanished First

5 min read

Qa

QA got hit early. AI test generation + 'shift-left' meant smaller QA orgs. The survivors do exploratory testing and strategy — not boilerplate.

Tech Writer

Docs teams shrank fast. AI writes tutorials. Humans still own accuracy, tone, and 'why does this API exist?' — if they position for it.

Frontend

Junior frontend roles dried up. AI can scaffold UIs. Senior frontend? Still in demand for UX judgment and accessibility.

Which Roles Vanished First

TL;DR

  • Junior devs, QA, tech writers, and entry-level support got hit hardest.
  • The pattern: repetitive, high-volume, low-context work that AI can automate or accelerate.
  • Senior roles and domain experts fared better. So did people who integrated AI into their workflow early.

"AI will replace programmers" was never the right headline. AI replaced certain kinds of programming work — and the people who only did that work.

Here's who felt it first.

Junior Developers

Why They Got Hit

  • AI excels at boilerplate: CRUD, REST endpoints, standard UI components, unit tests.
  • Junior devs are often tasked with exactly that — the work that's easiest to automate.
  • Companies realized: one mid-level dev + Copilot can output what two juniors used to produce.

The Nuance

It's not that juniors are useless. It's that junior-only skill sets became harder to justify. Juniors who pair with AI, ask good questions, and own the "last 20%" (debugging, integration, product sense) are still hired. Juniors who only wrote tickets from a backlog? Fewer of those jobs.

QA and Test Automation Engineers

Why They Got Hit

  • AI generates test cases, test scripts, and regression suites.
  • Manual QA — clicking through flows, writing basic Selenium — became harder to justify.
  • "Shift-left" and "devs write their own tests" (with AI help) reduced the need for dedicated QA headcount.

The Nuance

QA isn't dead. Routine QA is. Exploratory testing, test strategy, edge-case design, and "why did this break in production?" — that's human work. QA folks who moved up the stack survived and often thrived.

Technical Writers

Why They Got Hit

  • AI drafts docs from code, generates API reference, writes tutorials.
  • Doc teams that existed to "keep docs in sync with code" got consolidated.
  • One writer + AI could cover what three writers did before.

The Nuance

Documentation that requires accuracy, empathy, and "what does the developer actually need?" — that's still human. Docs that were glorified autogeneration? Gone.

Customer Support & Solutions Engineers (Tier-1)

Why They Got Hit

  • Chatbots and AI triage handle "reset my password" and "how do I do X?"
  • Support orgs shrunk at the tier-1 level.
  • Solutions engineers who only did cookie-cutter demos got squeezed.

The Nuance

Complex escalations, relationship-building, and "this customer's architecture is a mess" — still human. The folks who moved from triage to implementation or presales did fine.

Who Fared Better

  • Senior/staff engineers: System design, trade-offs, and "what should we build?" — AI assists, doesn't replace.
  • Domain experts: Healthcare tech, fintech, embedded — context and compliance matter. AI helps; humans decide.
  • Architects and tech leads: Strategy, stakeholder alignment, and org design — no AI takeover there.
  • People who adopted AI early: The ones who said "I'll use this tool" instead of "this tool will replace me" — they're the ones still employed.

Quick Check

Why did junior developers get hit harder than seniors?

Quick Check

QA isn't dead. What kind of QA work survived and even thrived?

Do This Next

  1. Find yourself on the list. Are you in a role or tier that got hit early? If yes, Part 2 is your playbook.
  2. Inventory your tasks. What percentage of your work is "repetitive, high-volume, low-context"? That's the AI target zone. Start adding skills that live outside it.