On IT hiring crysis and AI
My linkedin feed is full of posts like “we stopped hiring junior frontend devs”, “AI replaces juns”, “use AI smart”. I really want to answer, not from position of hirer or a worker, but as a user.
My smartphone app glitches, a website for online ticket sale gives multiple error messages in three (3) different language for the same eror (true story), small store website takes so many resources I almost feel like there is some hidden Figma aoo running inside.
And all Linkedin is arguing about is “We don’t want more junior devs — Yeah, but whom are you gonna hire in ten years”.
In fact it’s not that “AI came and stole our jobs” — it’s the opposite:
Too many junior devs entered IT during COVID, and the industry needs to get rid of them.
Same way we had bootcamps for people entering IT in 2020 — now we need bootcamps to exit IT in 2026. Industry did not need people copy-pasting answers from stackoverflow 10 years ago — the programming is about building software once and reuse it efficiently, writing more code shall be considered harmful. Now there is zero excuse for copy-pasters, AI can copy-paste poor solutions better, faster, and able to work 24/7. Same thing would have hapened without AI — AI just accelerated the imminent crysis.
And the biggest crysis so far is in the hiring — those yesterday juniors are now happily clogging HR pipelines with AI-generated or AI-refined CV-s that are not just indistinguishable from real ones, but AI-generated CV-s look better for 95% of HR-s and especially look good in ATS scores. Which also suggests: we probably don’t need this many HR-s who cannot adapt to the market.
Another suggestion: if you are graduating in CS, then you should probably not wait for someone to teach you how to code, but rather start doing soemthing real right now and graduate as a non-junion dev. I’m telling this as a former student that spent my summer holidays in GSoC and got first job offer by age 19 — I did not wait to graduate.
Poor HR using AI to a hire junior dev with AI-generated CV to produce crappy vibecoded software I’m gonna have to use — that’s the thing I cannot tolerate. And the industry is really slow to correct so far. Don’t bother explaining me the underlying mechanisms of this failure — the real answer would offend lots of high-ranked people. Let’s just say:
Sorry, we did a poor work, our users expect us to do better.