Since burning out and becoming a freelancer, I have become akin to an outsider to the tech industry. Out of necessity and self-preservation, I didn’t want to belong anymore. I felt helpless with the game it became. Despite it all, I still keep an eye on it. These days I feel mostly sorry for it.

Hiring in tech seems to be a mess right now. AI is messing up pipelines big time, no one can get their CV seen by any recruiters. Applications flood any opening, and if one can get to an interview, recruiters realise they cannot evaluate anyone properly. No one is hiring with any level of confidence.

While this is ongoing and a huge topic on its own, I’m reflecting on who are those that are hurt the most in all this, those that enter the market now.

It seems like no one is hiring juniors anymore.

During my time in the rat race, offers for junior roles were already rare. From the company’s perspective, they’re a risky hire. They need time to get trained, they take away existing resources, and they’re not that much cheaper compared to someone already efficient. Today, on top of the hurdles of hiring, juniors are pressured from the inside because they are increasingly deemed replaceable by LLMs.

See recently Codex being released and every LLM-head touting “it’s like having a junior engineer ready to use” about any new IDE, framework, or API they vibe-code with.
This perspective is disgustingly expected from the industry. Who cares about training the next wave of engineers if I can simply use a tool to spawn someone to make this nice-to-have fix I would have never had time to do because shareholders are calling?

How are young engineers, finishing school now, supposed to enter the market now ? I honestly have no clue, and it seems like companies are turning a blind eye to it.

It used to be that they would take that risk. Use valuable time to train, give some entry-level managerial skills to other IC employees (so important to grow teams), let them grow and get confident on easy tasks. Then they would progressively get onto deeper knowledge and harder tasks, pairing with seniors to get their view on topics and grow.

Today, if all seniors tend to feel like they have an army of juniors at hand with their fancy IDE, all that is skipped. We will only be hiring for seniors that are already up to speed with the valley’s latest trend and build armies of lonely ICs chatting with their bots to figure out how to not fall into PiP next quarter.

Some juniors will manage to get through by getting trained by LLM for months, learning the ropes of a job by the regurgitation of the most expensive Markov’s chain, desperately hoping for someone real to say “lgtm” to their PR.

The present is grim and sadly nicer to stare at than the future.