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This won’t be a post about the wonders of AI. You can go on Twitter (now X) and see what “revolutionary new feature” people are posting (or vibecoding) about. This also isn’t (directly) about AI art (ask an artist) or deepfakes (ask just about anyone.) It’s about the state the tech industry is in now.
If you’re in the tech industry right now you likely already know what I’m talking about. If you’re trying to find a job right now you really know it. Of course the main influence here is COVID: companies invested like crazy into tech as we all locked ourselves up at home. But as the pandemic “died down” they laid off the excess they had hired, flooding the market with many skilled people looking for new jobs.
If you’ve tried applying for a tech job now you’ll run into a struggle. Most postings (even for “junior-like” positions) ask for 6+ years of (profesional) experience. Most postings will also never contact you back—you’re lucky to even get a rejection sometimes. Some postings are not real and exist only to collect your CV and waste your time. If you’re lucky enough to get through the first screening, some places put you through veritable gauntlets of interviews. Even if you try to get in via referrals you can run into hiring freezes or silence.
How does AI fit into this? Well…
The looming death of the junior position
If you’ve been keeping up with tech you’ve likely seen people post about how a “senior dev with AI can replace multiple devs” or how they “vibe coded” an entire application by themselves. Regardless of how practical that actually is (and how many secrets are exposed), it’s something that managers in tech will notice. Why pay 6 people 6 salaries each when you can pay 1 person 1.5 salaries and a cursor subscription? Even if the end product is worse, you can still put down that you saved 4.5 whole salaries!
Is this already happening? Probably, businesses are driven so much by generating profits we have the word Enshittification to describe the practice. Companies are already outsourcing work to other (poorer) countries to pay them much less to do the same work, a chance to outright remove people is something they’d jump at immediately.
But where this really hurts is for junior devs. Why would you ever hire one when a senior with AI does the “same” work. As programmers, we can talk (or argue) about “code quality” and “maintainability” or even just “is it readable” all day but the unfortunate reality is that sometimes the person who makes the end decisions only cares that your software works “good enough.” AI not only works perfectly for “good enough” but also does it faster than a human can.
And everyone suffers
Now, junior devs aren’t perfect—they can also produce buggy spaghetti code just as well as any AI can—but we need junior devs so that they can become senior devs. Everyone was a beginner programmer at some point; we all wrote bad code before getting good at writing good code (don’t lie, nobody is a perfect prodigy. Your “temp” hacks count as bad code too.) But if junior positions are killed off in favor of a senior + AI, or some guy “vibe coding” your entire app, we might hit a shortage of “senior” devs.
I say “senior” in quotes because those would-be “junior” devs might still program as a hobby, or in education, or in any way where they still build experience but that companies don’t count as “real experience” (because there weren’t any options open to them.) You could be someone who’s had years of “vibe coding” experience on your own projects and still get left out because HR only cares about “experience in a professional setting.” The market will be left to people who got in before the ladder got pulled up.
Maybe you are lucky enough to be one of those seniors. Then you’ve now got to compete against other people. People who might be using AI to “help” them (cheat) through interviews. Or using AI to make resumés and apply to jobs for them. Now you’re up against people who can vastly oversell themselves and get positions you are better qualified for. Maybe companies wise up to it and try to counter it, but how? Mandatory in-person interviews? More interviews? Maybe the way they try and “detect” cheaters will flag you, even if you never did anything.
So far hiring managers seem to dislike AI generated job applications but we’re already seeing a push to make it acceptable. And even if companies dislike candidates using AI, they seem fine with using AI to filter resumés even if they think it’s biased. Why? Partly because it’s “more efficient,” but also because AI-submitted applications have been flooding actual job postings. Now you’ve got to make something that somehow stands out while also not getting rejected by AI. And trying to avoid bias from AI can be impossible without lying. Don’t have a white male name? AI might reject you for it. What’s your option there then? Lie about your name? Change it?
What if you just started your own business then? Twitter (now X) is filled with people posting about their startups and how much revenue they’ve made. But for every success story you see, there’s a thousand failures you’ll never hear about. And at the sheer rate someone can throw together some SaaS platform in a weekend with little more than vague ideas and a pitch people fall for, you’ve got a lot of competition to go up against. With the amount of shitty platforms that are going to come and go in the future, you’ll also have to fight to prove you aren’t just another flaky platform. Good luck.
So you hate AI then?
No. Well, the completely reckless use of it. I’ve been using Copilot since early access and it’s been great as a smarter autocomplete/“intellisense”, but it’s also been occasionally wrong and I need to watch the output. However people use it to build whole applications with no regard for actual code safety (look at how may vibe coded apps have exposed secrets or missing auth), people use it to cheat on tests and interviews