The Broken Job Ladder in Tech
The Broken Job Ladder in Tech
Take a look at this chart. Shortly after the release of ChatGPT, there is a disruption in the job market.
Employment for experienced developers seems stable or continues to grow, but what happened to the entry-level positions?
You have guessed it. AI has changed the game.
It can now write code, visualize data, create graphs, and generate reports, which, to some extent, replaces junior-level execution.
This has broken the traditional career ladder. A few years ago, toy projects and MNIST models were enough to land the first role.
But they are no longer the tickets into the industry.
Today, “entry-level” postings often demand 3 years of experience, experience with building RAG system that solves real-world issues, cloud deployments, and CI/CD pipelines.
And even if you check all those boxes, it doesn’t guarantee you a ticket to the door. I have read stories of smart and hard-working juniors who spray CVs everywhere and hear nothing back. This old playbook doesn’t work anymore. A single job posting can get 1,000+ applicants. One of my team’s job postings got 500 applications in a single day.
Yes, recruiters can’t possibly read them all. Many CVs — written by AI, scanned and rejected by AI — never reach hiring managers’s eyes.
But here’s something juniors can do: if no one is calling you, why not knock on their door?
How to thrive as juniors: don’t wait for the system, go hunt**.**
Your CV might die in an Applicant Tracking System (ATS), but a direct message can cut through.
Get used to the “hunter mindset.” Go after opportunities.
Those who find the hiring manager’s email, write a short and personalized note, and follow up ten times until they get a response are the ones who get a real chance. In many cases, that persistence is what breaks through the noise.
That means identifying the right people — CTOs, team leads — and showing them why they need you. Read their tech blogs, study their product, spot their pain points, propose an optimization strategy, or just share critical thoughts. This makes you stand out from the automated crowd.
Done this right, it bypasses the automated funnel and puts you directly in front of the decision-maker.
But don’t do this.
Here’s an actual LinkedIn message someone received. Unfortunately, it is quite common these days.
Just to be clear, if you want that job, you have to make an effort, a lot of effort. It must be done with grace, research, and personal touch.
In your CV, don’t just show you can code — show you can ship value fast. This means building end-to-end pipelines, demonstrating deployment workflows, and solving a real problem. Sharing your GitHub repositories, and instead of showing that you can build a RAG chatbot, show that you can deploy it using Azure or Google Cloud services with monitoring in place.
The Senior Growth Edge
Robert and I are both in our senior roles, and Robert is an engineer hiring manager. AI isn’t replacing us, yet — but it is amplifying the need for our judgment. The scarce skill is no longer writing functions but designing systems that scale, fail gracefully in production, and optimize for cost and reliability.
For experienced developers, the challenge is avoiding stagnation. Hard skills got us here — but the next level is about:
- Doing the impactful work but at scale
- Communicating complex ideas simply and tying them back to business outcomes
- Asking sharper questions that reframe problems
- Making trade-offs in design, scalability and cost
Hard skills land us the job. But we need soft skills to scale the impact and get us promoted.
The market isn’t broken. It’s just moved up the ladder. And the only way forward is to climb with it.