Oscar

Here is a pattern that is becoming impossible to ignore in software engineering hiring right now. 🤖 AI coding assistants have made senior developers more productive. One strong engineer using AI tooling can now deliver what previously required an additional junior hire. As a result, businesses are hiring fewer graduates and juniors, and the ones entering the market face a much higher baseline skills expectation. Junior roles are not disappearing. But they are narrowing. Businesses want juniors who have built real projects, who understand how code actually works rather than just how to prompt a model, and who can contribute without extensive ramp time. For hiring managers: if your junior pipeline has dried up, part of the problem is the spec. Expecting mid-level delivery from entry-level hires and offering entry-level salaries is a recipe for long vacancy timelines. For developers earlier in their careers: the premium is on fundamentals. If your foundation is built on autocomplete rather than understanding, that gap will show up in technical interviews. Build the basics properly. 🎯 The AI tooling shift is real. But it is sharpening the value of genuine engineering knowledge, not replacing it.

The cost of a vacant software engineering role is £850 a day. Most businesses are not treating it like that. The estimated cost of a vacant software engineering role in the UK in 2026 is approximately £850 per day. That includes lost output, project delays, increased load on your existing team, and the hidden cost of context-switching when work gets redistributed. And that doesn't include the mental turmoil it can put you through! Most businesses treat a slow hiring process as an unfortunate but unavoidable inconvenience. The maths says otherwise. Three patterns we see consistently in software engineering searches that take longer than they should. Salary bands set against benchmarks from 2023, which no longer reflect the market. Interview processes with five or more stages, which are filtering out strong candidates who have other options. Job specs that describe the perfect candidate rather than the likely candidate, producing a shortlist of zero. None of these are hard to fix. Update your salary benchmarks. Cut the interview process to three stages maximum (ideally 2, I'd recommend a 1st stage exploratory chat and a technical deep dive in the 2nd). Describe who you actually want rather than who you might theoretically want. The developers you are trying to hire are evaluating your process too. A slow, convoluted hiring experience tells them something about how decisions get made in your organisation. 📊 Fast, clear, and respectful hiring closes more offers than almost anything else.

AI isn’t just changing dev jobs… it’s changing the hiring experience 🤖 Worth a read 👉 https://lnkd.in/eu5z4ckM What’s shifting? 👉 Less “whiteboard coding” 👉 More real-world, AI-assisted tasks 👉 Faster, more candidate-friendly processes Because let’s be honest… The best engineers today aren’t coding solo for hours ❌ They’re collaborating with AI to get results faster ⚡ We’re already seeing it: 🧠 Hiring for thinking, not just coding 🤖 Assessing how candidates use AI ⏱️ Shorter, smarter interview processes If you’re a dev → show how you work with AI If you’re hiring → your candidate experience needs to evolve The companies winning talent right now? They’ve already adapted.