The expert warned of a staff shortage in IT due to the refusal to hire juniors

The refusal of IT companies to hire junior specialists may bring short-term savings, but in the next few years it threatens the industry with a personnel shortage. Alexander Klimeshov, director of the center of industry expertise at the IT holding LANSOFT, warned about this in a conversation with Lenta.ru.

The speaker recalled that the classic model in IT and consulting is structured like a pyramid. At its base there are many juniors (novice IT specialists - editor's note) who do basic work: collect data, prepare drafts, write standard code and layout slides. Through routine tasks, inevitable mistakes and feedback from mentors, they learn and eventually become independent professionals.

However, now this niche is being taken over by artificial intelligence. It is sometimes easier for experienced developers to entrust a task to an AI than to teach a new one, which is why companies are massively cutting back on entry-level hiring. Klimeshov is convinced that this is a strategic mistake: without the influx of juniors, the industry in a few years will be left without personnel capable of growing to middle and senior positions.

This is not about an abstract threat, but about an already emerging trend. Today it is noticeable that specialists who began their careers in the last two or three years with constant reliance on AI assistants often cope worse with tasks without them. “They simply did not go through that very difficult stage of independently searching for solutions, at which intuition is formed,” the LANSOFT representative emphasized.

From his point of view, market participants need to change the very content of the work at the entrance, making skills in interacting with neural networks a minimum requirement for hiring. “It is important for a novice developer not just to write code using AI, but to understand why this particular option was chosen, what the alternatives are, and how the solution fits into the overall system architecture. He must be able to check the generated result and be fully responsible for it,” concluded Klimeshov.

The problem described has already become global. According to a study published by CNBC, international businesses are actively cutting budgets for integrating young talent due to automation. To date, 19 percent of British companies have already reduced the number of Junes, as neural networks perform their daily tasks faster and do not require training costs. Labor market analysts believe that such savings are a “time bomb” that will deprive businesses of the basis for technological development in the future.