I was recruiting for junior devs in the UK back in the early 2000's and it was the same story then. One job we advertised had over a 1,000 applicants. 750+ were immediately ruled out because they had no right to work in the UK, another 200-ish were people from other professions trying to get into tech, but that still left us with 50+ people we should have interviewed but couldn't. We had to get down to arbitrary decisions on ridiculous grounds to cull the pile of CVs to the dozen or so we actually had time to interview.

And this was a small business in rural England. I can't imagine the stack a large company in a city would have to go through.

It has always been hard to get into the tech industry. There has always been a shortage of junior positions, and getting the first gig has always been the hardest step of this career.

However, I can totally understand how LLMs are making this worse. An LLM fills the exact spot in the team that would normally be taken by a junior dev. Anyone trying to get into the industry these days has my sympathy.

The media have been shouting the high salaries and IQ of programmers for nearly three decades, it was bound to satiate the market one day, with or without AI. Add to that the addictive nature of programming…

If you think that’s bad, about 15 years ago I asked a recruiter from Rolls Royce how competitive their grad scheme was and it had over 20000 applications per year at the time.