Where are we headed in the IT sector?

[justdev]

Hey everyone,

I’m Răzvan. I’ve spent 15 years in the IT trenches moving through Adobe, Oracle, CrowdStrike and Vodafone. Having lived through the corporate machine for so long, I wanted to open up a discussion here about the absolute chaos happening in our industry right now. I need to mention upfront that I used the help of AI to write and format this article, don’t freak out because of this.

So everyone is blaming the economy, politics or “the crisis” for layoffs, but let’s be real here, a lot of it comes down to pure human and corporate greed. Here is a look at what’s happening behind the scenes, how AI is fundamentally changing our daily work (for the worse) and where this is all heading.

1. The Rise of the “Botsitter” (More Work, Same Teams)

What they don’t tell you on the news is that since AI went mainstream, corporate workloads have exploded while teams have shrunk. If you work in dev or ops today, congratulations: your new job title is “botsitter.”

Just like a babysitter, you sit there reading through mountains of code vomited out by AI. Large Language Models (LLMs) have no actual understanding of complex, archaic corporate legacy systems or the real business logic behind them. An edge case or a wrong line can bring down production.

• The PR Nightmare: I’m seeing Pull Requests with 5,000 lines of AI-generated code. No human has the attention span to properly review that. So people just click “Approve,” cross their fingers and push to production to avoid being labeled an “obsolete boomer.”

• The Operations Fallout: Because of this unoptimized code, applications are incredibly unstable. For those of us on the infrastructure and operations side, this means sleepless nights, constant alerts and throwing money at cloud servers to scale databases running at 100% CPU because nobody has time to look at queries anymore.

2. The Death of Engineering Joy & The Workforce Debt

The part of software engineering that made it fun, racking your brain, finding an elegant solution and building those cognitive synapses, is being wiped out. Pure dev work is becoming less fulfilling, which is why a lot of devs are trying to pivot to ops, cloud or infrastructure.

Worse, we are creating “Workforce Debt.” Younger generations are being told everyday that “IT is dead.” Fewer juniors are entering the field, meaning 10 years from now, we are going to have a massive shortage of experienced seniors. Today’s seniors will be old, highly paid and completely exhausted.

3. The Double Standard: Token Monitoring vs. Pen and Paper

The corporate hypocrisy right now is staggering. Managers are breathing down our necks to use AI because they think it equals automatic productivity.

• The AI Dashboards: Some managers literally have dashboards monitoring exactly how many AI tokens each employee consumes per month. They don’t care if you’re using it to write a cookbook; they just want to see the consumption graph go up to prove “competitiveness.”

• The Interview Reality Check: But what happens when you go to a job interview at these exact same companies? They completely ban AI. They bombard you with LeetCode questions and some places are literally making candidates write code on a sheet of paper with a pen. You’re forced to use tokens on the job, but to get hired, you have to code like it’s 1995.

4. The Pre-IPO Hype and The Real Cost of AI

The tech market is being artificially pumped by massive AI valuations, look at the staggering market caps of these tech and aerospace giants dipping into the AI space. CEOs are acting like tech fanatics, even going to university graduations to tell students they won’t have jobs.

But the bubble is hitting reality. The $20 monthly subscription model is a farce. Major corporations are blowing through millions of dollars in token budgets in a matter of months, costing thousands of dollars per employee. AI is turning out to be way more expensive than hiring an actual software engineer.

My Prediction for the Future of IT

Once the major AI players complete their public listings (IPOs), the cheap $20/month tier for powerful coding models is going to be dismantled. It’s unsustainable. The future will force us into heavy pay-per-token API pricing or running smaller open-source models locally.

When the infinite AI funding tap is turned off and corporations realize they can’t afford the token bill, we will have to use our brains again. The markets are pumped up on AI hype right now and I wouldn’t be surprised if this artificial inflation ends in a major economic correction.

I’m not an AI hater, it’s a cool technology, but the corporate execution of it is completely broken!

[Baevox_DotCom]

i think there will still be demand for human developers but many CEOs and higher management are driven by cutting costs

i can see a few things happening

1. they reduce salaries by saying the work is easier now because of AI

2. they stop hiring junior developers and only look for senior developers but at lower pay

3. they lay off experienced developers and expect the remaining junior developers to do more work with the help of AI

“The world has enough for everyone’s need, but not everyone’s greed.”

[tibi_diablo]

I’ve been a freelancer since 2004. Yeah, it’s kind of insane to think about. I’ve never had a traditional job because I never needed one—I did just fine on my own.

Even though I don’t write as much code anymore, I still orchestrate the entire development process and review every line of code. That still requires experience. Without it, AI is basically a slot machine. Even if you manage to get a working final product, it will almost certainly have issues that you aren’t aware of because you don’t really know how it was built if you just let AI do its “vibe coding” thing.

Overall, nothing really changes. Experience and skill are just as important as they’ve always been. The difference is that development has become much easier, especially for senior developers. For me, it’s a dream come true not to have to write every single line of code anymore. I’ve been doing that for almost 30 years—now it’s vacation time.

For juniors, though, it’s a trap. If they rely entirely on AI, they’ll never develop into competent senior engineers who can actually solve complex problems and use AI to their advantage. Instead, they’ll end up shipping unstable, insecure, and buggy applications without understanding why they break.

I expect things will slowly settle into place. Every serious company building commercial products already understands that you can’t go all-in on AI. Even with AGI, that won’t change. Production applications are engineered, not merely prompted. That’s a distinction many people still underestimate.

I’ve been trough other crahses as well, Aodbe Flash was huge and it died in two years… nwo si different but come here i nthe forum two years from now and this discustion will have a different tone, experience and skill is more valuable than ever and it will be more and more valuable as senior devs will retire and Juniors will not be able ot keep up!

[stefan_admin]

Agree with every word!

Thought I was the only one who never had a traditional job

I also notice the same on the business side: I consult with AI a lot on strategy and it doesn’t work without my own judgement and experience.