Why developer jobs are growing and nobody can get hired
Andrew Lai's byline on why software employment keeps growing even as junior developers struggle to get hired, and what businesses should screen for instead.
By Andrew Lai ยท First published by Information Age (ACS). Summarised here by SMEC AI.
In brief
Information Age (ACS) published a byline by Andrew Lai on 25 August 2026 asking why developer jobs keep growing while many juniors cannot get hired. The argument, in SMEC AI's words, is that headcount in software can rise even when the first job is harder to land, because teams want people who can judge the work rather than only produce more of it. For a small business hiring or contracting, the useful screen is whether someone can check an AI-assisted result, explain a tradeoff, and own the outcome. The byline is Lai's. This page does not reprint it.
Original byline: Andrew Lai.