"It's become prohibitively expensive to make a simple website." SoftServe CEO talks about how AI will change the way people work and why IT won't collapse

Juns are needed because seniors are expensive

According to Koldovsky, the detailed division into juniors, middles, seniors (and their Strong variations) is mainly a Ukrainian specifics. In the world, the concept of Software Engineer with a certain level of experience is more often used. But the need for beginners does not disappear anywhere for banal economic reasons.

«It is not advisable to entrust all the work to seniors,» he explains. «Previously, the senior laid the architecture, and the juniors performed simpler tasks. Now the logic is the same: the senior accepts and validates the work, and prompting models, launching agents, and checking the results is a task for a less experienced and less highly paid specialist.»

Vyacheslav gives an example of a company that previously refused to hire newbies due to the difficult onboarding process. But with the advent of AI agents, they realized that opening Claude, writing prompts, and waiting for results is not a job for a Senior developer. The company implemented AI tools and again started hiring Juns for exactly these tasks.

The End of the Coder Era: What Junior Should Know Now

Previously, a junior was essentially a coder — a person who simply converts a solution already thought out by someone into lines of code. They were not allowed to develop higher-level solutions. Now, routine coding is done by AI, and the requirements for beginners have changed dramatically.

What should a junior be able to do now:

• Agent Engineering: Understanding how tokens, models, MCPs work, and what AI hallucinations are.

• Code validation: Writing code with AI is fast, but the programmer must be able to check that it is correct, optimal, and bug-free.

• Integrated thinking: understanding system design and architectural patterns.

«Previously, patterns were a matter for middle school and above, but now even a junior has to navigate them. Because if AI applied some pattern and you don’t know what it is, you won’t be able to understand or check the result,» the expert notes.

By the way, danger also lurks for experienced specialists: a senior who ignores AI and agent engineering risks very quickly finding himself on the market with irrelevant knowledge.

About bloated budgets and why the IT industry will only grow

Koldovsky draws attention to a deeper problem in the market: recently, many things in IT have «begun to reach the point of absurdity.»

«Front-end developers in the US had huge salaries, and it was prohibitively expensive to make even a simple website. Large enterprise solutions have become much more complex, expensive, and slower to implement. This needs to change: simple solutions need to become more accessible. We will hand over some of the work to AI, and people will focus on accepting the results,» he explains.

When asked whether the number of vacancies will decrease due to AI and the current mass layoffs, the expert reassures. According to him, the cheaper development will inevitably lead to an increase in demand for it. IT is absorbing other industries, automating the world (for example, replacing cashiers in supermarkets with stores without cash registers).

«We are starting to automate things that we hadn’t thought about before — the same drones with artificial intelligence. And these solutions require developers. In my opinion, IT is the last industry in which people will remain necessary,» concluded the Softserve Academy competency manager.