“It was said that you could earn a salary in the hundreds of thousands if you get a job as a developer, but now it’s hard to even find job postings.”
This is a common complaint among computer science majors. A prolonged hiring freeze across the global tech sector has reduced tech jobs and effectively halted entry-level hires. Repetitive tasks are being replaced by artificial intelligence (AI), and corporations are shifting their focus from hiring to restructuring.
According to Layoffs.fyi, a job dismissal tracking platform, 74,437 people lost their jobs at 157 tech corporations worldwide from the start of this year until July. Last year, over 150,000 people were laid off from 549 corporations.
Microsoft (MS) conducted layoffs four times in January, May, June, and July, with a cumulative total exceeding 16,000 employees. Intel alone reduced its workforce by 21,000 in April. Major U.S. tech corporations such as Meta, Google, Salesforce, and HP, as well as startups like Unity and Sprinkler, have joined the layoff trend.
The common background for these restructurings is the 'AI transition.' Google has reduced its smart TV division workforce by 25% and cut its budget by 10%, while increasing its investments in AI. Meta has consolidated its virtual reality (VR) division, reducing its hardware development staff, and Recruit Holdings, the parent company of Indeed and Glassdoor, laid off 1,300 employees in its U.S. research and development (R&D) and human resources departments while reorganizing. U.S. startup Cruise cut half of its employees and was effectively absorbed by GM. The pace of AI technology replacing human labor has also accelerated.
In Korea, where labor market flexibility is relatively low, the hiring of entry-level developers is being reduced instead of layoffs. According to the job placement platform JinHakSa Catch, the number of job postings for entry-level developer positions at domestic IT corporations has decreased by 43%, from 995 in the first half of 2023 to 564 in the first half of this year. Entry-level jobs make up only 4.4% of total IT hiring. An analysis by Saramin for the first quarter of 2025 shows that total job postings in the IT sector have decreased by 13.4% compared to the same period last year, with the hiring of entry-level developers down by 18.9%.
This is due to major domestic IT corporations reducing entry-level hiring in the wake of adopting generative AI. Kakao is said to have internally decided not to allocate new personnel to positions that can be replaced by AI, such as repetitive tasks. Some companies located in Pangyo and Gangnam are piloting AI-based coding assist tools like "Cursor" and "GitHub Copilot" in practice, and more companies are taking on subscription costs themselves or supporting practical training.
According to the overseas developer recruitment platform Supercoder, some startups have begun to focus on securing experienced professionals skilled in real-world applications, utilizing overseas developers from countries like India and Pakistan instead of hiring entry-level staff. This is attributed to costs being about 60% of South Korean developers and the understanding of the overall structure of AI services. It is reported that at least 300 domestic corporations have hired overseas developers.
The issue is that the government’s AI talent development policies are failing to keep pace with market changes. The Ministry of Science and ICT has established AI graduate schools at 10 universities nationwide since 2019 and invested 76 billion won, but the employment rate for graduates was only 63.5% as of 2023. The industry notes, “There is an oversupply of personnel simply operating basic models, while there is a lack of convergent talent capable of creative problem-solving.”
An IT industry official said, “Automated development and testing tasks have already progressed significantly, and with the addition of AI tools, the demand for hiring in that area has certainly decreased. There is a strong perception that the old structure of hiring entry-level employees and taking time to train them is a burden, leading to a trend of gradually being excluded from the hiring pool.”