Vibe coding killed the junior developer. Bullshit. I couldn’t disagree more. I’ve been fortunate to recently hire new developers and I can see a bunch of hungry and skilled grads who are enthusiastic and capable of picking up all the skills you need.
If you’re currently searching for a job and feeling some anxiety about it, that’s OK you have good reason to be anxious, but the industry will start hiring juniors again. In the interim I have some advice for you on how to stick out from a list of 100+ applications.
When I check your application on seek.co.nz, I’m going to spend about 30 seconds total figuring out if you’re taking a closer look. What catches my eye is anything that stands out as distinctly NOT ai generated. The generated slag is super easy to spot when you have 30 instantiations of it. Apparently we are all using the same prompt. People seem to paste the job description into chat gpt and then ask for a stupid prompt like ‘write a cover letter applying for this job’.
The obvious sign of AI crap writing is that it overfits exactly to the job post and every facet. The Job applications all read the same because the input is all too similar.
What you should do instead
Get creative with your prompt. Use the AI for fleshing out your own thoughts, not coming up with ideas. Find what is most important and relevant from the job description, then prompt the AI to include that in the cover letter. Finally — get to the point as fast as possible. If I read one more time “I am a dynamic individual ready for the fast paced world of junior engineering” I will eat my fucking hat.
Be authentic. Legit, when I’m reading all these applications I look positively on the odd quirky turn of phrase or spelling/grammer mistake. Small human errors are the bit around the edge that can show you are not a robot.
Give more context. When you are using AI to prompt, use it for the brain storming – but write the content yourself. Do include an extensive document of your portfolio as context and ask the AI to draw specific correlations between your own experience and the job description.
Be transparent about AI usage. Seriously this will make you stick out like a sore thumb and I will probably automatically accept the application for an in person interview without a second look. Tell me about the creative ways you are using AI to apply for jobs. I want to hire people who are experts at leveraging the new tools in our industry.
Don’t panic there will be jobs for junior engineers in 2025 and the industry will suffer for slowing down in hiring new people. The job is awesome, and I would highly recommend it if you like solving hard problems and enjoy the craft of building systems with code. There really are some awesome opportunities out there, and you can increase your chances of finding a good one by taking a few pointers from this post.