What AI is doing to the IT market 🔪

Two hefty reports have been released by Focaldata (in collaboration with the Financial Times) and Anthropic on the economic impact of AI on jobs.

Here's the most interesting part 👇

The programmer's paradox: code faster, fear more
According to Anthropic, it is developers (along with other highly paid tech professionals) who get the maximum productivity boost from using, say, Claude.

But here lies the paradox: the graph of fear of job loss is U-shaped. The two categories that fear the most are those whose lives AI has made harder and those whose work has been greatly accelerated. Programmers are at the top of the latter. When you close a task in 15 minutes instead of two hours, you start asking yourself a reasonable question: 'How many more like me does the business need?'

The end of the pyramid and the birth of the 'diamond' 💎
The Focaldata report confirms: AI is burning out junior positions.

Historically, the structure of IT companies resembled a pyramid: a crowd of cheap juniors at the bottom doing routine work, mids above them, and expensive seniors and leads at the very top.
Now the market is turning into a 'diamond' (rhombus). The bottom is being cut off. Tasks that used to be given to recent course graduates (information retrieval, basic boilerplate generation, simple scripts) are now done by AI.

Hiring data already confirms this: demand for juniors is falling, while demand for seniors is rising. Businesses no longer need to grow 'meat'; they need tech leads capable of managing an army of AI agents.

The threat is not from AI, the threat is from 'non-techies'
The most interesting insight is about productivity. The increase comes along two axes: speed (doing the same thing faster) and scale (doing what you couldn't do before).

So, 48% of respondents noted precisely the expansion of capabilities. A quote from the report: 'I’m a non tech guy but now I’m a full stack developer'.
Managers, marketers, and analysts use neural networks to cover basic technical needs without involving the development department. Well, those who made money from it — BYE-BYE.

A two-tier economy
The main conclusion of analysts: we are moving towards a two-tier system.
Daily AI use at work is less than 20% of employees. The rest either do it once a month or ignore it.

A huge gap is forming. On one side — AI-native specialists (usually in senior positions) who capitalize on their efficiency and demand more money. On the other — AI-excluded masses (mostly juniors and line staff) who will compete for a shrinking number of jobs with zero salary growth.

Interestingly, leaders in the tech sector plan to increase headcount, not reduce it (in the US, the IT hiring expectations index was +18). But they will hire those very AI-native mids and seniors to take on even more projects.

In short, keep up ☕️