#Recently, a small and medium-sized manufacturing company in Guro-gu, Seoul, attracted 21 applicants to hire a new developer with an annual salary of 35 million won. Mr. Choi (37), an executive of this company, said, “Because it was not a well-known company, usually around 10 people applied before, but I was surprised by the large number of applicants.” ” he said.
#Artificial Intelligence ( AI ) Search Startup Rainer has been recruiting developers specializing in artificial intelligence ( AI ) for four months, but has yet to find suitable talent. An official from Liner said, “There is a significant shortage of high-end developers in Korea that meet the required level.”
Recently, the mismatch phenomenon in the developer recruitment market, where only new developers are overflowing and excellent developers are lacking, is getting serious. Coding academies offering short-term, accelerated education 2-3 years ago sprung up and new developers poured in, while major IT companies such as Nekarakubae (Naver, Kakao, Line, Coupang, and Baemin) started hiring developers due to the economic downturn. This is because of a drastic reduction and oversupply. Conversely , with the chat GPT craze , the supply of developers who deal with high-skilled software such as AI is not keeping up with demand. ITIn the industry, there is an analysis that “the polarization of developer employment has begun in earnest.”
◇ Government-funded academies one after another… New developers overflow In the IT/ startup industry
after 2020, the ‘developer recruiting war’ has been so fierce that recruitment advertisements such as ‘100 million annual salary guaranteed’ are hung everywhere. As a result, academies and boot camps (coding training centers) with advertisements such as “I learned to code for 3 months and liberal arts students entered Naver and Kakao” popped up. It is a course that allows office workers or college students who do not graduate from computer engineering or engineering안전놀이터 colleges to receive intensive coding education for several months and get a job as a developer. The government has also increased state funding in this field. According to the Ministry of Employment and Labor, the number of domestic digital talents nurtured with government funding will reach 11,727 in 2021 and 22,394 in 2022. However, the atmosphere in the recruitment market has changed 180 degrees this year. Demand for IT manpower has frozen due to the global economic recession . As a result of analyzing the data of Wanted Lab, a specialized recruitment platform for IT personnel, this paper found that the number of new job postings in the first half of this year was 30,523, a decrease of 34% compared to the same period last year (45,755). On the other hand, the number of job search applications increased by 47% from 738,146 to 1,087,848.
As there is a lot of supply in the market, well-known companies have virtually stopped hiring new developers and started preferring experienced developers who can be put into the field right away. An official from a boot camp in Korea said, “It has become virtually impossible to find new developers hired by large companies or famous startups.” Startups are also raising the entry threshold by introducing coding tests to weed out novice developers who lack skills. Upstage, famous for its chatbot ‘ AskUp ‘, conducts 2 coding tests and 5 interviews. An official from a domestic AI start-up said, “Developers who learned programming in a short period of 3 to 6 months are immediately put into the field and lack the skills to do programming,” and “this makes the recruitment process more difficult.”
◇Unable to find high-level developers
Unlike the reality of overflowing with novice developers from abroad, it is still difficult to find excellent developers. This is because existing companies are risking life and death not to lose their excellent human resources. In particular, the shortage of developers in the AI field is so serious that Naver recently sent a proof of content to SK Telecom to ‘ stop stealing key AI personnel’.
Companies are turning their eyes to overseas recruitment. Lee Han-bin, CEO of Seoul Robotics, a self-driving software start-up, said, “60% of the company’s self-driving algorithm-related developers are foreigners. Upstage has also been hiring AI software engineers for the fourth year on a regular basis, but they are not hiring enough in Korea, so they are holding out by hiring developers overseas on the condition that they work from home. The same goes for Ellis Group, a digital transformation education startup. An Ellis official said, “It is too difficult to find a senior developer in Korea, so we are hiring locals after the establishment of the US corporation in August last year.”