“Don’t Hire Juniors, Buy More AI Tokens”: Korea Cut New Developer Hiring by 47%

Featured photo: Pangyo Techno Valley, the cluster south of Seoul where Korea’s biggest tech and game companies are based. Photo: Imtotallykorean / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Korean companies stopped hiring junior developers and bought AI coding tool usage instead. “Don’t hire new grads, give us more AI tokens” is how MBC’s investigative show PD Notebook summed up what big-company HR teams really think, and it is not an exaggerated soundbite. Government statistics confirm it is how Korea now hires.

The pie stayed the same, the junior slice was cut in half

In 2025, total hiring in Korea’s software development and production industry fell only 4.7%, from 44,973 to 42,852. Inside that number, though, 16,110 junior hires, or 47.4%, disappeared, while experienced hires grew by 13,990, or 127.7% (Ministry of Science and ICT, “ICT industry junior and experienced hiring,” submitted to Rep. Lee Hoon-ki’s office, Dong-A Ilbo, October 1, 2026). The jobs didn’t vanish. Experienced developers took the chairs juniors used to sit in.

Widen the lens to the whole ICT industry and the picture is the same. Junior hiring dropped 48.8%, from 95,116 in 2022 to 48,669 in 2025, while experienced hiring rose from 38,521 to 49,322. The junior share of all hires fell from 71.2% to 49.7%, and experienced hires outnumbered juniors for the first time since 2016 (same data).

For readers outside Korea, these numbers land even harder. For decades Korea was the country of gongchae, open recruitment: every year, at fixed times, big companies hired college graduates in large batches and trained them in-house. Today only 10.2% of companies hire solely through those regular recruitment drives (Federation of Korean Industries 2026 new-hire survey, cited by Money Today, October 24, 2026).

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“Don’t hire juniors, give us more AI tokens”

PD Notebook aired that line as the real thinking of big-company HR teams in “The AI Dilemma, Part 2: The Case of the Missing New Hires” on October 20, 2026 (MBC PD Notebook official YouTube). A “token” is the unit AI uses to count how much text and code it reads and writes, and what companies pay AI providers is priced by tokens. The message: turn a new hire’s salary into AI usage. One manager at a large company featured on the show was working with five AI agents instead of a junior (Etoday, October 20, 2026).

The timing isn’t a coincidence. 2025, the year juniors and experienced hires flipped, is the year “coding agents” that can take over whole development tasks, Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex, arrived in Korean workplaces in earnest. The work these tools take on, boilerplate code, tests, documentation and simple features, overlaps exactly with what junior developers used to do while learning the job (Dong-A Ilbo).

The 10-minute cut passed 320,000 views in five days, and the full episode more than 620,000 in six (checked October 27, 2026). The most-liked comments read less like anger than resignation. “I have no choice but to use AI, but once I use it well and build the system, I get replaced. The system stays” (362 likes). “IT is wrecked…” (135 likes).

The country that took up Claude Code fastest

Korea is going through this first because it took up AI coding tools faster and deeper than almost anyone. According to Anthropic, monthly Claude Code users in Korea grew sixfold in the four months to October 2025 (Electronic Times, October 24, 2025). That December, at a Seoul meetup, Anthropic introduced Park Jin-hyung, an engineer at Sionic AI, as Claude Code’s “No. 1 heavy user worldwide.” He spends about $1,360 a month on subscriptions to various AI tools (ZDNet Korea, December 18, 2025).

At the company level, the scale changes. When Anthropic opened its Seoul office in June 2026, it called Korea “one of the most active developer communities” and said Naver, Korea’s leading search and portal company, had rolled out Claude Code across its entire engineering organization, with thousands of engineers using it. Game maker Nexon writes, reviews and ships live game code with Claude Code, Samsung SDS is deploying Claude to Samsung Electronics employees, and LG CNS to thousands of its own staff (Anthropic official announcement, June 17, 2026). Hyundai Motor Group chairman Chung Eui-sun personally learned “vibe coding,” programming in plain language (Bridge Economy, October 19, 2026).

The language of job postings has changed too. When JobKorea analyzed third-quarter 2026 postings, those naming “Claude” were up 770% from a year earlier, and among postings that named any AI tool, the share mentioning Claude jumped from 17% to 55%. Meanwhile, postings that said they preferred a specific major fell by half, from 13.1% in 2021 to 6.5% (Wolyo Shinmun and MS Today, October 12, 2026). One applicant wrote in a Naver News comment: “There’s a field where you write which AI you used and what you achieved with it.”

Junior postings that ask for five years of experience

The junior postings that remain don’t actually want juniors. PD Notebook and the data analysis team Underscore analyzed about 10.41 million job postings from some 430,000 companies between July 2019 and January 2025. The share of software developer postings open to juniors fell from 37.1% to 26.8%. The average experience required in developer postings rose from 3.71 years in 2022 to 5.18 years in January 2025 (ppss, October 20, 2026).

The easier a job is for AI to do, the higher the bar rose. In the same analysis, roles with high AI exposure such as app developer saw required experience rise by an average of 0.72 years, about 8.6 months, while the roles hardest to replace with AI rose only 0.07 years (same article). Kim, a 26-year-old software major job hunting, said, “Even junior postings ask for the same skills as the old experienced-hire postings” (Dong-A Ilbo). Into that gap stepped “AI job prep” courses costing 580,000 won (about $440) (MBC PD Notebook official YouTube).

Seoul National University professor Moon Tae-sup put it simply: “If we don’t hire juniors now, in five years there won’t be any seniors” (Dong-A Ilbo). Korean developer postings now ask for five years of experience, and the first job that would start those five years has gone to tokens.

Sources

• Dong-A Ilbo, October 1, 2026 (exclusive): IT junior hiring halved in three years (Ministry of Science and ICT data via Rep. Lee Hoon-ki’s office)
• MBC PD Notebook, “The AI Dilemma, Part 2,” official YouTube, 10-minute cut
• Etoday, October 20, 2026, ppss, October 20, 2026
• Anthropic, June 17, 2026: Seoul office and partnerships
• Electronic Times, October 24, 2025, ZDNet Korea, December 18, 2025
• Wolyo Shinmun, October 12, 2026, MS Today, October 12, 2026
• Bridge Economy, October 19, 2026
• Money Today, October 24, 2026
• Currency conversion: 1,324.6 won per dollar (Seoul FX base rate, October 23, 2026)