The Junior DevOps Numbers Worry Me More Than the Rest

Hi, it's me again. I sat down this weekend with No Fluff Jobs' Kariera w IT 2026 report, the kind of thing I'd normally check for the salary tables and overall job market health and close the tab, and ended up stuck on one part of it for a lot longer than I meant to.

The overall market picture is actually decent this year, offers up, competition per posting down from 24 applications in 2025 to 21 in the first half of 2026. Juniors are still getting squeezed hardest though, and one stat made me stop scrolling: 146 applications for a single junior Frontend posting, against 3 to 5 for a senior Architecture or ERP role. Then I got to DevOps and AI, and it's a different shape of problem. There were so few junior postings in either category that the report couldn't even calculate a reliable salary range for them. Not low pay, just barely any listings to measure.

The report itself more or less says why, in the DevOps section: routine tasks are exactly what AI is automating first, and that used to be a lot of what a junior actually did all day. Fix the small ticket, write the boring script, run the same deployment steps a hundred times until they stop being scary. If that layer of work quietly disappears, so does most of what a junior role was for in the first place.

Here's the part that actually sits wrong with me. I only know Terraform and Azure and CI/CD as well as I do because I spent two years doing the unglamorous version of this job first, breaking things on purpose and by accident, with someone more senior around to catch it and explain what went wrong. That's not a nice-to-have on the way to being useful, it's the only way I know of that anyone becomes the senior who trains the next person. Automate away where that learning used to happen and I don't know where the next round of seniors is supposed to come from, mine or anyone's.

I don't have a fix for this, and I'm aware I'm one data point reading a report on a Saturday, not someone running hiring at a company. But the numbers in this report read like a pipeline quietly narrowing at exactly the end that everything else depends on, and that's not a small thing to wave off. I’ve been there, three years ago, trying to get my first role, and it was almost impossible back then. I can’t imagine how difficult it is now, but I’m more than sure there’s no senior without a junior, and I hope tech leaders are also aware of it.