How to land a $250k tech job even if you don't have the required skills

I’ve sat on both sides of the interview table. I’ve been hired into engineering roles at companies like J.P. Morgan and Legal & General, and I’ve hired and trained developers for my own consultancy, iMobilize.

And here’s what I learned: the highest-paid people in tech are rarely the most skilled people in the room.

They’re the ones who know how hiring actually works.

Most people approach the job hunt completely backwards. They spend months learning yet another framework. They fire off hundreds of identical CVs. They walk into interviews hoping their skills will speak for themselves…

Then they accept whatever salary they’re offered, because they’re just relieved to get a yes.

It sounds backwards, but it comes down to supply and demand.

Supply: almost everyone is competing for the same jobs. Graduates, bootcamp grads and career changers all pile into junior and mid-level roles, the jobs with the most applicants and the lowest pay. Very few people position themselves for the senior, architect and principal roles at the top of the market, so the queue for those jobs is far shorter.

Demand: and those top roles are exactly where companies are hiring.

When more of the hiring is happening at the top and fewer people are competing for it, the advantage goes to whoever presents themselves as the senior hire. That’s a skill, and you can learn it.

AI is now very good at the work companies used to give junior engineers: writing boilerplate, fixing well-defined bugs, writing tests, and turning a clearly written ticket into working code. If a task can be fully described in a ticket, an AI coding assistant can increasingly do it in minutes.

That’s why the bottom of the market is shrinking. Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab, tracking ADP payroll data, has found large employment declines for early-career software developers aged 22 to 25, while the pattern disappears for more experienced workers.

But someone still has to decide what to build, design how the systems fit together, weigh up the trade-offs, review what the AI produces, keep it secure and compliant, and lead the people and processes around it. That’s the work of architects, staff and principal engineers, and AI can’t do it for them.

In fact, every team that uses AI to write more code needs more of that judgement, not less. Indeed found that 37% of the recent growth in software development postings came from jobs with AI in the title.

I see this first-hand leading architecture for an AI agent platform. The AI writes more of the code every month. The people who design the system, set the guardrails and lead the team are more valuable than ever.

The opportunity isn’t to compete with AI at the bottom of the market. It’s to skip that queue entirely and position yourself for the roles AI is creating at the top.