Hiring in the WordPress and development world has gotten strange, and juniors are taking the worst of it. The advice they keep hearing is to learn more frameworks and tune the CV for the ATS, which is a losing game. My career advice for the AI era starts somewhere blunter: AI has already absorbed most of the task-level work. If you are selling yourself as someone who writes code once told what to write, I will not see you at all.
I have spent 14 years wrestling with legacy code and broken checkouts. I have read the “canaries in the coal mine” reports, including the Stanford Digital Economy Study, and entry rates for junior roles really have dropped. The work itself did not disappear, though. It shifted. The door is heavier to push because nobody needs a human coder any more. What we need is an engineer who can own a thread of work from start to finish.
The death of the task-executor
A few years ago, knowing your way around a specific hook or cleaning up a CSS file was enough to get you hired. AI handles that layer well enough now. What it will not do is take responsibility when the systems, the people and the business goals disagree with each other. So when I interview, I am looking for the person who “takes care of things.”
- There is a difference between finishing a ticket and owning the work. Do not tell me you closed the ticket. Tell me how you found what you needed when the documentation did not exist.
- I often float a deliberately bad architectural choice during an interview to see whether you will disagree with me without getting defensive. Can you explain why a particular transient might cause a race condition without taking the question personally?
If you want the wider market picture, I went through it separately in whether the AI job market is actually dying. Short version: it is not dying, it is just more demanding to get into.
Your portfolio is the only thing that matters
CVs are full of AI-generated slop now, so your GitHub and your own projects are the only real defense you have left. When I review a junior application, I can usually spot an AI-written repo inside 30 seconds. It shows in the commit messages, in how the README is put together, and in code that carries no sign of a human having debugged it.
Most of this comes down to passion over claims. One small project that solves a real problem is worth more than ten cloned tutorial repos. Show me you understand the why behind the code. If you would rather formalize the path, I have also written about the WordPress AI Micro-Credential and whether it is worth your time.
Working with AI as a teammate
Treat AI as a teammate you are supervising, not an oracle. The juniors who are getting hired right now use it as a multiplier for their own judgment instead of a substitute for it. That means knowing when to trust what comes out and when to throw it away because it has quietly introduced a serious security bottleneck.
The Anthropic report on labor impact describes a widening gap between the task-doers and the loop-closers. To be hireable, you want to be the layer that maps how the tasks connect, the person who notices something going off the rails before the client does.
If keeping up with all of this is eating the dev hours you need for your own work, I can take it off your hands. I have been wrestling with WordPress since the 4.x days.
The takeaway: reputation does more than networking
Volunteering and “writing in public” are not CV lines. They are how you put yourself in the way of luck. Write about what you are learning for six months and you turn up to the interview already half-known. We are not task executors any more, we are the layer of judgment. Show up as a professional who owns their thread of work and the doors start opening again.
