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From COBOL to ChatGPT: The Evolution of Tech Hiring

Remember when tech hiring meant finding someone who could wrestle with COBOL, fix a mainframe hiccup, and still have time to show off their new pager? Yeah, those were the glory days. Fast forward a few decades, and here we are, juggling candidates who casually say, “Oh, I fine-tuned a GenAI model last weekend for fun.”

The tech hiring landscape has been like a Netflix series with too many seasons—each one introducing new characters, plot twists, and cliffhangers.

  • Season 1: The Dinosaur Era (COBOL & Mainframes)
    Recruiters hunted for folks who spoke fluent COBOL. These legends still walk among us, often referred to as “the ones keeping your bank alive.”

  • Season 2: The Dotcom Buzz
    Suddenly, Java wasn’t just coffee. Every JD screamed “Java Developer” as if they were golden tickets to Willy Wonka’s factory. Then came the dotcom crash—ouch.

  • Season 3: The Cloudburst
    AWS, Azure, and GCP arrived like shiny new superheroes. Hiring shifted to finding cloud architects who promised companies could finally “shut down that dusty on-prem server room.”

  • Season 4: The Data Frenzy
    Data engineers, analysts, scientists—it was like Pokémon, gotta hire ‘em all. Clients wanted candidates who could make sense of data faster than Sherlock with a magnifying glass.

  • Season 5: Enter GenAI
    And now? If your JD doesn’t have the words “AI,” “ML,” or “GenAI,” are you even hiring in 2025? Candidates are building chatbots for their side hustles while companies are still debating whether to block ChatGPT at work.

The Plot Twist?
Through all these eras, one thing has stayed the same: recruiters. We’ve been the ones decoding acronyms, soothing client expectations, and occasionally Googling “What is Kubernetes?” at 11 PM.

The Next Season?
Who knows—maybe hiring quantum developers who can bend reality? Until then, we’ll keep upgrading our recruiter lingo from COBOL to ChatGPT and beyond.


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