A CTO now spends more time promoting courses and MCing events than coding: Korean dev YouTuber Hyangro's 'third way' for junior developers
Nov 14, 2026Original 개발바닥(향로 이동욱) · 딜사이트 · 중앙일보 ↗
In 3 lines
- Naver and Kakao's new hires under 30 fell to below a third in four years
- Even a CTO now promotes courses, MCs events and manages costs
- His answer: neither founding nor resignation, but practicing liking the work you do
Lee Dong-wook, known as Hyangro and CTO of Inflab, which runs the Korean learning platform Inflearn, posted a 24-minute solo talk on the developer YouTube channel Gaebalbadak on Nov. 12. It answers the question he says he hears most at events and job interviews: what advice would he give junior developers in the AI era? We read the video, which drew 36,000 views and 117 comments in two days, alongside hiring data from Naver and Kakao and an analysis of job postings on Wanted.
The question he hears most at events and interviews
Hyangro recently spoke on a panel and got the same question at the after-party, then again the next day from a candidate in his own team's interview: what advice would he give junior developers in the AI era? He had expected questions about AI code review or measuring developer productivity, and said it seemed "everyone is going through a hard time since AI arrived." After giving the same answer over and over, he decided to record it once.
Naver and Kakao's under-30 hiring fell to below a third in four years
He said he had read reports that Kakao and Naver were hiring far fewer new and junior developers. A Dealsite tally from August shows new hires under 30 fell from 528 to 163 at Naver and from 716 to 187 at Kakao between 2021 and 2025. Naver skipped its usual first-half recruiting notice this year, saying it would "hire talent suited to the AI transition flexibly." The paper described it as a shift from big open recruitment to pinpoint hiring of only the people needed.
Byun Han-seok · Dealsite ↗Five of the six shrinking job families were developer roles
A Wanted Lab analysis reported by JoongAng Ilbo in June points the same way. Of 72,793 postings on Wanted from January last year to April this year, five of the six job families that shrank significantly this year were developer roles. The share of postings mentioning "AI native" grew eightfold. Computer science employment rates also fell between 2023 and 2025: from 83.8% to 72.6% at Seoul National University and from 77.9% to 69.8% at KAIST.
Wanted Lab · Seo Ji-won · JoongAng Ilbo ↗A CTO's day: promoting courses, MCing events, managing costs
This is how Hyangro describes his days now: promoting courses, recruiting instructors, hosting promo streams like a home-shopping show, MCing events, managing spending and handling a flood of security issues. He admitted he got comments from viewers disappointed that about half his social posts are now course promotions. "It's getting harder for developers to work as developers, and the very color of being a developer is fading," he said, adding that some companies are moving designers to sales and developers to marketing.
Start a company, resign yourself, or a third way
He laid out three options. The first is founding a company to work the way you want. When Unity and Unreal went mainstream, many developers who built in-house engines left to make games on someone else's engine; some succeeded and some didn't, but it is a path. The second is to stay and resign yourself, telling yourself that work is just like that. Saying the remaining 30 to 40 years would feel too long that way, he chose the third: trying to like the work you are doing now.
If the bubble bursts, will companies hire people again?
He noted that developers only became a mainstream profession recently, as startup funding grew around 2018 and peaked during COVID. Pointing out that Cisco's stock price today is about where it was in early 2000, he asked whether the IT industry would hire people again if money stopped flowing after an AI bubble burst. Watching a women's pro volleyball team disappear this year made him think an industry could shrink, or slide back to the labor-for-hire days of 15 years ago. Since no one can know, he decided to like the job in front of him rather than drift in search of the developer he once wanted to be.
Watching yourself be clumsy is practice too
So these days he takes courses on how sales engineers work, funnel and retention analysis with BigQuery, and security breach cases. He reads Kazuo Inamori on accounting management, plus books on B2B sales and CRM marketing. "It's like I was a hero in another world, then came back and became an ordinary office worker," he said, adding that the hardest part is watching himself be awkward and unskilled. He wants to keep working into his 50s, 60s and 70s, so he would rather practice that while he is younger. Big shifts come roughly every 10 years, so even today's job seekers will live through a few more.
Less what was taken, more what you can now make
He was surprised to find that a song he loved while working out, "Have I Become the Adult I Dreamed Of?", was made with AI. Just as other roles can now build things without developers, developers can make the songs they loved, games like Farland Tactics or Romance of the Three Kingdoms: Cao Cao Chronicles that they played all night, or novels like Dragon Raja. With job boundaries this blurry, he said, now is actually a good time to build the habit of liking the work you do. People who slowly turn their corner of the mud into a flower bed, he said, end up happy.
117 comments: 'the first to take the hit'
The video drew 117 comments in two days. One with 49 likes read, "I've coded so much for 17 years. Was there ever a time like now when I go home without writing a single line?" Another said it "feels less like a technical job and more like office work." A comment with 50 likes argued that developers were among the first to take the hit in the AI era and so can adapt first, urging people to think about their calling rather than their job title.
