CAREER
Every few months, a senior engineer posts about how they no longer need to hire juniors because AI does everything a junior does, faster and cheaper.
It’s a take that gets a lot of engagement, mostly from other senior engineers who feel validated by it. It’s also, I think, largely wrong — and dangerously short-sighted about how engineering organisations actually work over time.
What Junior Developers Actually Do
The framing of “AI does what juniors do” implicitly defines junior developer work as: writing boilerplate, implementing specified features, fixing straightforward bugs, writing tests for known behaviour. And yes, AI is very good at all of those things.
But that framing misses what junior developers are actually for. They are the pipeline from which senior developers come. The junior developer who spends three years implementing features, debugging production issues, and getting code reviewed is building the mental model that makes them a valuable senior developer. Remove that pipeline and you have a short-term efficiency gain and a long-term capability crisis.
“Remove the junior pipeline and you have a short-term efficiency gain and a long-term capability crisis.”
What’s Actually Changing
The role of a junior developer is changing, not disappearing. The ability to implement something from a specification is becoming table stakes rather than the main value. The new junior developer needs to be good at: decomposing problems, evaluating AI output critically, understanding system design at a higher level of abstraction, and knowing enough to catch the things AI gets wrong.
That’s a different job. It’s also still a job — and still a necessary one. The organisations that have stopped hiring juniors entirely will find themselves with a skills cliff in five years that no amount of AI will patch.
Tags: Artificial Intelligence • Opinion • Technology & Society • 192.168.1.22/