What Happens When You Stop Hiring Junior Engineers
One of my kids has recently graduated with a CS degree. He's been applying for entry-level software engineering positions for months now, and the responses - when there are responses - have not been encouraging.
Junior hiring has always been competitive, but the framing has shifted. Hiring managers are telling me they don't really need junior engineers anymore - they have AI for the small stuff. I think that's one of the most short-sighted calls being made right now.
AI can write boilerplate code, handle simple bug fixes, scaffold components, and do it faster than a new grad who's still learning your codebase. On a spreadsheet, the cost comparison looks obvious. That math only measures immediate output, though - it doesn't account for what happens to your engineering pipeline over time.
Junior engineers, over time, become the senior engineers your company needs running its systems. A junior in their first two years picks up things that can't be taught in a classroom or by a language model. They figure out that changing the date format in Service A breaks the downstream parser in Service B, and that the "quick fix" their manager wants will create three months of tech debt. They start reading a Jira board and separating what actually matters this sprint from what just feels urgent. They find out that the team in building two has a completely different deployment process and that their PR is going to sit for a week if they don't give them a heads up.
None of that comes from writing code - it comes from being in the room, making mistakes, asking questions, and watching how experienced engineers handle the same situations.
AI doesn't learn any of that. It wasn't in the room when the sprint retrospective uncovered why the release went sideways, and it doesn't know why the staff engineer pushed back on a microservice split in last month's architecture review. It hasn't built the working relationship with the team in building two that makes coordination easier next time.
When a company decides they don't need junior engineers because AI handles the simple work, they're making a decision about right now and about five years from now. If you don't hire juniors today, you don't have mid-level engineers in three years, seniors in five, or staff engineers in eight.
You can't backfill that gap with AI, because the skills you need at those levels - judgment, context, institutional knowledge, the ability to anticipate what's going to break before you ship it - come from years of experience that started with being a junior engineer who was given the chance to learn on the job.
Budgets are real, headcount is scrutinized, and when someone offers you a tool that can do 70% of what a junior does for a fraction of the cost, it's tempting. The other 30% is where a human being grows into someone who can lead a project, mentor the next generation, and make the judgment calls that keep your systems running.
My kid will probably find a job eventually - he's persistent and he's good at what he does. I think about all the new grads who won't, though, and what that means for the industry in a decade. We're trading our future senior engineers for a cheaper AI bill today, and I don't think most companies have thought through what that's actually going to cost them.