Last week someone shared that "AI just killed 2 frontend devs from my team" and when the juniors panicked about it most of the replies from seniors were "well, they should have been more valuable." Yeah, that's the spirit. 🙃
Can I pose a tough question to answer: Where do you suppose you came from?
The Ladder Is Real
Every senior dev I know — myself included — got good by doing junior work. We wrote the CRUD endpoints. We fixed the CSS bugs. We copy-pasted Stack Overflow answers and slowly learned why they worked.
That grunt work wasn't busywork. It was the training ground.
AI Eats the Bottom Rungs First
Over 50,000 organizations already use coding assistants like Copilot. And they are particularly good at providing help with the kind of more routine work that less experienced programmers traditionally work on.
→ Boilerplate components
→ Simple API integrations
→ Bug fixes with obvious stack traces
→ Writing tests for existing code
If a team is able to deliver those things with AI in place of a junior, the junior is just not hired. The learning opportunity disappears before it is even created.
"Just Learn AI Tools" Isn't an Answer
I hear this a lot. "Let juniors just learn to use AI effectively" - fair enough, but use it on what exactly?
You won't improve engineering judgment by asking Copilot to write code for something you don't comprehend yet. It’s similar to suggesting that someone can learn to be a chef by just finding a better way to order DoorDash.
The gap in skills between those who can manipulate AI and those who can design systems is vast. Junior positions used to serve as a bridge to cross that gap. Now, we're destroying the bridge and expecting people to make the leap.
Seniors Are Complicit
What is most concerning to me, is that those who are rejoicing over AI taking over the mundane tasks of junior employees are the very same individuals who will be lamenting in five years that “nobody knows how to actually build anything anymore.”
You can't strip-mine the talent pipeline and then act surprised when there's no talent. 🤷
The current business strategy in this industry is to optimize headcount for this specific quarter regardless of the consequences for the future, creating a generational knowledge gap. For every junior dev that the industry rejects today, we're down a senior dev in 2030.
This Isn't Anti-AI
I use AI tools in my daily work. They are actually helpful. This is not a Luddite perspective.
We must be truthful about the compromise. Generating output faster today, but less competent engineers tomorrow, is not a victory without a cost. It is a debt - and as with any debt, it will have to be paid by someone in the end.
→ Companies could create AI-augmented apprenticeship roles
→ Teams could pair juniors with AI and a mentor, not AI instead of a mentor
→ Senior devs could advocate for junior headcount instead of shrugging
All of this can be prevented if we stop pretending that the pipeline will automatically be replenished. 🔥
The Question Nobody Wants to Answer
What is the strategy if junior positions are not available to juniors, and juniors can't become seniors without first being juniors?
Are we just hoping the current generation of seniors lives forever?
I'm eager to hear from hiring managers, team leads, and juniors who are currently on the hunt. What does the process of actually breaking in right now look like?
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