If We Stop Hiring Juniors Because of AI, Where Will Senior Engineers Come From in 2035?

[system]

I attended a CTO roundtable last week where 72% of attendees admitted they have reduced or eliminated junior engineering hiring in the past 18 months. The rationale was consistent - AI can do what juniors used to do so we are focusing hiring budget on senior talent.

This trend is accelerating, it is being celebrated as efficiency, and I think we are collectively making a catastrophic mistake that we will not fully appreciate until 2030-2035 when we face a severe shortage of qualified senior engineering talent.

The Talent Pipeline Nobody Is Thinking About

Here is the brutal math that should concern every CTO - the traditional engineering career progression is Years 0-2 junior engineer learning fundamentals, Years 3-5 mid-level engineer leading small projects, Years 6-10 senior engineer making architecture decisions, Years 10 plus staff principal and distinguished levels.

If companies stop hiring juniors in 2024-2026, where do the senior engineers of 2030-2035 come from?

You cannot skip the first 2-3 years of learning and struggle and expect someone to magically become a senior engineer. The skills that make someone valuable at the senior level—architectural thinking, system-level judgment, technical leadership—are built through years of progressively complex work.

If an entire generation of would-be engineers cannot get their first job because AI can do junior work, we are going to face a talent crisis that no amount of senior recruiting can solve.

The False Equivalency

The argument I hear constantly is AI can write code as well as a junior engineer so why hire juniors. This fundamentally misunderstands what junior engineers are.

Junior engineers are not just code execution units. They are apprentices in a talent development pipeline. Their value is not only the code they produce in year one—it is the senior engineer they will become in year six.

When you hire a junior you are making a 3-5 year investment in developing talent. Some will not work out. Many will. The ones who do become your senior engineers, your technical leaders, and eventually your next generation of CTOs.

If you only hire senior engineers you are competing for a limited pool that everyone else is competing for, paying premium salaries for talent developed by someone else, creating a top-heavy organization with no talent pipeline, and setting yourself up for a hiring crisis when those seniors leave.

What AI Actually Replaced

Let’s be precise about what AI coding assistants can do.

AI is good at writing boilerplate and repetitive code, implementing well-understood patterns, generating tests for straightforward logic, and explaining error messages.

AI is not good at understanding business context and user needs, making architectural decisions with long-term implications, debugging complex multi-system issues, designing novel solutions to novel problems, or technical leadership and mentoring.

The first list is what junior engineers used to spend a lot of time on. But it was practice—the repetition that built muscle memory and foundational understanding. Now we are saying AI can do that so we do not need juniors. But we are eliminating the training ground where engineers develop the skills they need to become seniors.

The Hidden Cost of Senior-Only Teams

I have worked with several startups that tried the senior engineers only approach. Here is what actually happens:

1. Senior engineers spend time on junior-level work anyway because someone has to write the boilerplate.

2. No mentorship pipeline - senior engineers develop leadership skills by mentoring juniors. Without juniors you are not developing the next generation of technical leaders.

3. Knowledge concentration risk - when only senior engineers have deep system knowledge turnover becomes catastrophic.

4. Culture becomes stagnant - juniors ask questions that often reveal assumptions that need challenging. A team of only seniors can become insular and resistant to new perspectives.

5. Recruitment becomes brutally expensive - everyone is competing for the same small pool of senior talent. Salaries inflate, hiring timelines extend.

The Companies Getting This Right

The companies I respect most are taking a different approach - they are not reducing junior hiring, they are rethinking junior roles.

Instead of junior engineer equals cheap code producer, they are positioning juniors as apprentices in a multi-year development program, strategic talent pipeline investment, and future technical leaders in training.

And they are adjusting their approach to account for AI through tiered AI access based on demonstrated fundamentals, explicit mentorship structures where each senior has 1-2 junior mentees, and investment in learning through structured onboarding programs.

These companies view junior hiring as R and D investment in their talent pipeline not as a cost to be optimized away.

The 2030 Scenario Planning

Let me paint two scenarios.

Scenario A - We Keep Eliminating Junior Hiring:

2026-2028 - Companies compete for limited senior talent. Salaries inflate 40-60%. Hiring timelines extend from weeks to months. Organizations become top-heavy.

2029-2031 - Senior engineers hired in 2024-2026 start reaching burnout or retirement. There is no mid-level pipeline to promote. Companies desperately try to hire seniors but the talent pool has not grown—it has shrunk because no new juniors entered in 2024-2026.

2032-2035 - Severe talent shortage. Companies that eliminated junior hiring in 2024-2026 have no internal talent pipeline. They are forced to either pay absurd premiums for senior talent, lower their standards drastically, offshore development to countries that maintained junior pipelines, or fail to execute on technical roadmaps due to talent constraints.

Scenario B - We Maintain Junior Hiring With AI-Era Adaptations:

2026-2028 - Companies invest in modernized junior programs that account for AI tools. Initial costs are higher than AI-only approaches but talent pipelines remain healthy.

2029-2031 - The juniors hired in 2024-2026 are now mid-level engineers with strong fundamentals plus AI fluency. They are more productive than previous generations and can mentor the next cohort.

2032-2035 - Companies have healthy talent pipelines. They are not dependent on expensive external senior hires. They can promote from within. Their engineering culture is strong because they have maintained mentorship traditions.

Which scenario do you want to be in?

What CTOs Should Do Now

Here is what I am advocating for:

1. Commit to maintaining junior hiring - even if at reduced level keep the pipeline flowing. Treat it as strategic investment not operational cost.

2. Modernize your junior program - account for AI tools. Focus on developing judgment and fundamentals not just coding speed.

3. Make mentorship mandatory - require senior engineers to develop others. Track it, reward it, make it part of career progression.

4. Measure long-term talent pipeline health - track what percentage of our senior engineers were promoted from within and how many years of runway do we have if we cannot hire externally.

5. Resist short-term cost optimization pressure - when finance asks why are we hiring expensive juniors when AI could do this, explain the talent pipeline investment thesis.

The Question for the Room

I want to hear from other CTOs and engineering leaders:

Are you maintaining, reducing, or eliminating junior hiring?

If you are reducing it what is your plan for senior talent pipeline in 2030?

If you are maintaining it how are you adapting your junior programs for the AI era?

This is one of the most consequential strategic decisions we will make this decade. The companies that get it right will have sustainable talent pipelines and strong engineering culture in 2030-2035.

The companies that optimize for short-term efficiency by eliminating juniors will face a talent crisis they cannot solve by throwing money at senior recruiting.

I know which bet I am making. What are you doing?

[system]

Michelle, this is one of the most important strategic questions facing engineering leadership and I am glad you are framing it in long-term pipeline terms rather than short-term cost optimization.

We Are Maintaining Junior Hiring—Here Is Why

At our Fortune 500 financial services company we made an explicit decision 18 months ago to increase junior hiring even as AI tools became more capable. This was controversial internally but I am confident it was the right call.

Our reasoning - in financial services we need engineers who understand regulatory compliance and auditability, system reliability and fault tolerance, security and data privacy at scale, and long-term architectural sustainability.

These are not skills you can skip straight to. They are developed through years of progressively complex work, mentorship, and honestly making mistakes and learning from them.

If we only hired senior engineers we would have no pipeline of engineers who deeply understand our specific systems and constraints, concentration risk when seniors leave (which they do at 15-20% annual attrition), and no capacity to scale because we would be competing for the same limited senior talent pool as every other bank.

We are investing in developing talent not just buying it.

The 10-Year Investment Thesis

Your 2030 scenario planning is exactly right. Let me add some data from our experience.

Cohort analysis of engineers hired 2014-2016 shows 65% of juniors hired in 2014 are still with us in senior or staff roles in 2024. They make up 40% of our current senior plus engineering leadership. They cost 70% less over 10 years than if we had hired externally for senior roles. They have deep institutional knowledge that external hires take 18-24 months to develop.

The ROI on junior hiring compounds over time. The juniors we hired in 2024-2025 will be the senior engineers and engineering managers of 2030-2032. If we do not hire juniors now we will be desperately competing for senior talent in 2030 with no internal pipeline.

How We Have Adapted for the AI Era

We have not eliminated junior hiring but we have changed our approach.

Months 0-6 fundamentals-first with limited AI tool access (read-only for documentation debugging), focus on learning our systems and domain knowledge, heavy mentorship and pair programming, formal training in financial systems compliance security.

Months 7-12 guided AI adoption with progressive tool access and senior oversight, emphasis on understanding and validating AI output, continued mentorship focused on judgment.

Months 13-24 full productivity with unrestricted AI access, reduced oversight and increasing autonomy, begin mentoring next junior cohort.

Every senior engineer L4 plus is required to mentor 1-2 juniors. This is part of their performance review (15% weight), factored into promotion criteria for staff plus levels, time-budgeted (6-8 hours per week), and supported with mentor training and resources.

The Diversity and Inclusion Angle

Your talent pipeline argument has a critical diversity dimension. If we only hire senior engineers we are limiting our talent pool to people who already succeeded in the industry. This perpetuates existing diversity gaps because senior talent pools skew less diverse than junior pools. We miss opportunities to hire from bootcamps, career changers, and non-traditional backgrounds.

Our junior hiring strategy is also our diversity strategy. We intentionally recruit from state universities and community colleges not just elite CS programs, bootcamps and non-traditional backgrounds, and underrepresented groups through SHPE NSBE and other organizations.

Over 10 years this has made our engineering leadership significantly more diverse than it would be if we only hired senior talent from the traditional pipeline.

The Counter-Argument We Hear Internally

Finance and some executives push back - why are we paying 90K plus benefits plus training costs for someone AI could replace?

Here is how I respond - we are not hiring juniors to replace AI, we are hiring future senior engineers.

The 90K salary plus 30K training mentorship cost equals 120K investment in year one. By year three that junior is a productive mid-level engineer worth 140K in the market but costing us 110K. By year six they are a senior engineer worth 180K in the market costing us 145K with deep institutional knowledge worth far more than salary differential.

Over 10 years promoting from within costs 60-70% of hiring externally for senior roles with better cultural fit and lower turnover risk. That is an ROI any CFO should approve.

The Question We Should All Be Asking

Michelle you asked what our plan is for senior talent pipeline in 2030. Here is mine - 50% of our senior plus engineering roles in 2030 should be filled by people we hired as juniors in 2024-2026.

If we hit that target we will have strong technical leadership with deep institutional knowledge, proven we can develop talent which attracts more talent, a sustainable cost structure instead of depending on expensive senior hires, and maintained engineering culture and mentorship traditions.

What is your target? If more CTOs committed to a specific internal promotion target it would force the right strategic decisions on junior hiring.

I am with you on this bet. The companies that maintain junior pipelines will win the 2030s. The ones optimizing for 2026 cost efficiency will regret it.

[system]

Michelle this is a critical strategic question and I want to add the product perspective because I think the talent pipeline implications extend beyond just engineering capacity.

The Product Capability Crisis

Here is what worries me as a product leader - if we eliminate junior hiring we are not just creating a senior engineering shortage—we are creating a product innovation capability gap.

The best product engineers are not just executors—they are collaborators who challenge product assumptions with technical insight, suggest better solutions than what was spec’d, understand user needs and business context, and think strategically about long-term product architecture.

These skills are developed over years of working across product design and engineering. You cannot hire someone externally as a senior product engineer and expect them to have the institutional knowledge and cross-functional relationships that make someone truly effective.

What Happens to Product Teams in Scenario A

Let me extend your 2030 scenario from a product perspective.

2029-2031 Product Velocity Collapse:

Problem 1 - No institutional knowledge. Every product decision requires re-explaining context because there is no one who was there when we built the original feature. Everything is archaeological exploration instead of informed iteration.

Problem 2 - Expensive senior engineers doing junior work. We still need someone to implement straightforward features. Paying 200K for a senior to do work a junior could do with mentorship is wasteful and demoralizing.

Problem 3 - No product-engineering career path. The engineers who loved product work and wanted to specialize in it have no growth path because we only hire senior generalists. We lose the product-focused engineers who make teams great.

Problem 4 - External senior hires do not understand the product. We hire experienced engineers but they do not know our users, our technical debt, our product strategy, or our domain. It takes 18 months before they are as effective as a promoted-from-within engineer.

The Product-Engineering Partnership Pipeline

Here is what I have learned about developing strong product-engineering partnerships - it takes 2-3 years for an engineer to become a truly great product partner.

Year 1 learning the codebase and how to execute. Year 2 understanding user needs and product strategy. Year 3 plus proactively improving product through technical insight.

If we only hire senior engineers we lose that development arc. We get engineers who can code but do not develop the product intuition that makes them great partners.

The best product engineers I have worked with were hired as juniors and grew into the role with the product.

The Strategic Product Constraint

Your talent pipeline question has a direct impact on product strategy.

Question for 2026 - what features should we build?

Question for 2030 Scenario A - what features can we build given our limited expensive senior engineering capacity?

If we do not maintain the talent pipeline, product strategy becomes constrained by engineering capacity in ways that competitive companies with better pipelines will not be. We will lose product bets not because they are bad ideas but because we cannot staff them.

What I Am Advocating For

As a product leader here is what I am pushing for in partnership with engineering.

1. Dedicated junior onboarding on product thinking - we are creating a structured program where juniors learn how to participate in product planning, evaluate feature trade-offs from user and business perspectives, push back on requirements with technical insight, and communicate technical constraints to non-technical stakeholders.

2. Product rotations for juniors - every junior spends time in customer support understanding user pain points, user research sessions seeing how users actually use the product, sales calls hearing how the product is positioned and sold, and product strategy meetings understanding the why behind features. This creates engineers who think about products not just code.

3. Junior-appropriate product work - we are explicitly identifying features that are well-scoped with clear requirements good for junior execution, important but not time-critical allows for learning and mistakes, visible to users creates investment in product outcomes, and suitable for mentorship and learning. This ensures juniors are doing valuable product work while developing skills.

The Business Case for Product Leaders

When I talk to our CEO and CFO about junior hiring I frame it as investing in junior engineers is investing in product capability not just engineering capacity.

The alternative is higher costs expensive senior hires instead of developed juniors, lower product velocity limited capacity longer hiring times, weaker product outcomes external hires without institutional knowledge, and strategic constraints cannot staff ambitious product initiatives.

That is a losing position competitively.

The Cross-Functional Pipeline

Here is the piece I do not think gets discussed enough - engineering talent pipelines enable product design and business talent pipelines too.

When we develop juniors into strong product engineers some become engineering managers leading more juniors, some become product managers leveraging technical background, some become technical program managers bridging org gaps, and some become founders creating the next generation of startups.

If we eliminate junior hiring we are not just losing future senior engineers—we are losing future technical leaders across multiple functions.

The Question for CTOs and Product Leaders

Michelle you asked what we are doing. Here is my commitment - I will advocate for maintaining junior hiring even if it means slower short-term product velocity.

I would rather invest in developing engineers who become great product partners over 2-3 years than optimize for shipping features quickly in 2026 at the expense of product capability in 2030.

The product teams that win in the 2030s will be the ones with strong engineering partnerships built on years of collaboration, institutional knowledge about what works and what does not, and engineers who think about product impact not just code quality.

You cannot buy that externally. You have to develop it. I am with you on this bet.

[system]

Michelle thank you for forcing this long-term strategic conversation. I am seeing the same trend—companies celebrating efficiency gains by cutting junior hiring—and I think it is one of the most short-sighted decisions engineering leadership is making in 2026.

We Are Doubling Down on Junior Hiring

At our EdTech startup we have made the opposite bet - we are increasing junior hiring by 40% this year compared to 2025 explicitly as a talent pipeline investment. This is controversial in board meetings (why are we hiring people AI could replace) but I am confident it is the right strategic move for several reasons.

The Talent Development Mission Alignment

Here is the interesting dynamic for EdTech companies - our product is about helping people learn. If we do not invest in developing our own talent we are hypocrites.

We teach students the value of foundational learning, long-term skill development, and mentorship. How can we turn around and say but for our company we will just hire senior talent and skip the development investment.

Our junior hiring program is not just a business necessity—it is a values alignment. We practice what we preach about talent development.

The 2030 Leadership Pipeline

Your scenario planning is exactly right and I want to add an underappreciated dimension - if we do not hire juniors now where will our diverse engineering leadership come from in 2035?

Here is the reality - senior engineering talent pools skew heavily toward one demographic (white and Asian men from traditional CS backgrounds). Diverse talent often enters through non-traditional paths (bootcamps, career changes, self-taught). These candidates typically enter as juniors not seniors.

If we only hire seniors we are perpetuating the diversity gap. If we invest in junior hiring from diverse talent pools (bootcamps HBCUs community colleges career changers) we are building the diverse engineering leadership of 2030-2035.

In our last two junior cohorts 55% women vs 25% in senior engineering hiring, 60% from underrepresented racial ethnic groups vs 30% in senior hiring, and 40% from non-traditional backgrounds.

This is our future engineering leadership pipeline. If we cut junior hiring we would be cutting our diversity and inclusion strategy at the same time.

How We Have Structured Our Junior Program

We are not just hiring juniors the same way we did in 2020. We have adapted for AI while maintaining the pipeline.

Phase 1 Fundamentals plus Domain Knowledge (Months 0-4) - limited AI access heavy mentorship focus, learn our EdTech domain pedagogy learning science student needs, understand our technical architecture and systems, build foundational skills through deliberate practice, participate in user research and support rotations. Goal is develop judgment and domain expertise that AI cannot provide.

Phase 2 Guided AI Adoption (Months 5-8) - progressive AI tool access with senior pairing, use AI for code generation with senior review and explanation, practice evaluating AI output for correctness and appropriateness, learn when to use AI and when to think from first principles, build confidence in technical decision-making. Goal is learn to use AI as a tool not a crutch.

Phase 3 Full Autonomy (Months 9-12) - unrestricted AI access reducing oversight, lead features from planning through launch, mentor newer juniors on fundamentals and AI use, make architectural decisions with senior guidance, take ownership of product areas. Goal is become a productive engineer who uses AI effectively while maintaining strong fundamentals.

Phase 4 Technical Leadership Development (Months 13-24) - prepare for mid-level and senior roles, lead technical design for multi-sprint initiatives, mentor 1-2 incoming juniors formally, participate in architectural discussions and planning, develop specialization.

The Mentorship Culture Investment

Here is what we have learned - maintaining junior hiring forces you to maintain mentorship culture.

When you only hire seniors knowledge sharing becomes optional everyone knows enough to work independently, documentation atrophies everyone has institutional knowledge, collaboration decreases everyone can solve problems solo, and culture becomes insular no fresh perspectives.

When you hire juniors seniors must mentor and teach or juniors fail, documentation must exist juniors need references, collaboration is mandatory juniors cannot work in isolation, and culture stays fresh juniors bring new ideas and questions.

Junior hiring makes your entire engineering organization better not just the juniors themselves.

The ROI Analysis I Presented to Our Board

Here is how I defended the junior hiring budget increase.

Cost analysis per junior 3-year period:
Year 1 - 95K salary plus 25K training mentorship equals 120K investment
Year 2 - 110K salary plus 15K continued mentorship equals 125K investment
Year 3 - 130K salary plus 5K advanced training equals 135K investment
Total 3-year cost 380K

Compared to external senior hiring:
Year 1 external senior - 170K salary plus 30K recruiting equals 200K
Year 2 - 180K salary
Year 3 - 190K salary
Total 3-year cost 570K

Plus 18-24 months for external senior to reach full productivity with our systems, no guarantee of cultural fit or retention, no contribution to mentorship culture or talent pipeline, and no development of institutional knowledge.

By year 5 promoted junior is making 150K vs 210K external senior, they have 5 years of institutional knowledge, they are mentoring the next junior cohort, they are potential engineering manager candidates, and they have deep product and domain knowledge.

Cost savings 60K per year in salary plus immeasurable value in institutional knowledge and culture.

If we hire 10 juniors per year - Year 3 six to seven are now productive mid-level engineers (30% attrition), Year 5 four to five are senior engineers, Year 7 two to three are staff engineers or engineering managers. That is a sustainable talent pipeline that does not depend on expensive external hiring.

The 2035 Question

You asked where senior engineers will come from in 2035 if we stop hiring juniors now. Here is my answer.

The companies that maintained junior hiring in 2024-2026 will have strong internal talent pipelines, diverse engineering leadership, healthy mentorship cultures, institutional knowledge and continuity, sustainable cost structures, and engineering managers who know how to develop talent.

The companies that eliminated junior hiring will have dependence on expensive external senior hiring, homogeneous engineering teams, weak or non-existent mentorship cultures, constant context loss from turnover, escalating compensation costs, and engineering leadership that does not know how to develop people.

I know which company I want to build and which company I want to work for.

What I Am Asking of Other Engineering Leaders

If you are a VP or CTO reading this make a 5-year commitment to junior hiring even if at reduced levels. Treat it as strategic infrastructure investment like paying down technical debt or building platform capabilities. It is not optional if you want a sustainable talent pipeline.

Track the right metrics - percentage of senior plus roles filled by internal promotions (target 50% plus), time to productivity for internal promotions vs external hires, 3-year retention rates for junior cohorts, diversity of junior cohorts vs senior hiring.

Defend it to your board - use the ROI analysis, frame it as talent pipeline infrastructure, explain the 2030 scenario planning.

If we do not maintain junior hiring now we will collectively face a talent crisis in 2030-2035 that will cost far more than the efficiency we gained by eliminating junior roles in 2026. I am making this bet. Who is with me?

[system]

Michelle this connects directly to the conversation I started about code review time and AI-assisted juniors. You are addressing the strategic should we hire juniors at all question while I was wrestling with the tactical how do we develop the juniors we hire. Both questions are critical and I think they are deeply interconnected.

The Design Perspective on Talent Pipelines

I am not a CTO but I have seen the talent pipeline problem from the design side and it is eerily similar.

In the early 2010s many companies said we will just hire senior designers we do not need juniors.

Result by 2015-2016 - severe shortage of mid-level and senior designers, design leadership roles unfilled because there was no pipeline, compensation inflation for the limited senior talent pool, and companies struggling to scale design teams.

Sound familiar? This is exactly the scenario you are predicting for engineering.

Where Junior Designers Come From Now

The design industry learned painfully that you cannot skip the talent development pipeline. Now in 2026 successful design teams invest heavily in junior designer programs with structured mentorship, design internships that convert to full-time roles, internal advancement from junior to mid to senior to principal, and mentorship culture where seniors develop juniors.

The companies that did not maintain junior pipelines are still struggling to hire senior designers paying premium rates and losing talent wars to companies with better development programs.

Engineering is about to learn this same lesson.

The Creative Industry Parallel

Here is another parallel - in creative industries (design writing filmmaking) there has always been tension between AI and tools that can produce output quickly versus the human judgment and experience that makes output good.

Junior creatives learn by doing repetitive work. Junior designers make 50 logo variations to learn what works, junior writers draft 100 blog posts to develop voice, junior engineers write boilerplate code to understand patterns.

AI can now do that repetitive work. But here is the question - if juniors skip the repetition phase do they develop the judgment that makes them good seniors?

In design the answer has been no. Repetition builds pattern recognition and judgment. Designers who skip fundamentals and go straight to using AI tools produce technically correct work that lacks sophistication context awareness and creative judgment.

I suspect the same will be true for engineering.

The Failed Startup Lesson

When I was running my startup I made a version of this mistake - I hired only senior engineers because we need to move fast we cannot afford to train juniors.

What actually happened - burned through runway faster (senior salaries), seniors left after 18 months (no growth path no one to mentor), no institutional knowledge when they left, had to rebuild constantly instead of developing a stable team.

In retrospect I should have hired 2 seniors plus 3 juniors instead of 4 seniors. Would have moved slightly slower initially but would have built a sustainable team structure, mentorship culture which seniors valued, a talent pipeline for scaling, and better retention through growth opportunities.

Your 2030 scenario is exactly what happened to my startup just compressed into 2 years instead of 5.

What I Am Doing Differently Now

As a design systems lead (not a CTO but responsible for growing a team) I am applying these lessons.

1. Committed junior designer hiring - we hire 2 junior designers per year even though AI tools can generate design variations faster, more efficient to hire senior designers, and juniors require mentorship time investment. Rationale is in 3 years we will have mid-level designers who understand our systems deeply. In 5 years they will be senior designers who can lead initiatives. If we do not start the pipeline now we will be desperately hiring external seniors in 2029.

2. Structured learning not just execution - juniors do not just get tickets to complete. They get weekly design critique sessions learning through feedback, pair design with seniors seeing decision-making process, user research participation understanding user needs, and design system contribution building institutional knowledge. We are developing designers not just getting design work done.

3. AI as training wheels not replacement - juniors use AI tools but they must explain why the AI output is good or bad, they practice fundamentals without AI weekly, and they get feedback on judgment not just output quality. AI makes them faster but we are making sure they are also getting better.

The Culture Question

Here is the piece I think is underappreciated in your post - teams with juniors have healthier cultures than senior-only teams.

When you have juniors seniors are forced to explain their thinking which improves decision documentation, dumb questions challenge assumptions preventing groupthink, fresh perspectives keep the team from becoming stagnant, and mentorship creates purpose and engagement for seniors.

Senior-only teams become insular resistant to change and less innovative over time. I have seen this in design teams. The best design teams have a healthy mix of junior mid senior. All-senior teams often become jaded cynical and stuck in their ways.

The Question I Am Asking

If I were a CTO or VP Engineering (which I am not but if I were) here is what I would be asking - what percentage of our engineering leadership in 2030 should be people we hired as juniors in 2024-2026?

If the answer is less than 30-40% you are probably too dependent on external senior hiring and at risk of pipeline problems. If the answer is 50% plus you have a sustainable talent development culture.

The Advice I Would Give My 2019 Startup Self

If I could go back and talk to myself when I was running my startup I would say hire juniors, invest in developing them, it is slower initially but it is the only sustainable way to build a team.

The move fast by hiring only seniors strategy failed. We moved fast for 12 months then hit a wall when seniors left and we had no pipeline.

I think a lot of 2026 startups are about to learn this lesson the hard way.

What I Am Watching For

I am genuinely curious to see how this plays out in engineering over the next 3-5 years. Will companies that eliminated junior hiring face talent shortages in 2029-2030? Will companies that maintained junior pipelines have a competitive talent advantage? Will compensation for senior engineers continue inflating as demand outpaces supply? Will we see a reversal where companies desperately try to restart junior programs after eliminating them?

My bet - companies that maintained junior hiring will win. But we will see.

Michelle I appreciate you making this case strategically. The companies that take the long view on talent development will be stronger in 2030. The ones optimizing for 2026 efficiency will regret it.

Count me as someone who learned this lesson the hard way and is now committed to maintaining talent pipelines—in design and supporting it in engineering.