Hire the Junior. It Is Our Job Now.

Junior dev hiring is down somewhere between 46 and 67 percent depending on which region you look at. The CEO of AWS called replacing juniors with AI “one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard.” He is right. And the industry is doing it anyway.

Let me say the part everyone in a hiring meeting is too scared to say out loud: we HAVE to hire junior developers. This is not a nice-to-have. This is not a “when the budget allows” thing. This is the job.

The Pipeline We Are Quietly Burning

Every senior engineer you have ever worked with became a senior by doing tedious, boring, slightly humiliating work for a couple of years. Hunting down a null pointer in a 4000 line file. Writing the seventh CRUD endpoint of the week. Fixing the flaky test nobody else wants to touch. Reading other people’s code and asking dumb questions in PRs.

That work is exactly the work AI eats first. Of course it does. It is repetitive, it is well-documented, it is the easiest stuff to automate. So companies looked at it, did the math for one quarter, and decided they did not need to hire the people who used to do that work anymore. Short-term savings, long-term suicide.

In five years, where do you think the seniors come from? They do not spawn at L5. They get built. If you stop building them now, you will be paying a million dollars a year for the ones who survived in 2031, and you will deserve it.

The New Grads Are Actually Incredible

I want to be clear, because the discourse online makes it sound like new grads cannot tie their shoes. That is not what I see. The new grads I have talked to recently are sharper and more driven than I was at that stage. By a wide margin. They ship more in a weekend than I shipped in a month at their age. They have an appetite for this work that is genuinely exciting.

They also have an enormous engine sitting underneath them now. AI tooling has raised the floor of what a motivated person can build, dramatically. That is real, and it is a good thing.

The problem is not the talent. The problem is the gap between what the engine can do and what the driver actually knows.

The Porsche Analogy

Here is how I think about it.

A junior I hired in 2010 had a 2005 Fiat engine inside them. Slow, simple, forgiving. You had a couple of years to teach them, expose them to bigger problems, upgrade their internals piece by piece. If they made a wrong turn, the Fiat engine could not push them into a wall hard enough to actually hurt anyone. You had time.

A junior today has a Porsche Cayman engine bolted in from day one. What they can output is genuinely powerful. It looks like senior work from a distance.

But they have not gotten their learner’s permit yet. They have not driven in the rain. They do not know what understeer feels like. They do not know that the brakes get hot. If you hand them the keys and tell them to merge to production on the highway, they are not going to get a fender bender. They are going to crash, and the crash is going to be fatal. For the codebase, for the on-call rotation, sometimes for the company.

That is the actual problem. Not “juniors are bad now.” Juniors are MORE capable than ever, with LESS experience than ever. The gap between what they can produce and what they understand has never been wider.

This Is On Us

So who teaches them to drive? Not the AI. The AI is the engine. Engines do not teach.

It is us. Senior devs. We have to do it. And here is the part I am tired of pretending is comfortable: a lot of seniors do not want to. They are happy to use AI to ship faster, ignore PRs from the new hire, and tell themselves the kid will figure it out. They will not. Not the way we did, because the path we walked does not exist anymore.

Mentoring in this era is harder than it used to be. I will not pretend otherwise. The tools change every week. Half the time I am learning the new thing while I am supposed to be teaching it. The old playbook of “give them the boring tickets and watch them grow” does not work when the boring tickets are gone. We have to build a new playbook in real time, while the ground shifts under us.

That is the job now. We do not get to opt out because it is inconvenient.

Practical, Not Preachy

I am not asking anyone to be a saint. I am saying:

  • Hire the junior. Even if a senior with Cursor could “do it faster.” That is not the point.
  • Pair with them. Not once a month. Weekly, at least. Watch them drive. Take the wheel when they are about to merge into a wall.
  • Read their AI-generated code WITH them. Ask why each piece is there. Make them defend it. That is where the actual learning happens now.
  • Give them problems the AI cannot one-shot. Architecture calls. Debugging in production. Talking to a real customer.

This is not charity. This is the only way the industry continues to exist past 2030.

Hire the junior. Teach them to drive. That is the job.