One of the dominant narratives in software today is that AI is making junior engineers redundant.
It goes like this: since AI can approximate well what a junior engineer is able to produce, there is no point in hiring anyone who is not senior. In fact, senior engineers are the only ones capable of steering these tools.
From what I can see, this story is real, in the sense that many people believe it. I know many companies who have frozen junior hiring, and others who are explicitly steering towards small, senior-heavy teams.
I believe this is a mistake. And I don’t mean it from an ethical angle (the poor junior engineers!) — I mean from a practical, business one.
It’s also a mistake I have seen being done many times, well before AI, pretty much based on the same arguments. If anything, AI supercharged some of the same fallacies that have been around for decades.
Also, I am not alone in this. If you have been following Refactoring, you know the junior engineers topic is a recurring one both in the newsletter and in podcast interviews. Over time, I discussed it with Chris Lattner, Charity Majors, Meri Williams, and more.
So today I will put everything together and make the definitive case for hiring junior engineers on your team in 2026! Here is the agenda:
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Juniors are required to do more now— let’s acknowledge where this is all coming from.⚖️
Junior vs senior engineers— the difference is messier than you think🔭
First vs second-order effects— thinking of your team as a system when it comes to process, hiring, and growth.🌱
How to make it work— because juniors just don’t turn into seniors automatically.
Let’s dive in!
Let’s start by acknowledging the obvious: all engineers, not just junior ones, are required to do more now.
More of what? For junior engineers, the job looks qualitatively very different, and requires a lot of things from them earlier in their careers than it used to.
Think of:
Code reviews— because of AI, junior engineers need now to review code from the get-go. Which in turn requires more... 👇Critical thinking— engineers need to constantly question the why and how provided by AI.Systems thinking— people are given bigger pieces of work from the start, which requires them to employ non-obvious design chops.
This is what many people see and makes them say: “yeah, junior engineers are screwed”.
I don’t think that’s the case, because there’s more to junior engineers than coding 👇
Anyone who has worked for some time in teams with mixed levels of expertise knows that the frontier, or boundaries, between a junior and a senior engineer is not clear-cut. It’s jagged.
Engineers do not grow linearly, simply becoming more capable over time. As humans, we also lose things over time. In my experience, there are things at which senior engineers are, on average, worse than junior engineers.
Many senior engineers are, vs junior engineers:
