How Do You Grow a Senior Engineer When AI Does the Grunt Work?
For decades, the path was obvious. A junior engineer joined a team, got handed a bug nobody else wanted, fixed it, broke something else, fixed that too, and over a few years accumulated the scar tissue that turned into judgment. Senior engineers were not trained; they were grown, slowly, by the system itself. That system has stopped working at both ends. At the entry point, juniors aren’t being hired. AI makes a senior dramatically more productive and a junior only marginally so, which makes the rational move, for any single team, in any single quarter, to skip the junior hire and let an experienced engineer with AI do the work two juniors used to do. Industry-wide, the pipeline is being shut off before it starts. ...