Can you sabotage the access to their tools, like with an DNS block or whatever would be feasible. And then suddenly have a very serious groundshaking issue come up that needs immediate attention. Something along this line. Just to see what's going to happen. Not to give you bad ideas, just being a little creative.

Maybe your juniors just don't give the same amount of fucks about working for some big faceless corp who doesn't give a shit about them (20 juniors eh? Sounds pretty big), and no promise of a better future.

They don't want to pay for engineer premium so they get basic or plus levels of efforts.

It makes me wonder how these 5 senior engineers came to found a company that works like that. Do they not like writing the code? Do they have dreams of being rich? Do they believe the product they will produce is so essential that the process doesn’t matter?

I started programming when I was 14 years old, and turned 34 this year. That makes about 20 years.

Figuring out the syntax of a new language, the satisfaction of getting something to compile, and getting the "perfect" dev environment on my Arch Linux install was a lot of fun. I wouldn't trade that experience for anything, but at this point I've gotten all the fulfillment I'm going to get from it.

Even before AI agents came along, I had already moved on to caring about the impact of the software: benefit to society (for my open source contributions); revenue to company (for half my day job); learning business skills to improve my earning potential (for the other half of my day job).

I would delegate the actual coding to junior engineers, and spend most of my time designing the higher level architecture and everything else needed to herd them into delivering the high level business objective.

Unfortunately, the current generation of AI agents (Opus 5, GPT 5.6 Sol) can do a somewhat similar role to those juniors. They don't have the human element that made it fun to mentor the juniors, but they also don't have feelings so I can give them feedback without worrying about coming off as a condescending asshole.

Dunno if that's helpful at all to you, but if you're genuinely wondering why a decent chunk of senior engineers are sticking around in the AI world, then there's one perspective.

The only way I see this ending is Juinor wages plummeting and turning into unpaid internships or paid (the other way) ‘educational programs’.

I do have a slightly more positive note on that. Universities are slow to adapt their curriculums to new technologies, but they will eventually care that they're producing graduates that provide so little value to companies that they're unemployable.

They'll begin to produce graduates that are the equivalent of today's mid level and senior engineers. While I don't know exactly what kind of education can instill in 4 years the essence of what took me decades to learn, I do know that pretty much every generation of humans have surpassed their parents so far. So I have every confidence you kids will figure it out.

i think they like other stems,. like biotech has done rely more on the senior level/scientists, of course they hire less of them, and not hire any, or barely any of the entry or junior level employees. so its a law of diminishing returns for a employer since they are mostly holding onto more "experience" employees.

Yeah part of why I posted it here was to avoid causing juniors unnecessary anxiety. It’s ultimately seniors who will need to have a plan in place to prevent this. And to be clear no senior worth their stripes wants this, because yes it would be soul sucking.

What would be the point? We’re already solving solved problems and reproducing known design patterns for someone else’s product. Money problems are solved pretty early in a developer’s career, so for most that motivation has diminishing returns. Meaningful work is harder to come by where the air gets thin, and developing people is where many of the best developers rediscover it. They won’t just give that up and spend every workday managing bots for nesting yacht riches.

Also new tools are just tools. Anyone who thinks they can replace human judgement needs to read more. Stakeholders will prioritize short-term profits because they’re free to be greedy shortsighted fools, but engineers who are any good at their jobs don’t have that luxury. They look ahead. They have a bench. Because that’s the job.

So i wouldn’t worry about this too much. If you want a takeaway from articles like this, something to give you an edge, maybe check out the new tools. Learn how to run them on basic local machines, how to train them, and understand what they can and (more importantly) can’t do. Even if it’s just to prove to yourself why they could never replace you.

I think it's going to be a weird period where we're expected to do everything that involves real engineering, anything "business centric", and they're going to be like "yes we gave you $500k annual, please provide the Secure And Well Architecture of the Olden Times... We need you to redesign a new system from scratch because the slop is losing us money"

...which I'm personally okay with, because I didn't really save that much for retirement or plan on it anytime soon? I was getting more worried about grey hairs aging me out of software, but maybe they'll age me back in.

Full disclosure, I'm not a senior developer, but a senior elsewhere in IT facing this exact same situation.

Like the author, I've also identified our cannibalism of our juniors with the obvious future consequences to this if continued unabated. I've struggled with how to combat this, and I really give the author lots of credit for producing actual actionable plans on a path forward.

The main failure mode I see for the proposal is organizational self interest. Investing in juniors made sense in the past because the junior work (grunt work) was needed completion anyway so the exercise of training produced a useful result while also freeing up cycles for seniors to engage in higher level work. The result is that the training of the junior became partially subsidized by their output. Today that isn't really the case. A senior with an agentic workflow can likely produce the same result as the junior with only a rounding error of effort. This shifts the organizational incentive model significantly to the point were training the junior is purely a cost sink with only a negligible return to the organization.

The author points out properly that systemically across the industry cannibalizing juniors eventually means cannibalizing future seniors, but wrongly assumes that training juniors inside the organization means producing seniors long term in the organization. Unless the entire industry adopts the new system to train juniors there will be organizations that simply poach juniors that have been trained up. Money is fungible. If it takes money to train the junior an org could take those same dollars and offer relatively obscene salaries to trained juniors.

From my view, seems like it will always be more expensive to train than to hire those trained. What am I missing here? How can an org that trains up its juniors (using the author's good suggestions on how) guarantee they keep their trained juniors (or at least retain enough to make the whole exercise worth it)?

Definitely has some opus smell in several places. Then again, people who use specific model families at work seem to get infected by their lexical patterns. Not a fan.

...the same junior developers that management and the investor class have stopped hiring.

Most seniors I know like mentoring newer engineers and would happily have more juniors on the team, but we don't get to make hiring decisions. I don't like that we have a glut of unemployed/underemployed new college grads and I feel bad for them, but I do not remotely care that management may have to pay me more than they'd like in 5 years because they decided they didn't need a junior pipeline anymore. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

Good point. I think most of the pitch here is to stakeholders and hiring managers, since they frame it explicitly as "buying senior-engineer futures at today's price,” but I also think they’re wrong that “your seniors will hate it.” IMO that depends entirely on what kind of seniors you’ve brought onto the team.

If they’re motivated entirely by money or personal accomplishment, or they don’t play well with other developers, like the type we’ve all met who are eventually siloed on smaller projects, then yes I’d agree. They’ll hate it. But they never wanted to mentor juniors in the first place. I’d call those mid-level engineers.

None of the true seniors I’ve known could grind through repetitive agentic workflows daily without eventually hitting a brick wall of boredom. And I think most who gave it a little thought would realize this in advance. The emptiness and tedium of that work alone would be deal breaker. The only exception might be former seniors who are burned out and just want to retire ASAP, to do literally anything else.

But otherwise I don’t think most seniors want this scenario to play out. At all.

And that mistake is even more shortsighted than the systemic failure condition the author focuses on (retaining only seniors and replacing juniors with AI).

Firing your seniors instead also cripples the growth of juniors but, as a bonus, guarantees proliferation of technical debt that tends to scale exponentially with the project. And that’s all before the compounding factor of reliance on coding agents.

Sounds like your former employer insists on learning the hard way. While I’m glad you got out ahead of the shitstorm, I do feel bad for your juniors.

We built an AI tool where I work, that looks at the stories that get written for us and complains until the story has a meaningfully good quality. I really like that kind of AI use.

We still write our code almost fully by hand.

Humans hate the slop. This doesn't work.

People keep trying to say, "maybe the AI would do a good job at handling the communication" and then they see it autogenerate paragraphs of slop that no one ever wants to fucking read, and the person copying and pasting it couldn't even be bothered to read it. It's pointless if people are sending messages no one cares about