AI didn't kill your junior pipeline. You did | Andrew Murphy | Andrew Murphy

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AI didn't kill your junior pipeline. You did<br>Andrew Murphy·2026-05-22·16 min read

Heads up, I swear sometimes in my writing. Need to share this somewhere that dislikes swearing?

👔 Corporate🇦🇺 'Strayan

Last week someone posted a job listing in a public engineering Slack community. "Junior Developer, Remote, Python/Django." Pretty standard stuff. The kind of listing that, three years ago, would have attracted a pile of applications and maybe a few "great opportunity!" replies from people trying to be helpful.<br>The first reply was "lol, companies still hire juniors?"<br>The second was "just use Claude bro."<br>The third was just:<br>That last one got forty-seven laughing reactions. The person who posted the listing deleted it twenty minutes later.<br>I stared at that thread for a while. Not because any individual reply was remarkable (Slack communities have been casually cruel since Slack communities existed) but because of what it represented. Somewhere in the last eighteen months, the engineering industry collectively decided that an entire tier of the profession was obsolete. Not through research. Not through careful analysis of what the talent pipeline actually needs. Through vibes. Through memes. Through VPs who went to a conference and came back saying "AI does junior work now" like they'd just discovered fire.<br>Or, more accurately, like they'd just discovered a vendor booth with good coffee and a very confident sales deck.<br>I scrolled back through the thread later. The person who posted the listing had been trying to hire for three weeks. Good company, decent salary, remote-friendly. They'd posted it because they actually believed (correctly, as it happens) that bringing in a junior and investing in their growth was better long-term strategy than fighting over the same twelve senior engineers as everyone else.<br>And the community laughed them off the platform.<br>That's where we are. The people making the right call are being mocked by the people making the short-sighted one. And nobody stopped to ask the obvious question: if nobody hires juniors, where the fuck do seniors come from?<br>The ladder<br>Every senior engineer reading this got their start somewhere. An internship. A graduate programme. A first job where they were in over their head and someone more experienced took the time to show them how things actually worked. Maybe it was a patient tech lead who pair-programmed with them on a Friday afternoon. Maybe it was a grumpy staff engineer who tore their PR apart and, in doing so, taught them more about software design than any course ever could.<br>That path, junior to mid to senior, isn't just a career ladder. It's the mechanism by which the industry reproduces its own expertise. It's how knowledge transfers.<br>It's how the next generation of engineers develops the judgement and taste that separates code that works from code that matters.<br>And we're dismantling it. Cheerfully. With LinkedIn posts about "efficiency."<br>Every senior engineer alive today got their start doing the exact grunt work they're now saying juniors don't need to do. That's not progress. That's pulling the ladder up behind you.<br>I want to pause here because this is the part that genuinely bothers me and I don't want to bury it in a joke.<br>There are people right now, thousands of them, who spent years learning to code. They went to university, or they went to bootcamps, or they taught themselves at night after working their day job. They did everything the industry told them to do. And they're being told, by the very people who benefited from the path they're trying to walk, that the path no longer exists.<br>That's 22-year-old with tens of thousands of dollars in debt staring at a job market that's decided they're obsolete before they've even started. And the people making that decision got their own start writing the exact kind of code they now claim a machine can handle.<br>I don't know what to call that, but I know it's not something to celebrate with a laughing emoji in a Slack thread.<br>The maths nobody wants to do<br>Senior engineers don't appear from thin air. There is no artisanal senior engineer micro-brewery in the hills outside Palo Alto, no matter what your recruiter’s LinkedIn posts imply. You can't even order them on Amazon Prime, although I'm sure someone in procurement has tried.<br>Senior engineers are what you get when you hire a junior, give them interesting problems, surround them with people who know more than they do, and wait. That's it.<br>Every senior engineer in your organisation was, at some point, a junior who didn't know what a database index was. Every staff engineer who's now making critical architecture decisions once shipped a PR that made a senior's eye twitch. Every principal engineer who can hold your entire system in their head once accidentally dropped a production table and learned a lesson they never forgot.<br>You're not saving money by...