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by Ankit Jain
Contributor
How do you go from junior to staff engineer when AI writes the code?
Opinion
Jul 14, 202610 mins
A few weeks ago, a new hire at Aviator, fresh out of college, asked me a question I didn’t have a clean answer to. How do I become a senior engineer, or even a staff engineer? What should I learn, and how?
It’s a fair question and a harder one to answer than it was just a year ago.
The path used to be well-known. As a newly hired junior software engineer, you were given an experienced mentor who would assign you simple tasks to learn the ropes. You’d write some code, ask plenty of questions, open a pull request, get feedback in code review, think about it and fix your code. Rinse and repeat that a few hundred times. The tasks became more complex; the feedback got shorter and along the way you’ve been building judgment, the thing that separates a senior engineer from a junior one.
Now AI writes most of the code. The loop looks different and the easy assumption is that it’s broken: fewer tasks for juniors to cut their teeth on, an agent fixing the code that another agent wrote, thinner path to judgment.
Mentoring got easier, not harder
I knew just the person to ask: how do we grow senior and staff engineers in the AI era? Adam Berry is a staff engineer at Netflix, a member of The Hangar, our community of engineering leaders, and someone I have been discussing the evolving role of code review and knowledge sharing for a while now. He spends his time on getting AI adoption right, rather than just fast, in their engineering organization and has been working out the question of growing new engineers in practice. Mentoring juniors in an agentic world, Adam says, isn’t harder; it’s embarrassingly easy.
“You grow juniors and help them become better engineers the same way you always did. AI isn’t changing the methodology. It’s changing the details,” he told me. His point is that the agentic world gives a lot more options for giving juniors bounded tasks to work on and more feedback. The scattered remarks and comments seniors used to give in person now can be put into instructions and guardrails.
Adam breaks working with agents into three foundational skills:
If you don’t know how to do something with the agent, ask the agent.
If the agent does something you don’t like, figure out how to correct it and then codify it so it doesn’t happen again.
Your sense of when the agent has gone off the rails.
“Most juniors can pick up the first two on their own. On the third one, they need guidance, he says.
His process for building it is staged. “The stages are about growing scope. First, you give a junior engineer a well-specified task—and these are now bigger than what you’d have given a junior before. You can give them task definitions that are like a prompt and instructions to drive that prompt, make sure they got to a good plan, make sure they understood the plan, and that they thought through the test cases, etc.
Then gradually you peel off some of that specificity so they have to build the muscle themselves. Once they’ve gotten good at that level of scope, they’re ready to work on larger scoped problems.”
Starting from more specific problems and going towards ambiguous problems is the definition of growing as an engineer.
Pair programming with the agent in the room
Seniors can still do pairing sessions with juniors, now with the agent in the room.
“In the pairing session, the earlier-career engineer should be the one driving. The agent can be set up to interrogate the junior rather than just answer them. None of you is manually writing code, but you’re still doing pair programming and mentoring. Even if it’s just a trivial bug fix, if you guide a junior through it, it forces them to do just that little bit of thinking.”
Adam says mentoring juniors today does not have to mean forcing them to write code manually. Seniors should teach them the process of agentic engineering, and that’s exactly what they should focus on during the pairing sessions. The habit he wants to be installed early is asking for options...