The tech industry is facing a looming crisis that isn’t making enough headlines: the potential extinction of the junior software engineer. As AI coding assistants like GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT rapidly evolve, they are automating the entry-level tasks that were once the training ground for the next generation of talent. Executives are celebrating the surge in productivity among senior staff, but they are overlooking the long-term consequences.
If companies stop hiring juniors, we risk breaking the industry’s talent pipeline. Today’s juniors are tomorrow’s seniors; without them, the industry faces a future where there are no experienced engineers to train the next wave or tackle complex architectural problems. We are essentially eating our own seed corn for short-term efficiency gains, creating a sustainability gap that no amount of AI can fill.
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