The Junior Developer Crisis Nobody Is Talking About

If AI handles the boilerplate, the tests and the simple screens, how does anyone actually become senior? In this episode we dig into a problem that sounds small and isn’t: we’ve automated the bottom rung of the ladder, and that rung was how people climbed.

We look at it from the junior’s side — being asked to review and judge work they never got to learn by doing — and from the business side, where not hiring juniors is rational every quarter and quietly disastrous over a decade.

We also get into the subtler loss: senior judgement comes from being wrong cheaply, many times, and AI hands people the careful answer without the scar that explains it. Then we talk about what some teams are doing to build a new ladder before they need the people who were meant to climb it.

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