Senior Engineers Are the Next DRAM Shortage

18 Sep 2026, 00:00 19 min read There’s a shortage coming that nobody’s put on a slide yet: senior engineers. Every company on earth is about to want one who can drive a fleet of agents with judgment — and almost nobody is making new ones anymore, because AI ate the entry-level work juniors used to learn on. You cannot conjure a senior in a quarter. We just watched this exact movie with memory: DRAM prices went vertical because demand exploded and you can’t build a fab overnight. Senior engineers are next, and the only hedge is to build your own, starting now. The best thing you can build in the agentic era isn’t your product — it’s another Engineer. I have juniors on my team. This is my problem, right now. Here’s how I’m thinking about it. Stop hiring and mentoring junior engineers and you’ve quietly unplugged the machine that makes senior ones. A few years out, you run dry — right when everyone else is dry too, and the price of the few left goes through the roof. I’ve written about the org chart flattening from the middle, and about how the bosses are coding again. This post is the piece those two were circling around: what happens to the bottom of the chart, and whose job it is to fix it. Spoiler — it’s yours, senior engineer. It’s mine. And most of us are about to get it wrong in a very specific, very tempting way. Yes, the Naysayers Are Right (Sort Of) The doom take goes like this: AI eats entry-level engineering work, entry-level jobs dry up, the ladder loses its bottom rung, and a few years from now there’s a hole in the workforce shaped exactly like the seniors we forgot to grow. And… they’re right. That failure mode is completely real. If you take the work juniors learned on and route 100% of it to agents, and you do nothing else, that is precisely what happens. And this isn’t just me predicting it. Martin Fowler and Thoughtworks pulled a room full of CTOs, architects, and senior practitioners together in Engelberg this past June, and one of the five headline findings from that retreat was — I’m quoting the report — “an apprenticeship and skills-transmission crisis.” Not a maybe. A crisis, named as such, that came up independently in at least six different sessions. Their words for the failure mode: If juniors never get to struggle with real code, real production incidents and real design trade-offs because agents (or senior engineers pairing exclusively with agents) absorb that work, the industry will lose a vital mechanism for growing the next generation of engineers with judgment and taste. Read that clause again — “senior engineers pairing exclusively with agents.” Hold onto it; it’s the accelerant, and I’ll come back to it. First, the machine it’s breaking — because to see why this is a genuine shortage and not just hand-wringing, you have to see what a junior engineer was actually for. Why We’re About to Stop Making Seniors Step back and look at what hiring a junior engineer actually bought you, for the entire history of this industry. It bought you two things, not one — bundled so tightly that nobody bothered to pull them apart: The work they did. Real tickets, real fixes, real features. Not glamorous, but it shipped, and it roughly paid for their salary. The senior they were becoming. Every one of those tickets was also a rep. The hard stuff — good software taste, judgment about what breaks and why, the gut feel for when something is off — none of it comes from a book or a bootcamp. It’s learned on the job, slowly, doing real work under someone who has already been there. That second thing was the actual product. Hiring juniors was always a supply chain for seniors — we just never had to call it that, because the first thing quietly paid for the second. The on-the-job training rode along, essentially for free, on top of labor you were buying anyway. It looked like “hiring cheap hands.” It was really “manufacturing seniors, subsidized by the hands.” Now watch what AI does to that bundle: it splits it clean in half. The work — thing one — is increasingly done by agents, faster and cheaper than any junior. So the spreadsheet says the obvious thing: stop hiring juniors, the work is handled. And it’s dead right about the work. But it silently cancels thing two right along with it — the OJT pipeline that was the only mechanism we ever had for growing seniors. AI made the junior’s labor redundant, and companies are about to throw out the junior’s training value along with it, because the two always came in one package and nobody ever put a line item on the half that mattered more. That’s the whole thing in one sentence: we’re about to stop making seniors because the thing that used to pay for making them just got automated. You Can’t Just Buy Them I can hear the objection, because it’s the obvious one and I’ve made it myself: just hire seniors when you need them. Let the other guy train them. Poach the finished product. It’s cheaper, it’s faster, and it has worked for the entire history of this industry. Right? WRONG. Here’s why that breaks: everyone is about to have that exact same idea at the exact same time. Every company that quietly decides juniors are too expensive is also quietly deciding to buy its seniors on the open market later.