The Senior Shortcut

Many have predicted the death of the “junior engineer” thanks to AI; after all, if AI can do all of the simple tasks, we don’t need to hire people who are only capable of handling those tasks anymore. And indeed, I was at a dinner of director+-level engineering leaders recently where many said they had turned all of their hiring to solely focus on “senior engineers” in lieu of anyone else.

Anyone who has thought about this for a moment sees the obvious problems. How do people ever become “senior engineers” if they don’t start out as junior ones?

One possible answer can be found by observing a recent terminology shift in the way we talk about engineers. During the last 5 years I got away from differentiating between engineers by “senior” or “junior” and started referring to the latter as “early career.” Call it excessive wokeness, perhaps, but in a time when people were moving into tech from other professions, calling everyone who was just starting out in engineering “junior” felt awkward and wrong. Since everyone has to go through “early career” at some point, perhaps the answer is not that we aren’t hiring early career so much as we expect those folks to be more skilled, senior, independent from the jump? Better get busy with those side projects and internships, college students! Of course, why would we ever hire interns if we aren’t even hiring new grads?

But people mean more than skills when they talk about hiring only senior engineers; many times they also want independence of work habits, and the judgement that comes…