Fewer Juniors Today, Fewer Seniors Tomorrow

Every senior engineer you admire was once a junior someone decided to hire anyway. Slow, a bit lost, asking the same question twice. Somebody looked at that and said yes.

That yes is getting rarer.

Two reports, one week

Last week Anthropic published a report on how work is changing inside its own company. The numbers are blunt. The share of juniors among its new technical hires dropped from 27% to 9%. Around a third of its ML managers and a fifth of its software engineering managers said they now hire less because of AI. By August, the agents its employees direct were logging six times as many hours as the humans directing them.

To be fair, Anthropic's total headcount still grew. This is a change in the mix, not a hiring freeze. And it's one company that sells AI, so it is ahead of everyone else by design.

Closer to home, the IAB, the research institute of the Bundesagentur für Arbeit, published a study on October 13. Its headline, roughly translated: AI is not a job killer so far, but career starters are increasingly affected. Overall, German jobs with high AI exposure have actually done better than other jobs since 2022. But for people aged 20 to 29 in those jobs, full-time employment fell 1.2 percentage points more than in less exposed ones. Not statistically significant yet. Getting stronger every year.

So no panic in Germany. Same direction as San Francisco, just slower.

The sentence I keep rereading

One line from the Anthropic report stuck with me: "Employment protections for incumbents will not benefit those not hired to begin with."

That's the quiet part. If you already have the job, you are mostly fine. You get the agents, the extra output, the new superpowers. The person who pays is the one who never gets through the door. And nobody notices them, because you can't miss a colleague you never met.

For a team, this looks great for a year or two. Then a senior leaves, and you look around for the person who was supposed to grow into that role. There isn't one. You skipped them in 2026.

A team that stops hiring juniors isn't saving money. It's borrowing from the seniors it will need in five years.

Judgment, please. But where does it come from?

The report says something else worth taking seriously: "Increasingly, hiring managers assess applicants based on their judgment and commitment." Not how fast you can write a CRUD endpoint. An agent does that now.

I like this, and it also worries me a little. Judgment is exactly the thing juniors haven't had the chance to build yet. You learn when not to trust code by trusting the wrong code once, with someone patient next to you explaining what happened. If we only hire people who already have judgment, we're asking for the result while quietly removing the training.

So what do we actually do?

If you're early in your career:

1. Show your thinking, not only your output. In interviews and in pull requests, explain why you chose something and what you rejected. That's judgment made visible.
2. Use agents, but own the result. Be the person who can say "I checked this, and here is the one case it got wrong."
3. Build something small and real that people actually use. Commitment is easier to believe when there's a thing with your name on it.

If you hire or lead a team:

1. Keep at least one junior seat open per team on purpose, and defend it in planning like any other investment.
2. Change the junior job instead of deleting it. Let juniors review agent output, write the tests, own the runbook. That's where judgment grows.
3. Look at your own numbers. How many of your last ten hires were juniors? If you don't know, that's already an answer.

I don't think AI ends the junior role. I think it makes it optional, and optional things are the first to go when budgets get tight. The teams that keep the door open will have good seniors in five years. The rest will be posting that nobody good is available.

Sources: People Matters: Anthropic's junior tech hires drop from 27% to 9%, Open Magazine: Junior tech hires' share at Anthropic falls from 27% to 9%, IAB via idw: KI bisher kein Jobkiller, aber Berufseinsteiger zunehmend betroffen