Skipping junior hires can feel like an easy decision right now.
AI tools already handle a lot of the work that used to be given to entry-level engineers, like writing simple code, fixing straightforward bugs, creating tests, and handling other routine tasks. So if a company can pay for an AI tool for a small monthly fee, it is understandable that a founder might ask why they should spend $90,000 or more hiring someone to do that work.
It's a fair question, but the problem is that it looks only at today's costs.
The person doing the simple work today is often the person who becomes the experienced engineer you need a few years later. Senior engineers don't appear fully formed. Even they started somewhere, usually with smaller tasks, a lot of guidance, and plenty of mistakes along the way. If companies stop giving people that first opportunity, they may eventually discover that there aren't enough experienced engineers to hire when they need them.
Look at What’s Happening
This isn't just a prediction about what might happen someday, as junior hiring has already fallen significantly.
Research from Stanford's Digital Economy Lab found that employment among developers aged 22 to 25 has fallen by roughly 20% since 2022, while employment among developers aged 35 to 49 increased by around 9% over the same period. SignalFire's 2026 State of Talent Report also found that entry-level technology hiring has fallen sharply since 2019, including a decline of around 65% at major technology companies and as much as 75% at early-stage startups.
Another Harvard study, looking at millions of workers across hundreds of thousands of US companies, found that junior employment at companies adopting AI fell by around 9-10% within six quarters of adoption, and a Resume.org survey of 1,000 US hiring managers found that 21% had already frozen entry-level hiring specifically because of AI, while another 36% said they planned to stop hiring at that level by the end of 2026.
So yes, companies are responding to AI by hiring fewer people at the beginning of their careers.
From a short-term budget perspective, that makes sense. But hiring isn't only about what your team needs this quarter.
Today's Savings Can Become Tomorrow's Problem
Imagine you're running a startup today and decide that you'll only hire experienced engineers from now on. It might work perfectly well for the next year or two. Your team stays small, the senior engineers are productive, and you avoid spending time training people who are still learning the basics.
Then, two or three years later, your company grows, you need more experienced engineers, and suddenly, you're looking for people with three, five, or seven years of experience, but you're competing with every other company that made the same decision. There are fewer people coming through the pipeline because fewer companies gave them the chance to start in the first place.
That's the part that doesn't show up in today's hiring budget. It's a little like deciding that you don't need to plant anything because you don't need more fruit this year. That works until you suddenly need fruit and realize you have nothing growing.
AI Is Changing the Junior Role
There is a legitimate reason AI has made companies question entry-level hiring. Some of the work that junior engineers used to spend a lot of time learning, like writing repetitive code, fixing simple bugs, and creating basic tests, can be done much faster with AI, but that doesn't necessarily mean there is no role left for a junior engineer. It may simply mean the role needs to change.
IBM is one example of a company that has taken this approach. Instead of treating AI as a reason to remove entry-level developers entirely, the company has increased junior hiring and shifted the focus of the role toward understanding requirements, working with AI-generated output, and checking whether the result is actually correct.
That is an important distinction.
A junior engineer in an AI-heavy environment doesn't necessarily need to spend eight hours a day writing code from scratch. They may instead spend more time understanding problems, reviewing AI-generated work, testing ideas, learning the company's systems, and gradually taking on more responsibility.
The technology changes the work. It doesn't automatically remove the need for someone to learn how to do it.
There's Another Cost You're Not Seeing
There is also a less obvious reason to keep junior engineers around: They can be valuable for your senior engineers too.
When a senior engineer explains why something works a certain way, reviews a junior developer's code, or helps someone work through a problem, they're forced to make their own thinking clearer. Teaching someone else can expose gaps in your own understanding that you might never notice when working alone.
For senior engineers, growth isn't always about writing more complicated code. It can also come from mentoring, explaining decisions, and helping other people become better.
Remove junior engineers completely, and you remove some of those opportunities too. That said, it doesn't mean every senior engineer wants to manage or mentor people all day. It simply means that a healthy engineering team usually has different levels of experience, with people learning from each other.
The Easy Answer: “Just Hire Experienced People”
You can, and for some startups, that may be the right choice for a period of time, but the problem comes when everyone makes the same decision.
If every company decides that it only wants experienced engineers, the demand for senior talent doesn't disappear. The supply pipeline simply gets thinner. When that happens, hiring experienced people becomes more expensive and more competitive. You may end up paying a premium for someone you could have developed internally if you'd started earlier.
That's why the question shouldn't necessarily be, “Should we hire juniors or seniors?”
A better question is, “What mix of experience do we need today, and what kind of team do we want to have two or three years from now?”
You Don't Need a Huge Junior Program
Keeping a junior pipeline alive doesn't mean hiring ten entry-level engineers and asking your senior team to train them all.
For a small startup, it could mean hiring one person with strong potential and giving them the right environment to grow. Instead of judging them primarily by how much code they can produce, look at how quickly they learn, how well they understand feedback, how carefully they check AI-generated work, and whether they can gradually take on more complicated problems.
A junior who learns quickly and knows when to question an AI-generated answer can become much more valuable over time than a junior who simply produces a lot of code.
The goal isn't to recreate the junior role exactly as it existed five years ago. It's to create a version of the role that makes sense now.
A Small Bet Can Go a Long Way
Imagine two startups in 2026. Both decide they want to keep their engineering teams small, so they hire only experienced engineers.
Two years later, both companies need someone at the mid-level to take ownership of an important part of the product. They go to the market and discover that there are far fewer people with the right experience than they expected.
Now imagine a third company that made a slightly different decision. It hired one promising junior engineer two years earlier, gave them proper support, and allowed them to grow alongside the business.
That person may now be ready to take on the exact responsibility the company needs.
The company didn't get lucky. It simply started building its talent pipeline before it needed it.
AI Is Redefining the Role And Not Replacing the Need
AI is changing what junior engineers do, and there's no reason to pretend otherwise. Some entry-level tasks are becoming faster and easier to automate, and companies should absolutely rethink what they expect from someone early in their career.
But “some junior work can be automated” isn't the same as “junior engineers are no longer needed.”
If companies stop hiring people at the beginning of their careers, they shouldn't be surprised when experienced talent becomes harder to find later.
For founders, the smarter approach may not be choosing between AI and junior engineers. It may be figuring out how to use AI to help junior engineers become useful faster, while giving them enough real work and guidance to eventually become the experienced people your company will need.
The short-term savings from skipping junior hiring are easy to see. The long-term cost is much harder to see until you suddenly need experienced people and realize everyone else is looking for them too.
And if you want to build that talent pipeline without taking on the full burden of sourcing and evaluating engineers yourself, that's where MyNextDeveloper helps, connecting startups with vetted engineers and AI talent across experience levels, including the early-career people who can grow into the senior team you’ll need tomorrow.
TL;DR
Skipping junior hires feels like an easy win right now, since AI tools handle a lot of the routine work juniors used to do. But junior hiring has already dropped 65-75% since 2019, and today's junior is the only source of tomorrow's mid-level and senior engineer. Cut that pipeline now, and in about two years, you'll be competing for a shrinking pool of experienced talent that almost nobody trained. Companies like IBM are responding by redefining the junior role around checking AI output, not eliminating it, and even one well-chosen junior hire can give a startup real pipeline insurance at a fraction of the cost most founders assume.
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