No Juniors Today, No Seniors in 2031

I'm sorry for the juniors but that's more jobs for me to choose from. They will make it so somehow.

It also teaches way more to mid-levels and seniors than just grinding code would.

> The new thing is on the supply side. Companies are already reporting staff+ vacancies that take 66 days on average to fill ... The shortage is already, in 2026, exclusive to senior-level roles.

I am not sure I agree with this being caused by lack of candidates. I have 25+ years of experience, I was caught in an office closure layoff in early 2025 for the second time in my career (the last was in the mid 2010s, where it took me a few weeks to easily find a new position), took the spring off, spent the summer preparing for the leetcode hazing ritual and interviewed a lot in the fall: despite having very up-to-date skills (I always keep up-to-date personally, also my last position was all k8s, llm integration, you name it) and long stints in my resume, interviewers did not care.

In the positions where I managed to pass the automatic resume screening (which was probably 10% of the time it felt), the interviewers just did their typical 5-rounds-sudden-death interview loops, with sudden death happening if the solution was not optimal. Sometimes sudden death was "oh I see you have experience in cloud 1 and cloud 2, but we run on cloud 3, sorry", other times it was a friday afternoon slot where the interviewer obviously just wanted to be done with the week.

It also did not help that many positions were "remote but only if you live within 50mi of one of our offices", and others were trying their best at downleveling (I have 15 years of my 25+ at principal+ both architect and IC, and some recruiters were pitching me senior positions, as in senior senior, not senior staff / senior principal). Often the hiring mgr would bemoan the fact that so many resumes are fake, and so many candidates just outright lie, but none of this seemed to make a difference when it came to the interview setup.

Ultimately after about 3-4 months of searching (I'd say I applied to ~100ish positions where I thought I'd be a good fit, and had actual interviews in less than 10) I ended up finding a local position for a significant pay cut, it is also the first job where the mandate from high on up is AI-everything, velocity first (like it's mentioned in this article). Given my long time experience I am able to be very productive with claude (because I know what it should be doing) but even with really tight reins it is a daily occurrence for it to prioritize expediency over correctness requiring rework.

I honestly don't know how people starting with AI agents will manage to improve, I have been through the transition of assembly->higher level languages, and the "spec driven agentic is just like using a compiler" rings very superficial to me: nobody would accept a compiler that 5% of the time (being generous here) miscompiled your code.

The current push seems to be "it's fine to have juniors on claude code producing tons of PRs, we'll just put a claude / codex reviewer action in GH so velocity stays up" which will lead to very interesting codebases in a few years. LLMs are a transformative technology, but it feels that management's perennial obsessions with cutting costs is going to use it mostly for that, as opposed to a way to create new products / improve existing ones.

That is absolutely absurd. Most people, especially those outside the FAANG ecosystem and in literally the rest of the world outside of SV, are not trying to retire at fifty. Jesus.

I said looking towards it not retiring. Probably retiring in 12 years or so with the company planning for their exit on the horizon seems like a pretty common situation in a lot of fields.