Juniors never had it easy

Competing inside a company when you're just starting out isn't easy either. Like any professional getting started, you don't have all the tools a Semi-Senior or a Senior does. Those years of your own mistakes, of projects that went wrong.

Still, they bring something else. A drive to learn, to dig into every topic, to try things out, to develop their skills, to grow day by day. This, whether it's the digital era or the AI era, has always been what matters most. The attitude of learning, listening, trying, getting it wrong, and trying again.

Every generation of juniors adapted to what they were handed: new languages, new frameworks, new ways of working. Today's generation adapts to AI, just like everyone else, and they do it just as naturally as the generations before them.

But one thing has changed.

The curve got shorter

A junior used to take months to become productive. You had to give them time to read the code, understand the stack, learn the way things get done, etc. That ramp-up was a sunk cost every company took on to train them.

With AI properly integrated into the workflow, that time collapses.

Navigating a repo you don't know used to take weeks. Today it's a few minutes of conversation with an agent that already read the code for you. The junior doesn't need to be an expert in the code anymore. What they need is the judgment to ask an agent what they don't know.

That doesn't make them Seniors. Only time does that. But the entry tax that justified long ramp-ups has practically disappeared, and the juniors coming in today start delivering value from day one.

That's why they're going to surprise us.