The Junior Developer Problem
The Junior Developer Problem
I've been watching CVs land in my inbox every week from freshly graduated developers. They're offering themselves at salaries that would have been considered ridiculous even ten years ago. And I find myself hesitating in ways I didn't used to.
The problem is not cost. The problem is whether it makes sense to invest in a junior at all.
There is a structural issue for anyone entering the developer profession today, and it has nothing to do with motivation, passion, or raw talent. The real obstacle is a competitor that does not sleep, does not eat, does not complain, and does not ask for a raise. It does not need formal education either, because it learns passively from the work of others. That competitor is AI.
In many teams, especially small and medium ones, AI has already taken over what used to be peer programming. Tools like Claude Code have effectively become the new junior developer sitting next to you. Not a perfect one, not a reliable one, but fast, tireless, and surprisingly competent. I use it daily. The point is not the vendor. The point is the role shift happening in front of us.
The ROI Problem
Here's what I actually see when I'm running projects and budgets.
Today, for many companies, it is more rational to spend money on tokens and let AI do most of the work that was traditionally delegated to newcomers. Boilerplate, scaffolding, basic integrations, test generation, even first-pass refactoring. The ROI is simply better.
AI makes mistakes. Sometimes stupid ones, very similar to what you would expect from someone with little experience. The difference is that it can reach a level of implementation speed and breadth that even solid senior developers struggle to maintain consistently. When you average the output, the final value is clearly higher.
This is uncomfortable to say, but hard to deny if you are actually running projects and budgets.
So What Is Left?
The obvious answer is that juniors must invest personally in their future. Being "good at coding" is no longer enough. The baseline has moved.
A junior today must demonstrate that they are AI-native. Not just someone who uses AI, but someone who can drive it. Someone who understands how to decompose problems, how to constrain solutions, how to iterate prompts, how to validate outputs, and how to integrate AI-generated code into real systems without breaking everything. Being Claude-Code-native, or whatever equivalent tool dominates tomorrow, is not optional.
This sounds easy from the outside. It is not.
At this point the role shifts. You are no longer trained as a pure developer. You are pushed toward becoming a software architect much earlier in your career. You need to reason about systems, boundaries, failure modes, and long-term maintainability. These are not skills you pick up by watching tutorials or grinding LeetCode. They usually come from years of enterprise exposure, from seeing things break in production at 3 AM, from dealing with constraints that are not written in the spec.
That is why entering the market today without experience feels like driving straight into a dead end. The traditional ramp no longer exists. The ladder has missing steps.
One Concrete Piece of Advice
If I had to give one actionable recommendation, it would be this: do everything you can to secure an internship in an advanced company. Ideally one that is already fully AI-driven. Not a company that "is experimenting with AI", but one that has reorganized its workflows around it.
The goal is not prestige. It is exposure. You need to understand how the game actually works, how decisions are made, how AI is integrated into delivery pipelines, and which strategies really scale. Only then will you have something practical to talk about in an interview. Something that goes beyond generic enthusiasm.
The Timeline
I've watched this transition accelerate over the past year. In one, maybe two years at most, there will be very little space left for developers who are not AI-native, regardless of which AI we will be using.
This is not a threat. It is an observation. The market is already adjusting. The only real question is whether new developers will adjust fast enough.