There’s one question every parent dreads hearing from their child: “Daddy, where do babies come from?”

We’ve all heard the responses over the years—storks, God, mommy’s belly, “ask your mother,” you name it. But beneath the awkwardness lies a fundamental question: how do we make more of us? 

Oddly enough, the tech world is now grappling with its own version of this question: Where do software engineers come from?

And lately, the answers we’re getting aren’t much better than “the stork.”

The Vanishing Junior Developer

Over the last year or so, we’ve seen a troubling trend take root. Across LinkedIn, Reddit, public layoff announcements and even private chats, junior software developers—bright-eyed, bootcamp-graduated, degree-holding or not—are becoming a bit of an endangered species:

• Offers rescinded.
  
• Layoffs hitting only the least experienced.
  
• Job postings asking for “junior engineers” with 5 years of experience and Kubernetes mastery.
• Companies saying they have put a hold on hiring junior developers
  

Meanwhile, hiring managers say: “We’re only looking for top-tier, senior-level talent who can hit the ground running… preferably with AI superpowers.”

I get it. In today’s hyper-competitive, AI-infused economy, the temptation to lean on experienced developers—and increasingly, AI tools—is strong. Everyone wants 10x output yesterday. But this mindset has a blind spot.

The Software Talent Pipeline Is Drying Up

We all love to talk about pipelines in tech. CI/CD pipelines. Security pipelines. Data pipelines. But there’s another pipeline we rarely talk about: the human pipeline.

If you don’t hire junior devs today, you won’t have senior devs tomorrow.

There is no Hogwarts School of Senior Software Engineering. Developers don’t just emerge from a secret lab fully formed with a GitHub repo of 10,000 commits. They start small. They mess up staging. They crash prod. They learn.

And yes, some of that early-stage work—debugging, boilerplate, test writing—is now within AI’s grasp. But that’s no excuse to stop growing new talent. The danger is clear: we’re optimizing ourselves out of a future.

Are We AI-ing Ourselves Into Mediocrity?

Let’s play this out. If junior roles disappear, then over time, fewer devs learn the fundamentals. That means fewer senior engineers down the line. Will AI replace them all?

Maybe. But do we really want to bet the future of software—and by extension, the economy—on that?

Even AI needs human oversight. Someone has to prompt it well. Review the outputs. Understand the systems it’s building. And as AI gets better, the bar for good human oversight gets higher, not lower.

We risk a future where the few remaining engineers are glorified AI babysitters with just enough understanding to catch hallucinated nonsense—but not enough to innovate, secure, or scale. That’s not a future I want to live in. 

So What Do We Do About It?

Glad you asked. Here are 4 steps we can start taking right now to make sure tomorrow’s developers exist—and thrive—in a world where AI plays a bigger role:

1. Mentorship-First Engineering Cultures

Don’t just assign junior devs Jira tickets. Pair them with mentors. Give them structured feedback. Celebrate learning, not just delivery. If your senior engineers don’t have time to mentor, you don’t have a team—you have a support group for burnout.

2. AI-Human Apprenticeships

Why not flip the script? Let junior devs learn by prompting. Have them use GitHub Copilot, CodeWhisperer, or open-source models as learning tools—not replacements. Teach them to critically evaluate AI output. Think of it as co-piloting their way into expertise.

3. Hire for Potential, Not Perfection

Companies love to say “we hire smart people and train them”—until it comes to engineering. Create entry-level pathways. Host internal bootcamps. Offer returnships. Today’s “junior” can be tomorrow’s technical leader if you give them the chance.

4. Establish an Industry Pledge

Let’s take a page from the DEI playbook and build a Tech Talent Sustainability Pledge. Imagine a coalition of DevOps orgs, vendors, and communities committing to hire and develop a minimum percentage of junior engineers. Call it ESG for talent.

Don’t Let the Stork Handle Your Hiring

At the end of the day, we have a choice.

We can tell ourselves comforting myths—that senior devs will always be around, that AI will save us, that someone else is training the next generation. Or we can act like grown-ups and take responsibility for nurturing the future.

Because if we keep cutting the bottom out of the software talent ladder, don’t be surprised when no one’s left to climb it.

Final Thought

Software is the backbone of modern civilization. But without the human minds to build, challenge, and evolve it—even with all the AI in the world—we’re just one stork story away from collapse.