I was invited to Belfast last week by Chris Busby @ MCS Group for his Build Better roundtable of engineering leaders from across Northern Ireland. The topic was graduate hiring. What I was most shocked by was that almost everyone in the room had the same story.

Nearly one in six young people aged 16–24 in the UK are currently out of work - Via BBC. The highest rate in over a decade. And sitting in that room, it wasn’t hard to see why and I fear it’s just the beginning.

Early in my career, running my own software agency, we brought on an apprentice. It felt right to give something back, train someone in how we worked, and free up senior people from work they shouldn’t be doing anyway. It stuck with me. Later I worked with a young person through an out-of-work placement scheme with no guarantees, just a chance. Their attitude was so good I ended up putting them through a full IT apprenticeship myself. After that we partnered with a university, took summer interns, and converted them into graduate hires. A proper talent pipeline developing the people that would hopefully stay and become the future seniors of the company.

Over the last three years, I haven’t hired a single junior.

It’s clear from my own experience, others in the room and across the internet there is a real pressure to do more with less, adopt AI tooling across the org and 10x the throughput. And I am not saying the companies pushing this are wrong, there is a real economic and investor pressure and maybe even peer pressure happening across the industry. I think we can all be honest and say that you have felt the very same pressures too.

If I look back to my days as a junior many moons ago, the grunt work is where you learn. The struggle of figuring things out without good docs, copying patterns from others, breaking things and learning why they broke and how to fix them. This is the collective scar tissue forming which becomes an experienced senior. My ability to make decisions was from the formative years of struggle.

Early on I was asked to replicate the BBC news iOS app (two way scrolling newsfeed) which was not a standard iOS control. I was a junior mobile developer but also the sole iOS developer within the company. I had to do research, trial and error and eventually pull off the new news feed for our app to match what the BBC had done. There was very little information online but it taught me; grit, persistence and loads of new skills I could apply to future problems. That grit and belief I can solve hard problems has stayed with me from junior iOS developer to CTO and means I never shy away from a challenge knowing I can research, learn and trial and error my way to the solution.

Every struggle is something you learn and take with you into the next project, role, company etc. What’s gonna happen when there is no juniors anymore?

Right now AI replaces that grunt work. In engineering you may need to upgrade some software which can be very tedious, well Claude Code can do that in 5 mins. That could take sometimes hours going through the code base and doing find and replace etc. But the opportunity cost is that a junior might have done that task and explored and learned more of the codebase that they have not seen before. The senior’s role has not changed, they review what the LLM or a junior produced and verify it’s good to ship.

Juniors need the room and freedom to learn, make mistakes and build themselves into the seniors of the future. And seniors need to not burn themselves out by over extending themselves with junior, mid and senior work.

Let’s take it out of engineering, I am currently renovating my house and trade people are very hard to get hold of. It’s taking months if not years to get people in to do certain work and there is a lack of people wanting to do small jobs (which again would be perfect for apprenticeship training) It’s clear there are not enough of them and I have heard that they are not also hiring apprentices for a variety of reasons; cost, time, reliability etc

The economic reality is the incentives are not aligned right now for more junior hiring. But equally everyone is taking a narrow / short term view of the world and what is going to happen is seniors age out, their salaries spike as they are the only ones left and there was no talent pipeline behind them. Young people not earning also means they are not spending which means huge economic stagnation.

People are waking up to this tho, IBM are leading the way with tripling junior hiring after seeing the limitations of AI and noting “If we don’t continue to invest in entry-level hires, what happens in 3–5 years?”. In their AI decoded series the BBC made a similar point: redesign roles around AI rather than eliminate them.

I believe the tide is turning but it’s early days.

I have three young kids, I question what world they are stepping into? Are we going to protect them and give them the very opportunities we had entering the workforce or just leave them behind and what impact does that have for us as we age. I will keep this in the back of my mind in future team composition planning, will you?