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The Death of the Junior Developer
Author’s note
This was written after I gave up my HoE job to become an engineer at Sourcegraph. I did a six-month deep dive with AI, and realized it was heavily biased towards senior developers, who would be able to see through its fabrications and guide it appropriately.
This was written while the job market was still super hot, and it caught everyone by surprise by being such a downer. It caught the attention of Dr. Matt Beane, who reached out to me for an intro via Gene Kim. He had been studying the effects of robotics in surgery on the career paths of junior surgeons, same problem. Matt and I spent the next several years working with Brendan Hopper on HOP as our general solution.
After much discussion in the wake of this post, we collectively realized that "junior" isn't the subset or dimension that's in danger. Many if not most junior devs are picking it up just fine. The engineers who are in danger, whom I called stubborn in the next essay, are the ones who aren't neuroplastic enough to adapt to the change.
I regret the 'sucks to be you' line. It was insisted upon by one of my trusted reviewers, and I threw it in against my better judgment.
AI Notes
The essay that opened the junior-developer debate, and still the most-argued-over piece in the recent cluster. The trigger was GPT-4o in May 2024: chat-oriented programming (CHOP) became viable, but lopsidedly. A senior can evaluate what the model hands back; a junior often can't. The same tool that makes seniors faster makes juniors harder to justify hiring. It's a bad year to be a junior anything. The predictions are specific: most source code written by prompting within twelve to eighteen months; companies tilting toward seniors who prompt and review over juniors who write; and — the warning rather than the forecast — a COBOL-shortage-shaped talent-pipeline crisis if nobody trains the next generation because the next generation never gets in the door. Organised under horror-movie section titles (The Purge, The Shining, Invasion of the Body Snatchers), the essay makes an alarming argument and ends with practical advice: get there early, show up prepared.
The front half of a matched pair. The title is bleak on purpose; the 2025 sequel, Revenge of the Junior Developer, is the deliberate answer to it. Read this one first for the worry, then Revenge for what Steve concluded once the trajectory had another year to run.
Companion
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2024
The Death of the Junior Developer, and Other Lessons Learned
The talk version, delivered at IT Revolution's Enterprise Technology Leadership Summit the same year — the essay's argument on stage at the height of the hiring debate.
Related listings
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2025
Revenge of the Junior Developer
The 2025 sequel, and a deliberate reversal. Where this essay worried the bottom rung was closing, Revenge argues the juniors who adapt fastest are the ones who come out ahead.
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2026
The Anthropic Hive Mind
Two years on: the operating model that rewards exactly the adaptability this essay told juniors to go and cultivate.
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2026
Welcome to Gas Town
Where 'agent babysitting' stopped being a prediction and became the job — the orchestration system Steve built once the trajectory this essay sketched arrived.
Press & impact
The essay didn't stay on the Sourcegraph blog. It became the reference point for the whole "are junior developers finished" argument that ran through tech YouTube, podcasts, and newsletters across the back half of 2024 — most of it pushing back.
Coverage & commentary
A partial list. The piece was reacted to, rebutted, and read aloud far more widely than it was quietly agreed with.
A full live-reaction read-through for his audience — the essay's widest single amplification, carrying the argument to a working-programmer crowd that mostly hadn't read the original.
A rebuttal episode: the hosts argue juniors get retrained rather than purged — "ditch-diggers taught to drive excavators."
Where it was argued
- Hacker News Jun 2024
- Simon Willison Jul 2024
- Forrest Brazeal Aug 2024
- Lobsters 2024