The shrinking number of junior roles is “a little bit of concern for me,” Argel Bejarano said. If companies stop hiring juniors, “we are not going to get seniors, right? We’re going to get junior-seniors.”
Bejarano, a Senior Staff Software Engineer and a Flutter and Dart Google Developer Expert with more than 15 years in software, spoke with Developers News at droidcon 2026 in Orlando.
“Let me explain that because it sounds weird, right?” he said.
How a ‘Junior-Senior’ Gets Made
Bejarano said the pattern starts with urgency. At some point, every company reaches a moment where someone says, “I just need an engineer right now.”
A candidate may not have the experience the role calls for, but the team needs someone hands-on, so a less experienced engineer ends up in a senior position. “But it’s actually a junior,” Bejarano said.
That engineer then becomes the benchmark. When the next hire comes in, the new senior reviews them, sees someone at their own level and concludes the new hire is senior too. In Bejarano’s view, both are still juniors.
“We’re going to get seniors with less seniority,” he said.
The pressure to hire only experienced engineers makes it worse. “We are not training juniors,” he said.
Two Extremes on AI
AI complicates the picture. Bejarano said companies are still working out how their teams should use it, and many have landed at opposite ends.
Some organizations opened AI to everyone with few guardrails and watched their expenses climb, he said. At the other extreme, “a lot of engineers don’t want to use AI that much.”
In his view, the industry hasn’t yet agreed on what using AI the proper way looks like. That leaves junior engineers, and the people training them, without a settled model to learn from.
Judgment Takes Time
The gaps Bejarano worries about aren’t only technical. He said some engineers now in senior or lead roles “don’t know when to escalate a situation.”
The result is predictable. It takes them longer to raise a problem, he said, and “when they do escalate it, it’s too late.”
That kind of judgment usually comes from years of working through problems with more experienced colleagues nearby. It’s also the kind of experience a junior misses when companies stop hiring them.
Bringing Back the Junior
Bejarano’s answer is to rebuild the pipeline.
“We need to get back to a time where we were hiring juniors and training juniors,” he said.
That training should cover the full range of the job, not only technical skills, he said. It should also include learning how to use AI properly, so the next generation knows when to lean on the tools and when to question them.
He also encouraged companies to look harder at what they’re hiring for. Many ask for a senior by default.
“You believe you need a senior, but maybe you need a really engaged junior,” Bejarano said.
AI may make it possible to ship more with fewer people. Whether those people can grow into the senior engineers the industry says it will need depends on whether companies still give them the chance to start as juniors.
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