100: Why AI Is Quietly Draining Your Senior Engineer Pipeline
About this episode
This episode discusses the impending senior engineer shortage due to changes in training and experience in an AI-accelerated world.
The reps that used to turn juniors into seniors are disappearing, and most engineering leaders won't notice until the senior shortage hits in three years. Build your own CTO Playbook at www.theCTOplaybook.com - the leadership platform built for the full CTO journey. Coaching, podcast, and community to help you lead with clarity, confidence, and strategic impact. Your dashboards say velocity is up, your seniors are asking careful questions nobody wants to answer, and your juniors are getting confident faster than they're getting capable. I'm a coach for CTOs across startups and enterprises, and this is the pattern I've been hearing in coaching conversations for the last six months. It usually arrives as unease about velocity or quality. By the time we trace it back, it always lands in the same place. Does our boilerplate still earn its keep in an AI-accelerated world? One camp wants to lock it down further. The other wants to delete half of it. They're both right, and they're both wrong. The argument is a symptom. The real question is bigger, and almost nobody is pricing it in yet. Our most experienced engineers got their judgment from reps we can no longer reproduce. Our juniors…
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