From Greg Herlein · · 3m
Senior Engineers Are the Next DRAM Shortage
AI is eating junior engineering roles, but senior engineers are the next scarce resource, build your own to avoid price spikes.
In brief
AI is eating junior engineering roles, but senior engineers are the next scarce resource, build your own to avoid price spikes. Senior engineers are the next DRAM shortage: demand for judgment-driven agents will explode while supply remains flat, so companies must build their own to hedge. Originally reported by Greg…
Senior Engineers Are Next
AI is eating junior engineering work, but senior engineers are the next scarce resource. Demand for judgment-driven agents will explode while supply remains flat.
“Senior engineers are next, and the only hedge is to build your own, starting now.”
The Junior Engineer Bundle
Hiring juniors historically provided two things: the work they did and the senior they became through on-the-job training.
“The work they did. Real tickets, real fixes, real features. Not glamorous, but it shipped, and it roughly paid for their salary.”
AI Splits the Bundle
AI automates the junior work, making it redundant and silently killing the on-the-job training pipeline that builds seniors.
“AI made the junior's labor redundant, and companies are about to throw out the junior's training value along with it.”
The DRAM Analogy
DRAM prices rose 400% from 2024 to 2026 due to a shortage that took years to fix, senior engineers face the same crisis.
“DRAM prices rose more than 400% from the start of 2024 through the end of 2026, nearly doubling in a single quarter.”
The Accelerant
Senior engineers paired with nine agents create a 3x productivity boost, but this model burns through the senior's time without growing new talent.
“One senior, nine agents, 3x. If you have five seniors, you have five of those. That's linear.”
The Trap
The nine-agent model is linear and self-sustaining, it doesn't grow the senior pipeline, so the shortage worsens.
“The nine-agent senior isn't just linear. Left alone, it's decreasing, a fab quietly running its own supply down.”
The Hedge
The only hedge is to build your own senior engineers through mentorship, creating a branching pipeline that compounds over time.
“One senior who mentors three juniors, each driving their own agents, creates a curve that compounds over time.”
Real Work for Juniors
Juniors should build small, contained, testable work that matters to the business, not toys or abstract concepts.
“Canary tests, smaller services, SDKs, example clients that double as test harnesses.”
Chaos Drills
Juniors need hands-on failure drills to build judgment, deliberately breaking systems and observing outcomes under time pressure.
“Chaos drills: kill a node mid-rollout, partition the network, and so on, on a cluster safe to wreck.”
Certs as Forcing Functions
Use certifications like CKA and AWS SAA as live, time-bound challenges to prove judgment under failure, not just as badges.
“Certs as a forcing function: a performance-based exam puts a human alone at a live terminal with a broken system and a clock.”
No-AI Checkpoints
At least one exercise per skill area with AI turned off to verify independent mental models without tool dependency.
“No-AI-assist checkpoints: at least one exercise per skill area with agents turned off, under time pressure.”
AI as Tutor
Use AI to learn 10x faster, but only to build judgment, not to replace the mental model through direct knowledge.
“Stuck on how Raft handles a split vote? Ask. Can't see why the NetworkPolicy is silently dropping traffic? Have the model walk you through it.”
The Rickover Legacy
The US Navy's Rickover program trained junior engineers to handle nuclear reactors through failure drills, a model that applies to modern software.
“The Rickover program didn't work because the kids memorized procedures. It worked because it was built around rising standards, constant training, and escalating bad news fast.”
Why Seniors Hate It
Letting juniors build agentically is slower than doing it yourself, but it creates long-term capacity that senior engineers need to maintain.
“You will watch them go down a road you'd have skipped. You will want to grab the keyboard.”
The Trade-Off
Short-term velocity for long-term capacity: mentoring pays a tax now but compounds later, creating a sustainable pipeline.
“The mentor pays a tax now and compounds later. You can't learn to swim from a book.”
The Real Answer
The highest-leverage action in the agentic era is building another engineer through mentorship, not just building faster.
“The highest-leverage thing you can do in the agentic era is still, stubbornly, to build another Engineer, not just build it yourself faster.”
The big picture
Senior engineers are the next DRAM shortage: demand for judgment-driven agents will explode while supply remains flat, so companies must build their own to hedge.
