Hiring only senior engineers is killing companies

Summary

In the last 3 months, I've interviewed 134 engineers - students, mid-level, seniors and even CTOs. My main takeaway: there is a huge pool of exceptional junior engineers that most companies won’t even consider. While everyone else is fighting over seniors, smart companies can get a significant advantage by going the other direction. If you won’t, your competitors will.I’m not alone here. In the beginning of 2025 Shopify recently hired 25 interns (and their head of engineering said he aims for 1000(!) more by the end of the year, saying that: “...interns bring energy, drive and intensity that pushes the whole team forward.”)Why do companies avoid juniors?Every company has a different excuse:In small startups - “we are a very small team and we don’t have time to mentor juniors, we need engineers who will be very productive from day 1"In medium-sized companies - “we are going to grow very fast, we need engineers who can handle scale and have faced such challenges before"In big companies - “our infrastructure is super complex, it’ll take juniors too long to ramp up".It's safer to hire someone with 4+ years of experience who can contribute from day one, even if their ceiling isn't as high as a motivated junior engineer.So colleges continue churning out graduates who can't get a job, while companies complain about how hard it is to find senior engineers (and pay premium rates for them).The thing is that many of these "experienced" hires aren't actually that much more productive than a well-mentored junior engineer.Software development is not rocket science. There are diminishing returns, you will get better with time, but the pace will become slower. You can tell the difference between a developer with 1 year of experience and one with 5, but between those with 10 vs 15? Probably not.The most critical parts (motivation, ambition, character, and brains) have little to do with experience.What companies are missingThe main mistakes companies make:Old assumptions about onboar...