Senior Engineers Are the Next DRAM Shortage
The article argues that AI automation of entry-level tasks is creating a future shortage of senior engineers by eliminating the traditional apprenticeship pipeline. This situation is compared to the DRAM memory shortage, where demand outpaced the ability to scale production capacity. The author suggests that companies must actively invest in mentoring and developing junior talent to ensure a future supply of experienced engineers.
- ▪AI agents are increasingly performing entry-level engineering work, which reduces the need for hiring junior developers.
- ▪Junior roles have historically served as the primary mechanism for developing the judgment and skills required for senior positions.
- ▪Thoughtworks identified an 'apprenticeship and skills-transmission crisis' in a recent industry report.
- ▪The author predicts that the lack of new senior engineers will lead to a significant talent shortage similar to previous hardware supply issues.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | Greg Herlein |
| Canonical URL | https://blog.herlein.com/post/build-another-engineer/ |
| Publication time | Fri, 18 Sep 2026 20:40:25 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-18T21:08:45.554Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-18T21:08:45.554Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | vYA9Bz7VQD8e · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
18 Sep 2026, 00:00 19 min read ai / agentic-coding / leadership / mentorship / career / software engineering / management There’s a shortage coming that nobody’s put on a slide yet: senior engineers. Every company on earth is about to want one who can drive a fleet of agents with judgment — and almost nobody is making new ones anymore, because AI ate the entry-level work juniors used to learn on. You cannot conjure a senior in a quarter. We just watched this exact movie with memory: DRAM prices went vertical because demand exploded and you can’t build a fab overnight. Senior engineers are next, and the only hedge is to build your own, starting now. The best thing you can build in the agentic era isn’t your product — it’s another Engineer. I have juniors on my team.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Greg Herlein.
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