There is a huge pool of exceptional junior engineers

Perceived flaws in the article

• Many readers say the piece offers assertions, not evidence: no concrete data that “only hiring seniors is killing companies,” nor examples of firms actually harmed by this.
• The logic is called internally inconsistent (e.g., “no one hires juniors” vs “your competitors will if you don’t”).
• Several suspect the text is AI-written and note that its strong “AI will supercharge juniors” line matches the author’s AI-metrics product, reading it as marketing rather than analysis.

Market realities and compensation

• Commenters dispute that “nobody hires juniors,” but agree there’s a glut of CS grads vs available roles, plus senior engineers willing to down-level on pay/title.
• A core issue: rigid pay bands. Juniors are hired cheap, then not raised to market, so they leave; employers fear paying to “raise” people they’ll then lose.
• Some argue it’s rational to offshore or hire only experienced engineers if juniors expect $120k+ without fundamentals; others note you can retain talent with only slightly-below-market comp.

Junior quality, education, and skills

• Strong criticism of bootcamps and watered‑down CS curricula; hiring managers report grads missing OS/theory basics and relying on Leetcode memorization or AI for coursework.
• Others counter that you can hire teachable people and fill gaps; lack of perfect curricula isn’t fatal if onboarding and reading assignments are deliberate.
• Debate over whether FOSS contributions, GitHub activity, or language transferability (e.g., C#↔Java) are realistically valued by hiring managers.

Benefits of juniors and pipeline arguments

• Concrete anecdotes of interns/juniors producing a lot of useful work quickly when given ownership and guidance.
• Juniors can handle grunt work, bring fresh perspectives, ask “why do we do it this way?”, and eventually become highly domain‑expert seniors.
• Multiple commenters warn that cutting off junior hiring jeopardizes the future senior pool; some explicitly frame this as a prisoner’s‑dilemma / tragedy‑of‑the‑commons problem.

Risks, costs, and management challenges

• Many stress that juniors consume senior time; if mentorship isn’t explicitly budgeted, seniors experience it as pure overload.
• Onboarding to complex domains can take 6–12 months even with strong juniors; some firms see negative value initially and fear they’ll churn at 1–3 years before ROI.
• Examples are given where over‑reliance on cheap juniors produced massive tech debt and “lunatics running the asylum.”

AI’s role in junior work and onboarding

• Several push back on the article’s AI thesis: there’s no clear evidence AI actually shortens real onboarding (understanding team practices, domain, and architecture).
• AI may speed code reading and boilerplate, but also lets juniors avoid deep learning and human interaction, potentially slowing integration.
• Some ask bluntly why a junior is “worth 10,000× more than Claude” for basic CRUD, while others note that domain knowledge, judgment, and non-code work remain human‑centric.

Interviewing juniors

• Two main schools: (1) hard, open‑ended or unsolvable problems to probe reasoning beyond memorized patterns; (2) simple but real tasks focused on fundamentals and collaboration.
• There’s concern that filtering for “passion” and tooling choices (Linux, vim, tiling WMs) selects for people who resemble the interviewer rather than the best engineer.
• Several share question patterns that test basic abstraction, state management, and networking concepts instead of Leetcode trivia.

Culture, attitudes, and loyalty

• Many seniors report juniors with strong “Reddit‑poisoned” cynicism, viewing employers as enemies and work as a scam; others argue this is a rational response to layoffs, wage suppression, and “family” rhetoric.
• There’s disagreement over whether loyalty is “dead.” Some have stayed 3–10+ years where pay, growth, and respect were good; others see job‑hopping as the only way to get fair compensation.
• Passion vs paycheck: several note a decline in “computer nerds” and an influx of status‑ and money‑motivated candidates; opinions split on whether that’s a real problem or just professionalization.