Nobody is hiring juniors. So who becomes senior in 2035?

TCS plans to hire about 25,000 freshers this financial year. In earlier years that number sat between 40,000 and 42,000. Infosys is aiming for about 20,000. Placement season is under way, and somewhere a final-year student is refreshing a portal and doing this arithmetic in their head.

“Nobody” in the headline is an exaggeration, though a smaller one than I’d like.

Here is what worries me more than the headcount numbers. The entry-level job mattered less for what juniors produced than for the repetitions it gave them, and repetitions are how people get good. AI now does a large share of that repetitive work, so firms need fewer juniors, and the juniors they do hire get fewer chances to practise. None of this hurts much this year. The bill arrives when today’s seniors move on and there is nobody with eight years of practice standing behind them.

The junior job was a training programme that clients paid for

Every services business I know runs on a pyramid. A few partners or architects at the top, a layer of managers, and a wide base of juniors doing the work that is necessary, repetitive and billable: test cases, data cleaning, first drafts, documentation, reconciliations.

That base was also the training system, and the clever part was that clients funded it. A junior spent two or three years doing billable grunt work under supervision, and came out the other end knowing how systems actually break. Medicine has a neat phrase for it: see one, do one, teach one.

AI is very good at the “do one” part.

Clients have noticed. Nobody wants to pay for junior hours spent on a first draft a model produces in forty seconds. So the cost of training a junior moves off the client’s invoice and onto the firm’s own P&L, at exactly the moment margins are under pressure. Most firms will and many already have made the obvious call.

The numbers point the same way in Palo Alto and Pune

Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab has been tracking US payroll records for millions of workers. Its August 2026 update found that employment for 22 to 25 year olds in the most AI-exposed occupations fell about 11% between November 2022 and June 2026, while the least exposed grew about 10%. Older workers in the same jobs kept growing. The decline is concentrated where AI does the task itself, as opposed to helping someone do it. The authors are careful to call this descriptive rather than causal, and I’ll be careful too.

The Burning Glass Institute put it more bluntly last year: “For the first time in modern history, a bachelor’s degree is no longer a reliable path to professional employment.” In the UK, graduate job postings at the Big Four accounting firms fell 44% in 2025.

India’s version is quieter, partly because the industry is still growing overall. NASSCOM says tech added about 1.35 lakh net jobs in FY26, with much of that in Global Capability Centres, and most of the big IT firms added staff in the September quarter. HCLTech alone hired 6,136 freshers in three months. I’m not going to pretend the door has slammed shut.

But look underneath. Over the twelve months to October, the six largest IT services firms lost a net 24,422 roles, with roughly 92,000 people leaving and about 68,000 joining, according to Xpheno. Entry-level tech openings were down 44% year on year in June. Infosys now has the lowest share of employees aged 30 or under in fifteen years. And a survey of 650 Indian IT firms by ICRIER (supported by OpenAI, for what that’s worth) found 55% had hired fewer entry-level staff, while 42% had increased mid-level hiring.

The industry is still hiring. It’s just hiring people somebody else trained.

AI takes away the practice too, even from experts

If this were only about fewer junior jobs, it would be a hiring story. The part that keeps me up is what happens to the skills of the people who do get hired.

In 2025, The Lancet Gastroenterology & Hepatology published a study of 19 experienced endoscopists in Poland, each with more than 2,000 colonoscopies behind them. Before an AI detection tool arrived, they found adenomas in 28.4% of procedures done without it. A few months after they started working with the tool, their detection rate on procedures without it had dropped to 22.4%. These were experts, and it took months.

A smaller randomised trial by Anthropic researchers found engineers who learned a new task with an AI assistant scored 50% on a follow-up quiz, against 67% for those who learned without one. They did worst at debugging, which is the one skill you can’t afford to lack when the AI is wrong.

Both studies have limits. The first is observational and the second is a small preprint by people who build AI. But they point at the same mechanism: people build skill by struggling with a problem, and AI takes the struggle away.

Every firm is betting that someone else will train the juniors

Put yourself in a CFO’s chair. A junior costs money and takes two years to become useful, and AI now covers much of what they’d have done in those two years. A mid-level engineer with five years’ experience is available today, already trained, at a price you can see.

Hiring the mid-level person is the rational choice for any single firm. It is also a classic commons problem. When every firm makes the same rational choice, the pool of mid-level people stops being refilled. You can poach trained people from each other for a while. Eventually you’re all bidding for the same shrinking group, and nobody remembers who was supposed to be training the next one.

TCS reported its employees logged 17.1 million learning hours last quarter, up 17%. That’s real investment, but it goes into people who are already inside. It doesn’t widen the entrance.

The bill arrives around 2032

The arithmetic is simple. Graduates who don’t get hired between 2024 and 2027 are the ones who would have been team leads and solution architects between 2031 and 2035. Some will find other routes in. Many won’t, or they’ll arrive late and with less practice.

So around 2032, expect the mid-level talent shortage to show up as salary inflation for anyone with eight to ten years of real experience, and as quietly declining quality in work that needs judgment, because the people checking the AI never learned to do the work themselves.

India feels this harder than most. IT services were the main way graduates from tier-2 and tier-3 towns entered the salaried middle class. The State of Working India 2026 report estimated 11 million of India’s 63 million graduates aged 20 to 29 were unemployed in 2023, before most of this started. The GCCs still hiring mostly want experience. The escalator is narrowing at the bottom step.

Some of this isn’t AI’s fault

Some of this is the post-pandemic hiring binge unwinding, plus higher interest rates and cautious clients. Stanford’s own data shows some trends that started before ChatGPT. AI is creating new junior roles too, in evaluation, data operations and AI support. And spreadsheets didn’t end accounting.

All true. But spreadsheets took away arithmetic, and junior accountants still learned the trade by doing the rest of the work. This time the tool can do most of the junior’s job, which is where the learning used to happen. The real test is simple: when demand recovers, does junior hiring come back with it? If it does, I’m wrong, and happily so.

Five things a sensible firm should do now

If you run a company, technology or otherwise, here is what I’d do.

1. Set a junior intake ratio and protect it. Decide what share of each year’s hires will have less than two years’ experience, and treat it like a capex line instead of a cost to cut first.
2. Redesign junior work around checking. Juniors used to learn by producing first drafts. Now they can learn by reviewing AI output against reality, and explaining why it’s wrong. That builds judgment faster, if a senior is reviewing the reviewer.
3. Schedule practice without AI. Pilots still fly by hand on a schedule because autopilot erodes manual skill. Junior engineers, analysts and marketers need the same: regular work done the slow way, on purpose.
4. Measure time to competence, not just output. If juniors are producing more but can’t explain or fix what they produced, the dashboard is lying to you.
5. If you’re a mid-sized business outside IT, hire the graduates the IT majors passed on. Good engineers and analysts are available right now at salaries that won’t stay this low, and five years from now they’ll be your mid-level managers, trained on your own processes and your own customers.