Hiring only senior engineers is the worst policy in the startup industry

Author interviewed 134 engineers in 3 months and found a huge pool of exceptional junior engineers most companies won't even consider. While everyone else fights over seniors, smart companies can get significant advantage by going the other direction. Shopify's head of engineering hired 25 interns and aims for 1000 more by end of year, saying interns bring energy, drive and intensity that pushes the whole team forward. Companies avoid juniors with familiar excuses. Small startups claim they don't have time to mentor, need engineers productive from day 1. Medium companies need engineers who can handle scale. Big companies say infrastructure is too complex for juniors to ramp up. It's safer to hire someone with 4 plus years of experience who can contribute from day one, even if their ceiling isn't as high as a motivated junior.

Software development is not rocket science. There are diminishing returns - you get better with time but pace becomes slower. You can tell difference between developer with 1 year of experience and one with 5, but between 10 versus 15? Probably not. Most critical parts like motivation, ambition, character, and brains have little to do with experience. Many experienced hires aren't actually that much more productive than well-mentored junior engineer. Companies make mistakes with old assumptions about onboarding time. They assume juniors need 6 to 12 months to become productive, but great juniors get up to speed much faster. They use LLMs to understand new codebases without interrupting team members, generate boilerplate code, learn new technologies at faster pace. Companies run outdated interviews focusing on algorithm memorization and whiteboard coding when AI can handle all those known problems.

Great juniors aren't restricted by what they know. They haven't been trained to think that's just how we do things. They won't try to reuse same technologies from previous companies or recreate amazing design patterns that were useful only in specific context. It's not just being AI-native, it's about having less resistance to change. Great juniors learn fast and search for feedback. It's easier to manage them. They want to improve and know what you think about their work. Motivated junior engineer often has more upside. You're getting someone at beginning of their growth curve rather than middle or end. Juniors bring fresh energy to the team, they want to learn, they have drive to prove themselves and succeed. Their motivation can be contagious. Existing seniors in your team will enjoy working with smart and motivated developers.

Hiring process in five steps. Filter for mindset by asking about projects they've built, then drill deeper with why did you build this and how does that work. Keep drilling until you hit bottom of their understanding and whether they can think through complex problems. Look for passion and curiosity - they should light up when talking about projects. Give small realistic coding challenge with explicit permission to use any tools they want, then schedule 30-minute follow-up where they walk through solution. Problem solving without AI in 40-minute interview to test ability to think through complex problems and design solutions. Live implementation with AI for 20 minutes to see how they work with tools, their prompting strategies, how they iterate on AI output. Evaluate their AI strategy - look for engineers who excel in both phases, understand huge benefit AI provides but also know where it hurts. Engineers who can't think without AI hit walls when they encounter new problems. Ones who resist AI are outpaced by peers who go all-in with new tools.