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Are we creating an experience gap?

Every organisation automating its entry-level work is making the same locally correct decision, and the shortage of experienced people it produces will arrive for all of them at once.

Careers7 min read

One company automating its junior work has a hiring problem in five years. An entire industry doing it at the same time has something else: a shortage that cannot be solved by hiring, because there is nobody to hire.

This is the part that individual planning cannot see, because every organisation is looking at its own numbers and every set of numbers says the same reasonable thing.

Why the incentives point the wrong way

The cost of not developing people is deferred, diffuse and lands on somebody else's budget. The saving from automating the work is immediate, attributable and lands on yours.

No individual decision here is wrong. The finance director who questions the junior intake is doing their job correctly with the information available. The head of engineering who ships faster with fewer people is right about this quarter.

That is what makes it a structural problem rather than a management failure. Correct local decisions producing a bad collective outcome is not something anybody fixes by trying harder.

An immediate, attributable saving on one side and a deferred, diffuse cost on the other, landing years later and usually on somebody else's budget. Every individual decision is correct.
Correct local decisions, bad collective outcome.

What the gap looks like when it arrives

It does not announce itself as a skills shortage. It appears as a set of unconnected symptoms that each get their own explanation.

  • Senior roles that stay open unusually long, and candidates who look senior on paper and are not.
  • Salaries for genuinely experienced people rising much faster than for everyone else.
  • More expensive mistakes reaching production, because the people reviewing lack the instinct to catch them.
  • Teams that are fast and directionless, producing a lot while nobody can say whether it is the right thing.
The symptoms of an experience gap, each arriving with its own separate explanation: senior roles open for months, candidates senior on paper only, costly mistakes reaching production, and fast teams going nowhere.
It never arrives labelled as a shortage.

The organisations that will be fine

Some will be fine, and it will look like luck rather than planning. They are the ones that kept developing people through the period when it was hardest to justify.

This is a genuine strategic opportunity and it is unusually cheap right now, because everyone else is doing the opposite. Building experienced people while the market is not competing for that is the sort of advantage that takes years to copy.

The practical version is not large: keep hiring some juniors, design their roles around reviewing and deciding rather than producing, give them consequences early, and measure whether they are getting better rather than how much they ship.

And if you are early in your career

Do not wait for an employer to solve this. The scarce thing is judgement, judgement comes from consequences, so the move is to get near consequences as early as you can.

Take the decision nobody wants to own. Ask to review rather than only to produce. Make predictions and check them. Work somewhere small enough that your calls matter, if you can. In a market that is about to be short of experienced people, being genuinely experienced early is worth more than it has been for a long time.

Common questions

What is the experience gap?
The shortage of experienced people that appears when organisations automate the entry-level work that used to develop them. It is different from a skills gap because it cannot be solved by hiring: if everybody automated the same development path, the experienced people were never produced anywhere.
Why do companies automate junior work if it causes problems later?
Because the saving is immediate and attributable while the cost is deferred and lands on somebody else's budget, often at another company. Each decision is locally correct, which is what makes it structural rather than a failure of management.
How can organisations avoid the experience gap?
Keep hiring juniors but design the role around reviewing, questioning and owning small decisions rather than producing output that AI produces faster. Give consequences early, and measure whether people are getting better rather than how much they ship.

PDP Quest exists because of the problem underneath all of these: when output stops indicating capability, you need another way to know who can actually do the work.

See how verification works →