Senior developers doubt juniors' AI coding readiness

BairesDev has published survey findings on how junior and senior software developers view AI-assisted coding, pointing to a gap in how job readiness is judged across 77 countries.

The survey covered 1,569 developers, including 1,059 junior engineers and 510 senior engineers. Only 16% of senior developers said junior engineers fully understand the code they generate with AI tools, while 57% said juniors understand it to some extent and 23% said they rarely do.

Junior developers were more confident about their own progress. According to the findings, 85% said AI has improved their understanding of software development.

That confidence did not extend to every task. Nearly a quarter of junior developers, 24%, said writing code from scratch is the task they feel least confident performing without AI assistance.

The data also suggests younger developers do not see traditional coding craft as the main route into work. Only 5% of junior developers said writing clean code is the skill that matters most in getting hired today.

Instead, 48% ranked problem-solving and analytical thinking as the top skill for getting hired, compared with 18% who chose AI tool proficiency.

Senior developers took a similar view of broader reasoning skills. The survey found that 72% identified critical thinking as a foundational skill for junior developers over the next three years.

Readiness test

Experienced engineers placed the greatest weight on practical exposure when assessing whether a junior developer is ready to contribute. Some 70% ranked real-world project experience as the strongest indicator of readiness, followed by internships at 56% and strong performance in practical coding tasks at 53%.

Junior developers also pointed to a need for more practical work during training. Half said education should provide more real-world project experience, making it the most common response by a wide margin.

The findings present a mixed picture of how senior engineers assess graduates entering the profession. Just over half, 51%, said graduates are broadly ready to contribute after onboarding, while 38% said there is a clear gap between university training and real-world application. A further 11% said graduates require significant additional training before they can contribute.

The debate comes as software teams adapt to tools that can generate code in seconds, shifting attention from production to review and judgement. The figures suggest many junior developers see AI as a way to learn, while many senior developers remain concerned about whether that learning is deep enough.

Nacho De Marco, chief executive officer and co-founder of BairesDev, said the profession was moving away from code writing as the main test of technical skill.

“For most of software engineering's history, writing code was the job. It was the craft, the proof of skill, the language developers used to think. AI has changed that. Generating code is no longer the hard part and that means it can no longer be the measure,” said Nacho De Marco, chief executive officer and co-founder of BairesDev.

He said the survey highlighted a concern about long-term technical development.

“What this data is telling us is that the next generation of developers is learning to produce output without fully owning it. That gap between generating and understanding is exactly where the profession needs to focus. If we don't close it now, we have a real problem: where are the senior engineers, architects, and technical leaders of 2030 and 2035 going to come from? The seniors of the future are the juniors of today. And right now, the people closest to the work are telling us the foundation isn't there yet,” said De Marco.

Shared view

An academic review of the survey data reached a similar conclusion on the skills that still matter most. Professor Francisco Anello, director of the master in business and technology at Universidad de San Andrés, focused on the areas where junior and senior developers agreed rather than where they differed.

“The most revealing finding in this study is not the gap between junior and senior developers. It is where they agree,” said Professor Francisco Anello, director of the master in business and technology at Universidad de San Andrés.

“Critical thinking and deep code comprehension rank far above AI tool proficiency. These are the same competencies that technical training has always prioritized,” said Anello.