At Avanti we spend a lot of time thinking about where the software engineering talent market is heading. One framework that keeps coming to mind is demography, the study of human populations.

One thing that always stands out is graphs like this:

In Western Democracies the post WWII social contract we all tacitly agree to is: You work hard, pay your taxes, contribute to society and then you can retire and you will be looked after. In order for this social contract to work you (probably) need a workforce that outnumbers the number of people not in the workforce. A population that looks like this would resemble a triangle, more people at the bottom than the top. As you can see the UK's triangle is disappearing. This creates pressure on public services, pension systems, and housing.

The uncomfortable truth is that it needed to be addressed decades ago. There isn't an easy fix. So what does this have to do with Tech recruitment?

We're in the process of recreating this population pyramid for software engineers.

It's largely going unnoticed and we've written more about it here but the headline story is that unemployment is highest among Computer Science graduates and the amount of companies hiring graduates and juniors has fallen off a cliff. It's a massive shame and there is so much talent going to waste at the moment.

If AI continues to improve and we don't need software engineers in the future this lack of a pipeline for future senior engineers might not be a problem. No one can predict the future however, demand for software engineers is likely to increase in the short term, similar to what happened to horses when the train was invented and due to an increase in software demand due to Jevons paradox. Software is so integral to everything we do now. It runs healthcare, finance, transport, logistics and if software continues to eat the world we're going to need a lot more engineers than we're currently producing.

The Stack Overflow developer survey data shows what's already happening. In 2019, over a quarter of all developers were under 25. By 2025, that's fallen to under one in five, while the 25-44 bands have swelled to fill the gap. The base is shrinking. The middle is bulging. Three years of heavily reduced junior hiring doesn't sound catastrophic until you do the maths. With the average developer's active career spanning 15-20 years, a significant chunk of the future senior pipeline simply hasn't been built.

If that does happen it's going to be great for the software engineers still in the industry. They'll be in high demand so their salaries will skyrocket. But it won't be great for the UK as a whole. If demand for software continues to grow but we don't have the engineers to build it, we'll create fewer companies and the economy will be worse off for it. And a bit like our population problem, by the time we notice the problem it will be too late to fix.

So if you want to avoid all of that start getting good at hiring juniors. The companies that invest in the tooling and infrastructure to get juniors productive quickly will have a significant advantage in the future. And if you're clever and you go against the herd mentality of only hiring seniors at the moment you'll be able to find some amazing talent. SMEs with limited budgets rarely get the chance to hire the top 1% - they're normally hoovered up by big tech. Right now, for the first time in years, that's changed. Don't waste it.