...the same junior developers that management and the investor class have stopped hiring.

Most seniors I know like mentoring newer engineers and would happily have more juniors on the team, but we don't get to make hiring decisions. I don't like that we have a glut of unemployed/underemployed new college grads and I feel bad for them, but I do not remotely care that management may have to pay me more than they'd like in 5 years because they decided they didn't need a junior pipeline anymore. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

Good point. I think most of the pitch here is to stakeholders and hiring managers, since they frame it explicitly as "buying senior-engineer futures at today's price,” but I also think they’re wrong that “your seniors will hate it.” IMO that depends entirely on what kind of seniors you’ve brought onto the team.

If they’re motivated entirely by money or personal accomplishment, or they don’t play well with other developers, like the type we’ve all met who are eventually siloed on smaller projects, then yes I’d agree. They’ll hate it. But they never wanted to mentor juniors in the first place. I’d call those mid-level engineers.

None of the true seniors I’ve known could grind through repetitive agentic workflows daily without eventually hitting a brick wall of boredom. And I think most who gave it a little thought would realize this in advance. The emptiness and tedium of that work alone would be deal breaker. The only exception might be former seniors who are burned out and just want to retire ASAP, to do literally anything else.

But otherwise I don’t think most seniors want this scenario to play out. At all.