Years of Experience Just Got Commoditized

For decades, years of experience served as a reliable proxy for capability in engineering. You hired a senior engineer because they'd already made the mistakes. They'd internalized patterns. They knew what not to do.

That proxy is weakening. Quickly.

What Seniority Actually Bought You

The traditional value of seniority came from accumulated context. Senior engineers knew the gotchas in a codebase. They'd seen architectural patterns fail in production. They carried mental models built over years of trial and error.

But here's what's changed: much of that accumulated knowledge is now instantly accessible. AI assistants can surface patterns, explain tradeoffs, catch common mistakes, and provide context that used to take years to develop. The knowledge gap between a thoughtful junior and a cruising senior is collapsing.

This doesn't mean experience is worthless. Far from it. But it does mean experience alone is no longer a differentiator.

A Hypothesis About What Actually Matters

I've been shipping heavily with AI assistance over the past year. Building products, solving problems, working through the kind of challenges that used to require deep accumulated expertise. From that experience, I have a hypothesis about what separates engineers who will thrive from those who won't.

It's not what they already know. It's how they think.

Problem framing matters more than solution knowledge. When I work with AI, the quality of my output depends almost entirely on how clearly I can articulate what I'm trying to solve. AI can generate solutions. It can't tell you what problem to solve or whether you're solving the right one.

Decomposition matters more than memorized patterns. Breaking a complex challenge into smaller, reasoned pieces is what makes AI collaboration effective. This is a thinking skill, not a knowledge skill. You can't look it up.

Iteration speed matters more than getting it right the first time. The engineers who will win are those who ship, observe, and adjust without getting precious about their initial approach.

Validation intuition matters more than implementation skill. You need enough judgment to recognize when an AI output is off, even if you couldn't have written it from scratch.

None of these skills require years of experience. Some develop them quickly. Others never do, regardless of tenure.

The Uncomfortable Implication

This creates real tension in how we evaluate and compensate engineers. The traditional ladder assumes a roughly linear relationship between tenure and value. More years, more impact, higher level.

But what happens when a junior engineer with strong fundamentals and AI fluency can ship work that rivals a senior who relies on pattern-matching from an earlier era?

I'm not suggesting we throw out experience. Seasoned engineers bring judgment, organizational knowledge, and the ability to mentor others. These matter. But the weight we place on raw years is increasingly misaligned with actual contribution.

Some senior engineers are thriving in this environment. They've adapted. They've incorporated AI into their workflows. They focus on the higher-order skills where human judgment still dominates: architecture, mentorship, cross-functional influence.

Others are coasting on accumulated reputation while their actual output falls behind hungrier, more adaptive teammates.

What This Means for Leaders

If you're leading engineering teams, this shift demands a harder look at how you evaluate talent.

Stop using years of experience as a primary filter. It screens out capable juniors and lets complacent seniors through.

Watch for builders. The engineers who thrive now are those who love the craft of creating. They're curious about tools. They iterate obsessively. They care about outcomes, not credit.

Reward adaptability over tenure. The engineers who will matter most in the next decade are those who can continuously reinvent how they work as the tools evolve.

Create paths for growth that aren't purely hierarchical. Someone can be extremely valuable without managing people or accumulating years. Make room for that.

The Real Question

I don't think seniority becomes meaningless. But I do think its relationship to value is changing. Experience combined with adaptability is more powerful than ever. Experience used as a substitute for adaptability is a liability.

The engineers I'm most impressed by right now are those who've embraced AI not as a threat to their expertise, but as a multiplier of their judgment. They happen to be spread across every level of the ladder.

What matters is whether you can build. Whether you can frame problems clearly. Whether you can ship and learn.

The years on your resume? Those are starting to matter less than how you spend your next year.