Microsoft execs warn AI threatens entry level coding jobs
Feb 24th 2026
Azure CTO Mark Russinovich and VP Scott Hanselman say companies must keep hiring and mentoring junior developers to catch AI coding agent mistakes or risk hollowing out future engineering talent.
- Russinovich and Hanselman say AI coding agents boost senior engineers but impose a productivity drag on early-in-career developers who must steer and verify AI output.
- They warn agents can introduce serious bugs, inefficient or duplicated code, leftover debug statements, test-only fixes, and unsafe workarounds like Thread.Sleep.
- A Harvard study cited in the paper found junior hiring drops sharply at firms that adopt generative AI while senior hiring remains largely unchanged.
- The authors say focusing on short-term efficiency by hiring those who can already direct AI risks hollowing out the next generation of technical leaders.
- Recommended fixes include a preceptor model where senior engineers mentor juniors, an 'EiC mode' for coding assistants, and some university courses that ban AI for key assignments.
- The paper is presented as the authors' opinion not formal Microsoft research; Microsoft has started a pilot and the tooling and hiring trends are evolving quickly.