Train juniors on what they reject

The junior designer argument came around again this week, from both sides. On Tuesday Patrick Neeman made the case that the field survives on leaders who keep hiring juniors, because every senior designer was once a bet somebody made. On Wednesday CNBC quoted Tobias Green, founder of the London ad agency Catalyst, making the opposite case: “If AI removes the grunt work, then the grunt work is no longer relevant.”

I’m with Neeman on the hire. I think both of them have the training wrong.

Hiring them is the easy half

The hiring numbers aren’t subtle. In Figma’s 2026 hiring study, 56% of hiring managers reported rising demand for senior designers. Only 25% were hiring for junior roles. A working paper from two Harvard researchers tracked 62 million workers at 285,000 American firms through their résumés. Junior employment fell sharply at companies that adopted generative AI, while senior employment barely moved. The drop came from slower hiring, not from people being let go.

Nobody announced the end of junior hiring. The requisitions just stopped getting opened. Neeman’s answer is to open the requisition anyway, and he is right. Every senior designer was a junior somewhere first.

The weak part of his argument is the reason he gives for why now is a good time. He cites the Brynjolfsson, Li and Raymond study of support agents, where novices with an AI assistant improved 34% and the most experienced barely changed. His conclusion is that the tools compress the time it takes a new person to become useful.

Useful is not the same as trained

Look at what that study measured: issues resolved per hour. It’s an output number. The authors’ own explanation is that the model “disseminates the best practices of more able workers” to the new ones. The novices got faster because they were carrying someone else’s practice, not because they had formed their own.

That’s fine in a support queue. In a design team it switches off the oldest signal a lead has. A junior who needed help used to show it in the work: the muddled hierarchy, the empty state nobody drew, the flow that fell apart on the third screen. Weak output was the alarm.

Now a junior with a good model hands in a competent screen in their first week. It looks like progress. It might be. Or the model did the part that used to teach them, and they approved it.

Cheney Hamilton of the research firm Bloor named the gap in the same CNBC piece. AI raises what a junior can produce, she said, but it “doesn’t give them the judgement to know when the output is wrong”. That judgment came from repetition and consequence, and those are exactly the parts the tool now absorbs.

The player-coach has no time for screens

The standard answer is that seniors will teach the judgment on purpose. The org chart is moving the other way. In May Coinbase cut about 14% of its staff and capped the company at five layers below the chief executive and chief operating officer. Leaders would carry as many as 15 or more direct reports. There are no pure managers left. Every leader is also meant to be an active individual contributor.

A player-coach with 15 reports and their own work to ship can’t sit beside a junior and critique every frame. A small interview study of software engineers in South Korea gave the pattern a name: absorption. Entry-level work gets pulled into senior workflows running on AI, and juniors skip the struggle that used to build expertise. The seniors and juniors it interviewed didn’t even see the problem the same way.

So the training has to happen somewhere cheaper than a screen-by-screen review. And it has to leave a trace a busy lead can read.

What I review instead

In my reviews, a junior’s work comes with what they threw away. The options the model gave them that they killed, and one line on why each one died, written against the team’s standard.

I read the reasons before I look at the screen. The order matters, because it separates two juniors who hand in the same competent work.

• Right reasons, rough screen. That’s a craft gap. It closes with practice, and the tools help.
• Polished screen, thin reasons. The model got it right and the junior agreed. That’s where my time goes, because nothing in the output would have told me.

None of this works unless the standard is written down. A junior can’t explain why an option fails an unstated bar, and a lead can’t check the explanation against a mood. Adam Elman made a related case about AI products at Nielsen Norman Group in June: the designer’s job shifts toward defining what good does and doesn’t look like.

The rejection notes also test the standard. Where it has gaps, they show up as reasons the team can’t give.

And it gives the review a unit a player-coach can afford. A paragraph of reasons can be read between meetings. A file full of frames can’t.

The grunt work was never the point

Green is right that nobody should keep juniors on busywork for its own sake. He is wrong that the skill it built stopped mattering. Grunt work taught judgment because every piece of it came back with a verdict. Somebody said no, and said why.

A model rarely tells a junior no. It hands them another option. The only person left to say no is the junior, and the only way to know whether they can is to have them do it in writing, where someone will read it.

So hire the junior, and review what they reject.