I was reading a post on LinkedIn that mentioned the following:
“In a short time, the workforce will no longer look like a pyramid. It’ll look like an obelisk.”
A narrow base of juniors. A big, heavy block of mid and senior people, and a thin sliver of leadership at the top.
At first glance, it sounds efficient. Less time training beginners, more “ready-made talent,” more immediate productivity. In Excel, it probably looks beautiful.
In real life, I think it’s a slow-motion disaster.
Because a company, or an industry, that stops investing in juniors is quietly deciding to stop investing in its own future.
Let’s unpack this properly, shall we?
From Pyramid to Obelisk: Why It Feels Attractive
For a long time, the workforce has been visualized as a pyramid: a broad base of juniors, a smaller middle layer, and a narrow top of seniors and leaders.
The pyramid made intuitive sense: people entered, grew, filtered up, and a few ended up owning the hardest decisions. Along the way, juniors absorbed culture, learned from experienced people, and eventually became those experienced people.
The “obelisk” narrative is different. It says: keep the base thin. Hire fewer juniors. Fill the body with “ready-made” mid/senior talent. Let automation and AI do the low-level work.
If you’re a CFO or a VP staring at budgets and headcount constraints, this can seem rational:
Juniors take time to ramp up.
They need mentoring and supervision.
Their mistakes can be costly.
Automation can do some of what they used to do anyway.
So why not “optimize” and hire mostly mid/senior people who can “hit the ground running”?
On a one-year or two-year horizon, that logic holds. On a ten-year horizon, it collapses.
Cutting junior hiring doesn’t hurt you tomorrow. It hurts you slowly, structurally, in ways that are hard to debug until it’s very late.
No succession, no bench
Every senior quits eventually. Some get promoted, some burn out, some just want a different life. When they go, you need someone who understands the systems they built, the mistakes they made, and the scars behind the design.
If you haven’t been feeding a pipeline of juniors and mid-level engineers behind them, you end up with:
Critical systems nobody fully understands.
Roles that stay open for months because you “need someone senior.”
Teams are paralyzed because every simple change requires summoning the one person who still remembers why BGP is configured the way it is.
Without juniors, there is no bench. There is just a handful of exhausted starters playing every minute of every game.
A culture that never renews itself
Juniors bring something that can’t be automated: fresh eyes.
They ask questions like:
“Why do we still do this manually?”
“Why don’t we use this new tool?”
“Does this process still make sense?”
If your team is full of people who have been doing things the same way for ten years, the probability of “we’ve always done it this way” quietly becoming dogma skyrockets.
Without juniors, culture ossifies. The same processes persist. The same blind spots remain, and the same skepticism toward new ideas becomes the default. You may feel “stable,” but what you’re really becoming is brittle.
Higher costs and senior burnout
A team composed mostly of mid- and senior-level engineers is expensive. If you’re not using that seniority strategically, you’re overpaying for tasks that could and should be delegated.
What happens in a lot of obelisk-shaped organizations is this:
Seniors spend their days doing both complex work and operational grunt work: repetitive changes, basic troubleshooting, and simple documentation.
They are constantly context-switching between deep design thinking and low-value chores.
They become the bottleneck for every decision and every task of any importance.
You end up with high salaries, high stress, and declining satisfaction. People burn out not because the work is too hard, but because the work is too misallocated.
Loss of teaching muscle
Training juniors is a skill.
Teams that do it regularly get good at it: they build onboarding plans, documentation improves, standards are clarified, and senior engineers learn to communicate and coach.
Teams that stop hiring juniors eventually forget how to teach at all. When, years later, someone says, “We really should rebuild a pipeline of young talent,” they discover they no longer have the internal capability to do it efficiently.
The obelisk looks lean from the outside, but internally it’s hollow.
What This Means for Your Career
This isn’t just an abstract organizational design problem. It has direct consequences for your career, whether you’re a junior, mid-level, or senior engineer.
If you’re junior or trying to break in
In a world that hires fewer juniors, entry-level jobs feel harder to get.
Job postings for “Junior Network Engineer” demanding three years of experience are not a joke; they’re a symptom of this trend. Companies want the benefits of juniors (lower salary, perceived flexibility) with the productivity of seniors. And that's absolutely insane!
That’s frustrating and, frankly, unfair.
But here’s the flip side: companies that do invest in juniors will value you more than ever.
Because they know they’re going against the grain. They know they’re building something long-term. They’re often younger companies, small teams, or leaders who remember what it was like to be given a chance.
In those places:
You get more learning exposure.
You’re less likely to be treated as a “ticket monkey.”
You become part of the future bench, not an afterthought.
Your job is to make it as easy as possible for those companies to bet on you:
Build a portfolio: lab work, automation scripts, small projects, posts about what you’re learning.
Show evidence that you can learn fast, solve real problems, and communicate clearly.
Look for environments where mentoring is visible, blogs, talks, internal learning programs, rather than places where everything is a black box.
If you’re mid-level or senior
At first, an obelisk world feels like it favors you. Everyone is hunting for your profile. Salaries rise. Recruiters spam your inbox.
But long-term, it can trap you.
Without juniors:
You have nobody to delegate the foundational work to.
You carry both architectural responsibility and day-to-day manual toil.
You become a single point of failure for systems you don’t have time to clean up.
From a career perspective, you risk becoming “the person who knows how everything works” without ever becoming “the person who built a team and a succession plan.”
The former is irreplaceable until the day they’re not. The latter is the person organizations trust with leadership, budgets, and strategy.
The pattern is obvious:
Seniors who embrace teaching, delegation, and talent development grow into roles with more scope and impact.
Seniors who hoard knowledge and avoid juniors become overloaded ICs; respected, but stuck.
Developing People Is Not Charity, It’s Strategy
There’s an important distinction here: hiring and developing juniors is not an act of kindness. It’s a strategic choice.
If you run a team or a company, juniors are not a “nice-to-have.” They are the raw material from which your future mid-levels and seniors will come.
When you invest in them, a few things happen over time.
Juniors become force multipliers
A senior engineer with two capable juniors is far more effective than two seniors working alone.
The senior can:
Focus on deep design, automation, and cross-team coordination.
Delegate execution, documentation, and testing.
Use real work as the training ground for juniors, instead of artificial “learning tasks.”
In a year or two, those juniors become mid-level engineers who can independently handle major chunks of the stack. Now you have a team, not a collection of isolated experts.
Internal pipelines beat constant senior hiring
Hiring “ready-made talent” from the market is expensive and risky:
You pay a premium for experience.
You gamble on cultural fit and the truthfulness of the CV.
You still have to onboard them to your specific environment and stack.
Growing a junior into a mid-level internally isn’t free, but the total cost (salary + mentoring time) is often much lower than the cost of perpetual external senior hiring. And the result is someone who understands your systems from the ground up.
Knowledge becomes institutional
When you have juniors in the room, seniors are forced to explain things.
That explanation:
Flushes out assumptions.
Exposes outdated practices.
Often triggers “wait, why do we still do it like that?” conversations.
As a byproduct, knowledge moves from tacit (in someone’s head) to explicit (in docs, diagrams, and code). The organization gets smarter, not just the individuals.
Building a Healthy Pyramid in an Obelisk World
If you lead a team or influence hiring, you can push back against the obelisk trend in practical ways.
You don’t need a perfect theoretical model. You need a deliberate, sustainable mix.
You can start by:
Deciding that you will have juniors, not as an afterthought, but as a part of your design. Maybe that’s 20–30% of your engineering team.
Designing real onboarding, not just “sink or swim.” Give juniors 60–90 days plan with clear goals, mentors, and real tasks.
Using automation to free your seniors, so they have time to teach instead of drowning in tickets.
Think of it as infrastructure design:
If you overbuild the core and underinvest in access and aggregation, you end up with unused capacity and bottlenecks in the wrong places.
If you over-hire seniors and under-hire juniors, you overbuild “core expertise” and underbuild the layers that feed and sustain it.
A healthy engineering organization looks more like a well-designed network: balanced layers, clear roles, redundancy, and room for growth.
How to Grow in a Thin-Base Market
For individual engineers, the question is: how do you grow your career in a world that sometimes forgets the importance of juniors?
If you’re starting out, you focus on signal:
Show that you’ve done things, not just studied them. Labs, home projects, contributions to open source, blog posts explaining what you’ve learned; these all make you stand out in a thin-base world.
Be strategic about where you apply: smaller companies, engineering-led organizations, and teams with visible mentoring cultures are more likely to invest in juniors.
If you’re mid-level or senior, you lean into being part of the solution:
Volunteer to mentor interns or juniors.
Offer to design onboarding paths and internal learning materials.
Argue, calmly, with numbers, for the long-term value of a pipeline when hiring decisions are made.
The engineers who understand both technology and talent are the ones who end up shaping the future, not just reacting to it.
The Shape of the Future Is Not Inevitable
The “obelisk workforce” may be a trend, but it is not a law of nature.
Companies can decide to keep investing in juniors even when it’s not trendy. Teams can decide they will build succession, not just capacity. Senior engineers can decide they will teach, not just carry everything on their shoulders.
And you, wherever you are in your career, can decide you will care about how talent is grown, not just whether the BGP sessions are up.
The article you read is right in one sense: there is pressure to narrow the base. Less entry-level hiring. More automation. More demand for “ready-made” people.
But the conclusion is wrong if we let it be deterministic.
Developing people does take work. Writing training plans, pairing with juniors, reviewing their code or config, answering basic questions for the fiftieth time, all of that costs time and energy.
Not developing people costs more.
It costs succession.
It costs resilience.
It costs innovation.
It costs culture.
And, eventually, it costs money and stability when your obelisk starts to crack.
If you want a career that grows, not just a job that pays, you should care deeply about which shape you’re helping to build.
Leonardo Furtado