Indeed Hiring Lab's Felix Aidala and Sneha Puri looked at how job postings split by seniority, and software development is the outlier. Across all US postings, entry level is 46%, mid level 40%, senior about 14%. In software development, senior roles were 69.3% of postings in the first quarter of 2026 and entry level was 4.5%. No other occupation they track is tilted that far.
The tilt is getting steeper. Senior postings rose 14.7% year over year as of May while entry level fell 7.5%. In tech specifically, the mid-level share has dropped 7.7 points since 2019 and the senior share has gained about 9.
I keep coming back to the arithmetic. A mid-level engineer is a junior engineer plus three or four years. A senior engineer is a mid-level engineer plus a few more. If the industry hires almost no juniors in 2026, it will have fewer mid-level engineers in 2030 and will be bidding against itself for the same shrinking pool of seniors, which is already what the 14.7% looks like.
So my view is that a team that stops hiring at the entry level is not saving a headcount. It is deciding not to have mid-level engineers in four years, and leaving the problem to whoever is running the team then. I think keeping a small, deliberate entry-level pipeline is one of the few decisions a manager can make today that their successor will thank them for.
How many people on your team started there as juniors, and could they today?
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