sqlfingers.com: Who Trains the Senior DBAs of 2035?

Last week I wrote about the Death of the DBA (Again) and how AI, like every 'extinction event' before it, won't actually replace us. Thank you for reading. The responses were great! One anonymous comment really got my attention:

"What happens to the supply of junior DBAs when companies no longer have an incentive to hire them? Senior DBAs retire, and all that's left are the machines."

My response: "Very good question — and I don't have a tidy answer."

I've been thinking about it ever since. Not because I think we're doomed — but because this is the one problem AI can't solve for us. We have to.

The Numbers Are Already Moving

This isn't hypothetical doom-scrolling. It's happening.

According to SignalFire, which tracks job movements across 650 million LinkedIn profiles, new graduates made up just 7% of new hires at big tech companies in 2024. In 2023, that number was 25%.

A Stanford University study published in August 2025 found that the AI revolution is having a 'significant and disproportionate impact on entry-level workers in the U.S. labor market' — particularly 22- to 25-year-old software engineers.

Meanwhile, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has publicly warned that AI will eliminate half of junior white-collar jobs within five years.

So the trend line is clear. The question is whether we let it play out to an unknown extent — or we do something about it.

"One of the Dumbest Things I've Ever Heard"

Not everyone is buying what the AI hype machine is selling.

In August 2025, AWS CEO Matt Garman appeared on the Matthew Berman podcast and was asked about companies replacing junior staff with AI. His response was... direct:

"That is one of the dumbest things I've ever heard. They're probably the least expensive employees you have. They're the most leaned into your AI tools. How's that going to work when you go like 10 years in the future and you have no one that has built up or learned anything?"

He doubled down in December 2025 in an interview with WIRED:

"At some point that whole thing explodes on itself. If you have no talent pipeline that you're building and no junior people that you're mentoring and bringing up through the company, we often find that that's where we get some of the best ideas."

Garman runs the largest cloud infrastructure company on earth. He's not saying this because he's sentimental about new grads. He's saying it because he's done the math on what happens when you stop investing in people.

Spoiler: it explodes.

What Junior DBAs Actually Learn

Here's what Copilot can teach a junior DBA:

Syntax
Query patterns
How to Google faster

Congrats. You've trained a very expensive autocomplete.

Here's what Copilot can't teach:

Why the production database has that weird naming convention from 2012
Which developer to call when the nightly job fails (and which one to avoid)
That one table you never touch on Tuesdays because of the downstream dependencies no one will take ownership of
The instinct that something is wrong before the alerts fire
How to tell a VP 'no' without getting fired
What it feels like to bring a system back from the dead at 3 AM — and why you'll do what it takes to never do it again.

That knowledge transfers through proximity, mentorship, and supervised failure. You can't download it. You can't prompt-engineer it. You have to live it.

There's no training data for tribal knowledge. No neural network for judgment. That's not a bug in the model — it's the whole point.

The 2035 Math

Let's sketch this out.

I think the average DBA career spans about 25-30 years. If you entered the field in 2005-2010, you're now mid-career or approaching senior. If companies slow junior hiring now, the pipeline starts thinning immediately. By 2030, you feel it. By 2035, it's acute.

Year	What Happens
2025	Junior hiring slows. AI handles 'easy' tasks.
2028	Mid-level shortage begins. Fewer people with 3-5 years experience.
2032	Senior DBAs start retiring. Replacements aren't ready.
2035	Salaries spike. No algorithm for institutional knowledge.

This isn't a prediction of doom. It's a prediction of opportunity — if you're on the right side of it.

What We Do About It

I'm not a policy maker. I'm a DBA. But here's what I know works:

Apprenticeship, not abandonment

Pair junior DBAs with seniors on real systems. Not sandboxes — production. Let them see what happens when a query goes sideways. Let them fix it with supervision. That's how judgment is built.

AI as training wheels, not a replacement

Use Copilot to accelerate learning, not skip it. A junior who uses AI to write a query and then has to explain why it's wrong learns more than one who just runs it and moves on.

Cross-training

Rotate new hires through development, operations, and DBA work. A DBA who has written application code understands why developers do what they do — and knows how to push back without starting a war. Speaking from experience: my time in the development layer was one of the biggest gains of my career. It changed how I see problems, how I communicate with dev teams, and honestly, how much I'm able to get done.

Write it down

That tribal knowledge everyone jokes about? Start documenting it. Not for the AI — for the humans who will need it when you're gone. Future you will thank present you. So will future them.

The Bottom Line

AI is not going to replace senior DBAs. We covered that last week.

But senior DBAs don't appear out of thin air. They come from junior DBAs who were given the chance to learn, fail, and grow. Cut off that pipeline, and in ten years we won't have a robot problem. We'll have a people problem.

The companies that figure this out — that keep hiring juniors, keep mentoring them, keep investing in the long game — will have senior DBAs in 2035.

The companies that don't? They'll be posting 'Senior DBA — URGENT' on LinkedIn and wondering why no one's applying.

Good luck with that.

SQL Server Consulting

Thursday, January 22, 2026

Who Trains the Senior DBAs of 2035?