Continuous Engineering Press
The Missing Generation Tax
Let Juniors Inside the Rooms Where Seniors Decide
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“In 2035, who will you promote?”
About the book
AI now does the work that used to grow juniors into seniors, and does it faster and cheaper. Each team that skips the junior hire is making a sound call for the quarter. Add those calls up and a generation of senior people never forms. Nothing on the books shows it until the day you need one.
Related: The Missing Generation Manifesto. It is published on continuous.engineering, the author's site.
Inside the book
What it covers
The Missing Generation Tax names that cost, measures it, and shows you how to pay it on purpose, as a budget line funded from what AI saves you.
Seniority Debt
Why a skipped junior year behaves like technical debt, with six warning signs and a self-assessment.
The Proximity Dose
A floor of ten live hours a month between a junior and the people who make the decisions.
A six-variable formula
It turns succession into a number a CFO can approve.
The vacancy chain
A redesigned junior role, and governance that survives a tight quarter.
In the appendices
A succession policy and a manifesto, printed in the book.
Who it is for
Founders, engineering and security leaders, and the CFOs and boards who decide what survives a budget review. Every chapter ends with a thirty-day action. It also speaks to the junior reading about themselves.
The author runs his own ventures on AI and says plainly that he is part of the problem.
AI did not just change how we work. It quietly changed who gets to become us.
About the author
Shree Mandadi is a mentor who builds systems, a tech hacker, and a daily AI user. He has spent thirty years in healthcare, regulated industries, and high-stakes infrastructure.
Today he runs three ventures where AI does much of what a team used to do. In one planning session he did not renew a junior analyst's contract, because a partner could not say what the role added beyond a better prompt. He kept thinking about it, and this book is where that thinking went.
It is his life work, first written in public as a 2026 LinkedIn series and finished alongside Claude, which he says up front. He founded Continuous Engineering and runs vMentor, a peer group for founders and CTOs.
Written with Claude, Anthropic's AI assistant. The author's note in the book explains how.
Discussion
Read what other readers have said, or add your own. Every post is read by a person before it appears. See the moderation rules.
- General discussion
Reactions to the book, questions, disagreement. - Putting it to work
What you tried in your organization, and what happened. - For juniors
What to expect, what to ask for, and what is fair.