> “The unfortunate thing right now, specifically for recent college grads, is those positions that are most likely to be automated are the entry-level positions that they would be seeking,” said Matthew Martin, U.S. senior economist at Oxford Economics, a forecasting firm.
This matches my experience. About 90% of the coding tasks I would have assigned to a junior in years past, I can get done for a fraction of the price at a similar quality and in 1/3rd the time by a tool like Claude Code. The only reason I have to hire a junior would be to develop them into a senior over 3-5 years, and companies are far too shortsided to think about that training pipeline.
A good senior engineer still does things the tools can't- in particular, non-programming tasks like planning, persuading, and accountability. I fear that there will be a crisis in these skills as the current seniors retire/change industries in the coming years.
Its pretty clear there will be a crisis in these skills from just a structural point of view. Career development is a sequential pipeline that sieves people.
If you've as an industry blocked the pipeline saying we don't need these people, time passes and those people who had to invest to get to that point abandon the bad investments, and you get no new people coming in. People leave such industry because of burnout, and aging/retirement/death. The dynamics created are one of a deflationary sieve where the front-loaded cost savings becomes a back-ended cost sink. Tthe demand and related cost of the professionals is recognized at a point where there is great need but they can't be found at any cost. In system's engineering we call this Hysteresis whipsaws, Mises might call this the first early stages of the Economic Calculation Problem.
> The only reason I have to hire a junior would be to develop them into a senior over 3-5 years, and companies are far too shortsided to think about that training pipeline.
Well and, without special arrangements, once trained for 3-5 years they'd now be more valuable and as easily scooped up by another company - if companies are short-sighted about the training pipeline, so too are employees short-sighted about how long they intend to remain somewhere
So sounds like the new entry level position is going to be learning to manage automations.
Question I still don't have an answer to is what that career trajectory looks like. I was at a event last week where someone from a popular startup, Clay, described a position (a "GTM engineer") as very intentionally not strategic, but about boots on the ground execution. I came away from the event wondering was "ok, how long until you automate away this line of work?"
This matches my experience. About 90% of the coding tasks I would have assigned to a junior in years past, I can get done for a fraction of the price at a similar quality and in 1/3rd the time by a tool like Claude Code. The only reason I have to hire a junior would be to develop them into a senior over 3-5 years, and companies are far too shortsided to think about that training pipeline.
A good senior engineer still does things the tools can't- in particular, non-programming tasks like planning, persuading, and accountability. I fear that there will be a crisis in these skills as the current seniors retire/change industries in the coming years.