Well anthropic says you are wrong and wants juniors to disappear into another trade. This absolutely wouldn't be a coordinated effort to deskill Americans and force companies to helplessly accept whatever LLM code is generated without human review. Most certainly not. They wouldn't target regulated industries that require certain work praxis like biotechnology and lobby heavily with the military and government to change laws around this. Definitely not!
What would Anthropic gain by wanting juniors to disappear into another trade? Obviously their goal is to turn a profit meaning they need to be more efficient and they seem to believe that will come from senior engineers. They have the supply for it, why hire juniors when seniors are dying to working in your shop
This reminds me a bit of the gaming industry. In most AAA game studios, junior openings are very rare or simply non existent. Companies expect you to learn the ropes elsewhere and only show up when you're experienced.
As long as there other companies scooping up the juniors (which we cannot assume will happen), this could be sustainable.
> Companies expect you to learn the ropes elsewhere and only show up when you're experienced.
This is every industry - barring unionized trades with established apprenticeship pathways - over the past few decades. Either someone does the early-career job-hop dance, or they take on student loans to (maybe!) skip some of that. (And, you know, universities would prefer not actually to train anyone, either. If they can - "highly selectively" - find cohorts who don't need much mentorship then that's much better for their bottom lines.) Regardless, the entire cost and risk of training has been pushed onto individual employees.
Yes, this works well for a small minority of highly-motivated people - who are, of course, vastly over-represented on this board, so few here will object to it - but it prevents far, far more people from ever reaching their potential.
Uh complete market capture for an entire industry that costs billions of dollars a year. They have been claiming software engineer was solved for years now.
If everyone does it, no one monitors it anymore, and quality degrades the only way out is more tokens.
Bingo. From day one what these companies have really been after is not "intelligence" but rather mass production and the concomitant quality expectation and behavioral shifts that go with it.
All they really need to do is convince enough people to adopt lower expectations and accept worse software products. At that point, mission accomplished. They've annihilated the source of value originally provided by people who actually know how to do things.
