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Comment by softwaredoug | Hacker News Reader

In the context of layoffs, I feel like junior software engineers have been indirectly impacted by AI. There's seemingly a lot of demand for senior talent and much less for junior talent.

I imagine at least some of this would be caused by real or imagined productivity gains from AI tools for coding. The typical executive might have gone from thinking "staff up at all costs!!" to "AI will mean fewer devs doing higher value work". As these decisions have come from the top, the implication around wanting to "increase talent density" feels like there's less room for junior, lower skilled workers. And I can't help but think there's AI tools in the back of these execs minds.

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There is danger of losing the apprenticeship nature of our industry, where companies who take on grads help the industry as a whole.

How this plays out is a good question. You need a way for people new to the industry to get real world experience, and express their talents.

This might just fix itself. After all if company A has AI, and so does B, then AI is table stakes, and people are still needed for the edge, whatever that might be, at least while people are still the customers :-). An example of where people are not the customers: stock market. Mostly bots and algorithms buying that stuff.

> How this plays out is a good question.

Look into what happened to Japanese wood printers around the time of the industrial revolution over there. It was a many layer apprenticeship system where everyone had a separate job - the bottom layer, mostly children, would make prints for candy wrappers and such until you get to the top - the masters which dealt with the most valuable and skilled work.

The lowest layers got cut, replaced by machines, and the entire structure eventually toppled. Including the work that couldn't be done by a machine - it was simply not requested anymore or there wasn't enough people coming from below to fill the ranks.

It's somewhat doubtful whether software engineers will feel the same both, because of the actual impact AI and that the job itself IS automation by nature. There could be political factors, however, that could skew things otherwise.

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