That industry has properly recognised that this is where people learn the skills to do more complex, higher value work.

I don’t think anyone has the budget for that anymore - not even the big companies. It’s two years of negative $ output for the $ you put in and after those two years the junior dev leaves anyway for a more senior position.

1) For the last decade many juniors have had unreasonable salary expectations that have often still been met. Now there is an alternative that's a lot cheaper and doesn't come with an attitude.

2) It's generally agreed that for the first year or 2 in your career you aren't that useful; after that you start to add lots of value quickly. But salary expectations don't double when you go from a junior to an intermediate - maybe they go up 25%. It's clearly much better value to hire only seniors if you can find them.

I'm not saying these are right or wrong but a whole article about juniors that doesn't mention wages, and just tries to implore companies to "do the right thing", misses the point.

Managing one or several of these idiots has to be the worst job ever invented.

But it's hard to imagine committing to the training without the history.

This one seems like a classic Prisoner's Dilemma. Defecting (hiring only seniors) is rational in isolation, but if everyone defects, everyone loses. What incentive for a smaller company to hire and invest in training the junior if in two years they'll leave for a larger company anyway.

I was just testing the newly released Copilot Agent Mode in VS, and it already looks quite capable of debugging things independently (actually, it's not much different from VS Code Agent Mode, which came out a couple of weeks earlier).

System design? Not all seniors need Google-scale design skills. Most systems designed by seniors are either overdesigned, badly designed, or copied from an article or a case study anyway. There are plenty of seniors whose only real qualification is the number of years they've been working.

The author is from Google. I’m not sure if effective collaboration is something given there, but in many companies, especially outside of tech, it's not something you see often. And it's usually inversely proportional to the company’s age.

What seniors learned by doing is now written down and available to LLMs, often in multiple sources, explained by some of the best minds in the field. Any given senior likely knows only a fraction of a domain, and even less when you start combining domains. LLMs probably already there for some of the seniors, only they never checked.

Our service occasionally gets especially expensive requests that amplify to our dependencies, one of those dependencies have started complaining that our bursts of traffic are impacting other users, talk to them and propose a solution that aligns with our different requirements. Possible directions are X, Y, Z.

AI is pretty far from able to do this. A cracked out vibe coder maybe could have just added a one-off naive rate limit algorithm pulled from stack overflow or maybe pulled in an unmaintained 3rd party 'rate-limit' package and called it a day. And that would be fine for a MVP but in large organizations figuring out what to build, how to build it, and getting agreement with stakeholders is way, way more work that doing than actual implementation (which still rarely can be one-shotted and needs a lot of hand-holding and iteration to get decent solutions).

In a world where the average work is the first to be displaced (due to training data availability), the last to be replaced are the ones furthest from distribution mean...

To me, this is the salient point. There are more juniors coming through now who aren't learning the fundamentals, because there is a ready shortcut around the mundane tedious work. Which means they're trying to move onto higher value, higher risk areas without understanding the foundations

If I were a betting man, I would wager that those managers either don't care, or are gambling that by the time senior engineers are in short supply, AI will be good enough to replace them as well.

Many small startups _never_ really hired junior people, preferring to only take people who had some experience. To some extent, taking juniors and _turning them into_ seniors has always been more of a big-company thing than a small-company thing (which makes _sense_; it's expensive). I'd be curious whether there's actual data showing a shift, or if it's just vibes.