It isn’t just AI, as entry level people have always been poor value, but at this point we basically just want entry level to be a favour for employee’s kids.
I’m an overemployed Senior SDE, one at a unicorn and one at a generic company.
Do you have a perspective on whether this will exacerbate the shortage of senior engineers in a few years, if way fewer new people enter the profession in that time period? Or will it be okay since the need for humans will reduce commensurately?
Really, I don’t think they fully replaced the juniors as only some of the job is code generation. A lot of basic support and edge case handling is falling on the intermediates who often now aren’t producing much of anything due to the support burden. Many of them are dissatisfied.
Have both your companies explicitly stated that the freeze on entry-level hiring is because of copilot?
The current situation is definitely untenable, but it is not clear whether you need a full fledged developer do a lot of the work they are presently doing.
Keep in mind that this is a fairly large org of thousands, so smaller companies have different needs as full time support engineers may not be worth it. We already have some, they just are not allocated to this team.
As for your second question, one company phrased it something along the lines of "AI allows us to quickly do tasks for which we would otherwise need junior/certain classes of support team members." AI isn't just being used by developers, but all over the org. There is an AI steering group and everything.
Other employer hasn't said anything about it as AI implementation is less far along.