Apprenticeship has pretty much disappeared, even from trades, but as far as I know, "juniors" have always been in demand, if for nothing else but the lower salaries.
In some industries you see education inflation- apprenticeships may be declining, but you can get a 2 year degree in auto repair at my community college. Similarly, you used to be able to become a lawyer through apprenticeship and self study, so a “junior” in the profession was the apprentice. Lawyers now enter the profession after 3 years of law school, so the bar for what a “junior” lawyer does and is has changed.
More significantly, you’ll see what is expected of a junior developer (and developers in general) change. My understanding is that prior to personal computers and spreadsheets accountants spent an enormous amount of time doing arithmetic. Presumably, junior accountants were expected to do a lot more of the arithmetic than the senior accountants. The invention of the digital spreadsheet eliminated a lot out of this work, but accountancy (and junior accountants) ended up evolving to deliver ever more insights about how a business operates and now there are more accountants than ever.
As a principal software engineer, I have far more problems to solve than I have time or available resources. If a new grad can solve those problems I’ll happily let them do so. There are precious few problems I have that an LLM can largely solve on its own and where that is true the new grad is often better at utilizing an LLM than I am.
https://apnews.com/article/ports-strike-longshoremen-unions-...