> Regardless of its realized effectiveness improvements it froze the intern/junior hiring pipelines.

Would be great to see some industry-wide stats here. There are three OTHER factors are play here:

1. Record numbers of CS undergrads (more supply)

2. More remote-CS/tech grad programs (yet more supply, many overseas)

3. Bursting of the tech-vc bubble (less demand)

4. AI (???)

Not sure how much can be attributed to AI. That said, i'd confidently say our team is at least 2x more productive than 3yrs ago. Huge numbers of loose change get thrown to the LLM to solve, instead of writing clever algos, etc.