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Comment by cmiles8 | Hacker News Reader

Not really though:

1. Companies like savings but they’re not dumb enough to just wipe out junior roles and shoot themselves in the foot for future generations of company leaders. Business leaders have been vocal on this point and saying it’s terrible thinking.

2. In the US and Europe the work most ripe for automation and AI was long since “offshored” to places like India. If AI does have an impact it will wipe out the India tech and BPO sector before it starts to have a major impact on roles in the US and Europe.

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1) Companies are dumb enough to shoot themselves in the foot over a single quarter's financials - they certainly aren't thinking about where their middle management is going to come from in 5 or 10 years.

2) There's plenty of work ripe for automation that's currently being done by recent US grads. I don't doubt offshored roles will also be affected, but there's nothing special about the average entry-level candidate from a state school that'll make them immune to the same trends.

To think companies worry about protecting the talent supply chain is to put your fingers in your ears and ignore your eyes for the past 5-10 years. We were already in a crisis of seniority where every single role was “senior only” and AI is only going to increase that.

I actually think the opposite will happen. Suddenly, smart AI-enabled juniors can easily match the productivity of traditional (or conscientious) seniors, so why hire seniors at all?

If you are an exec, you can now fire most of your expensive seniors and replace them with kids, for immediate cash savings. Yeah, the quality of your product might suffer a bit, bugs will increase, but bugs don't show up on the balance sheet and it will be next year's problem anyway, when you'll have already gone to another company after boasting huge savings for 3 quarters in a row.

> Suddenly, smart AI-enabled juniors can easily match the productivity of traditional (or conscientious) seniors, so why hire seniors at all?

I guess we'll see, but so far the flattening curve of LLM capabilities suggest otherwise. They are still very effective with simpler tasks, but they can't crack the hardest problems like a senior developer does.

1. Sure they will! It's a prisoner's dilemma. Each individual company is incentivized to minimize labor costs. Who wants to be the company who pays extra for humans in junior roles and then gets that talent poached away?

2 Yes, absolutely.

The cost of juniors have dropped enough where it's viable now.

You can get decent grads from good schools for $65k.

As far as 1 goes, how do you explain American deindustrilization and e. g. its auto industry.

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