I'm not all gloom and doom but the treatment of junior engineers is something I think we will either regret or rejoice. Either will have a spur of creative people doing their own independent thing or we'll have lost a generation of great engineers.
We’ve been coasting along on a single generation who have ruled with iron fists.
If you fire all your SWEs they won't sit around twiddling their thumbs waiting for an AI collapse, they'll career shift. Maybe to an unemployment line and/or homelessness, maybe to something else productive, but either way they'll lose SWE skills.
If you close down all the SWE junior positions you'll strongly discourage young people training in the field. They'll do something else.
Then if you want to go back, who will you hire for it?
They are large language models. Not automated development machines. They hallucinate.
The goal post has not shifted since 2023 or so. Make an LLM that doesn't blatantly disregard knowledge it has, instructions it has been giving, over and over, and you win. If trillions of USD of investment can't do it, I'd be curious to see what can.
If the AI is not good enough, then don't fire the devs. If/when the devs are no longer needed, I don't see why the need would return later, that was my point.
The consumer space is about extracting every ounce of personal data possible.
The b2b space is about "maximizing customer value" - that is, not maximizing the value of your product to the customer, but maximizing the value of the customer to your business. Lock them in and lock them down, make your product "sticky" so they can't leave without immense cost.
Company brain drain, knowledge leaves with your seniors if you decide to get rid of them, or they just leave due to the conditions AI creates.
I don't know if the above comes to fruition, there's a lot of questions that only time will answer. But those are my first thoughts.