Not hiring junior engineers won't solve the problem you think you have

There are too many new grads and the quality bar outside of target programs has dropped nor never existed to begin with.

And the target programs graduate around 15-20k EECS adjacent majors a year.

It's hard to justify hiring a (choosing random college) CS@Ouachita Baptist University grad for $140K TC (50th percentile for an entry level SWE) or even $100K TC [0] (25th percentile for an entry level SWE) unless they are truly an outlier.

For example, back in college I had a buddy who really didn't want to take our OS class because it was hard, so he used transferology and found an OS class offered by some random Christian university in Texas where the class assignments were either writing biblical analogies for system programming concepts like memory management or basic fizzbuzz level assignments. My alma mater's CS program ended up blacklisting that college when admin was working on transferring the credits for that class and began reviewing the class's curriculum.

While that is an extreme example, outside of target programs, the quality bar drops dramatically, and an entire generation of grads are truly unemployable at the current prevailing wages.

[0] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/levels/entry-leve...

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I would have liked the article to address more specifically what skills will be needed in the future and how engineers of all levels will learn them. Senior engineers in my circle feel their own brainrot, and at the same time feel like super wizards combining our deep software knowledge with the amazing AI dev tools. How will the AI native engineers learn the things, do they need to learn the things, what does anybody need to learn anyway? Let’s talk about it.

This blogpost didn't really address the elephant in the room that increasingly the bottleneck is no longer the part that jr devs could help out with.

Every startup I know that hired some level of jr's and encouraged them to use AI found themselves in a code review bottleneck for basic code quality and architecture decisions. Many startups I know are largely forgoing jr devs.

Code quality regarding evolvability, reliability, maintainability is still part of the development process. All of the people who claimed src code is just assembly on Twitter some months ago have started chiming in that they were wrong.

I do wonder what this does to the talent pipeline like mentioned in the post.

Is this a poorly instructed llm? Or a poorly constructed thought?