The tech industry seems to be performing a real time experiment to see if they can survive without a talent pipeline. There’s a continual stream of news about how bad the hiring market is for junior engineers and how senior engineers (that can use an LLM) are doing just fine.
This is likely one of those situations that will take many years to play out before a negative effects are felt. At some point companies will struggle to get a small army of AI agents to understand high level business problems and technology, and realize they have to pay phenomenal sums of money for the dwindling pool of senior engineers. It’s the like the problem of banks maintaining their COBOL mainframe systems, but for everything.
This feels very much like 2008 when there was a significant shift in the tech world and nobody was ready. (See: smartphones and the cloud.)