How AI Could Break the Career Ladder

Here&#x27;s what all these &quot;AI is coming for yer jerb&quot; articles miss.<p>Employing juniors allow for somebody down the line to take the blame. Everybody is somebody&#x27;s direct report, and shit doesn&#x27;t roll uphill. As a 1970s IBM presentation slide once said: &quot;A computer can never be held accountable, so a computer must never make a management decision&quot;.<p>That aside, I&#x27;m not particularly convinced by the findings of a &quot;research study&quot; about the usefulness of shovels when its produced by Shovels.com, especially when they&#x27;re not willing to dogfood their own software on internal use cases such as legal brief reviews.

To be fair, we&#x27;re already starting to see this without AI. Seems like every company under the sun is looking for &#x27;senior&#x27; and &#x27;lead&#x27; and &#x27;staff&#x27; level employees now, with very little consideration put into entry or junior level roles. Seems like the days of anyone learning on the job have been over for a while now, and everyone is instead expected to hit the ground running 4 minutes after being hired with the exact skill set needed by the role in question.<p>I can definitely see AI making it worse though, given how less effort needs to be given to menial&#x2F;entry level work when its implemented.

Ah the great predictions of how things will go - these ones will prosper, those ones will suffer. Remember what game is actually being played - eyeballs on ads.

This article by Steve Yegge covers the same ideas: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sourcegraph.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;the-death-of-the-junior-developer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sourcegraph.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;the-death-of-the-junior-develop...</a><p>HN - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40783682">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40783682</a>

Seems the senior managers &amp; senior workers&#x2F;producers should be spending some of their time and resources to develop AI training systems including coursework, simulation rigs, coaching, etc. to accelerate and reduce the load of training entry-level workers. This would multiply the capacity of a fully staffed team.<p>If they lack the foresight to do this, then yes they will break the career ladder as well as the path to their own team&#x27;s survival.

Maybe the roles will be fewer in number but someone will be needed to verify the work of generative AI. I also can see it putting mid career people in competition with entry level workers. It will end up causing deflation but maybe it puts younger people on a more even footing, especially if they build skills in using generative AI that older workers may not.

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