That “learning” phase used to end in the 18-25 range. Getting rid of juniors and making someone get enough experience on side projects to be considered a senior would take considerably longer. Exactly how long are parents supposed to be subsidizing their children’s living expenses? How can the parents afford to retire when they still have dependents? And all of this is built on the hope that the kid will actually land that job in 10 years? That feels like a bad bet. What happens if they fail? Not a big deal when the kid is 27, but a pretty big deal at 40 when they have no other marketable skills and have been living off their parents.
The difference is there are juniors getting familiar with those enterprise products today. If they go away, they will step into it as senior people and be unprepared. It’s not just about the syntax of a different language, I’m talking more about dealing with things like Active Directory, leveraging ITSM systems effectively, reporting, metrics, how to communicate with leadership, how to deal with audits. AI might help with some of this, but not all of it. For someone without experience with it, they don’t know what they don’t know… in which case the AI won’t help at all.
I even see this when dealing with people from a small company being acquired by a larger company. They don’t know what is available to them or the systems that are in place, and they don’t even know enough to ask. Someone from another large company knows to ask about these things, because they have that experience.
