alt Hacker NewsThe issue stems from 2 things:
1) People hearing "an LLM is as smart as a junior" and actually opting for the LLM subscription price instead of hiring a junior
2) The gap between senior and junior in terms of performance has become larger, since the senior devs had their hands get dirty for years typing stuff out manually AND also tackling challenges.
This generation of junior-mid developers will have a significant portion of the "typing stuff" chopped off, and we're still pretending that this will end up being fine.
I think your second point is interesting, and it has actually already happened a couple of times.
It used to be a lot easier to find devs that knew assembly and could navigate call stacks through memory by hand because a lot of folks had to learn that to get their job done. Now higher level languages have mostly eliminated that level of operation.
The same applies to infosec roles. It is 10x harder for junior infosec folks than 20 years ago because there are a bunch of skills you need in infosec that today's mainline dev experience doesn't need, but were more common a while ago.
Case in point, I remember working with a partner company's junior engineer on some integration. They needed some hard-coded constant changed and time was of the essence. I told them to change a couple bytes in the elf binary directly. They looked at me like I was a wizard. I thought it was a fairly pedestrian skill having grown up reversing computer game save files.