“The career on-ramp for professional software engineers used to work like this: you got hired to write mediocre code, a senior engineer reviewed it, you slowly absorbed judgment through repetition and correction, and a decade later you were the senior engineer. That chain is now broken.”
Junior hiring is down 19 percent since 2022 and the industry is shrugging. Every company wants senior engineers and none of them want to make any. The apprenticeship pipeline was the entire system for producing seniors, and they torched it for a quarterly margin. In ten years they will act shocked.