this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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So what would that mean for the company itself long-term? If they're not training up their employees, and most of the entry level is replaced by text generator work, there would be a hole as executives and managers move out of the company.
It seems like it would be a recipe for the company to implode after a few years/decades, assuming that that the managerial/executive positions aren't replaced also.
What are these decades? Is that something longer than next quarter?
we are going to hold the month open a few more days
And why would those executives and managers care about that? They just need to make sure they time their departures to be early enough that those holes don't impact the share prices. Welcome to modern capitalism where the C suites only goal is to make sure they deploy their golden parachute while the company still has enough cash left over to pay them.
Yeah, it should be obvious by now after 3 decades of 1980s-MBA style corporate management (and a Financial Crash that happenned exactly along those lines) that "the bonus comes now, the problems come after I've moved on" measures will always get a go-ahead from the suits at the top floor.
That sounds like someone else's problem.
I think those in charge often don't care. A lot of them don't actually have any incentive for long term performance. They just need a short/medium term stock performance and later they can sell. Heck, they'll even get cash bonuses based solely on short term performance. Many C-secs aren't in for the long haul. They'll stay for maybe 5-10 years tops and then switch jobs, possibly when they see the writing on the wall.
Even the owners are often hoping to just survive until some bigger company buys their business.
And when the company does explode... They'll just declare bankruptcy and later make a new company. The kinds of people who created companies rarely do it just once. They do it over and over, somehow managing to convince investors every time.
It's a Tragedy Of The Commons situation: each market actor expects to get the benefits of automating away entry level jobs and expects it's going to be somebody else who keeps on training people through their junior career years so that mid and senior level professionals are available in the job market.
Since most market actors have those expectations and even those who don't are pressured by market pressures to do the same (as paying for junior positions makes them less competitive than those who automate that work, so they're forced to do the same), the tragedy part will eventually ensue once that "field" has kept being overgrazed for long enough.
Why would you want to train people to do it wrong? If you had to train someone tomorrow would you show them the email client or give them a cart and have them deliver memos for a week?
Right now we have handed over some more basic tasks to machines. Train the next generation to take those tasks being automated as a given.
It's not the tasks that matter, it's the understanding of the basics, the implications of certain choices and the real life experience in things like "how long I thought it would take vs how long it actually took" that comes with doing certain things from start to end.
Some stuff can't be learned theoretically, it has to be learnt as painful real life lessons.
So far there seems to be an ill-defined boundary between what AI can successfully do and what it can't, and sadly you can't really teach people starting past that point because it's not even a point, it's an area where you have to already know enough to spot the AI-made stuff that won't work, and the understanding there and beyond is built on foundational understanding of how to use simpler building blocks and what are the implications of that.
We have this thing called school
You clearly never worked in an expert knowledge area.
In any complex enough domain knowledge there are elements you can only ever learn from doing it for real, with real requirements, real users and real timeframes.
With my career spanning 4 countries I have yet to see somebody straight out of uni that could just drop-in and start working at mid-level, and that includes the trully gifted types who did that stuff at home for fun.
Engineer for 15 years but go ahead and try patronizing me again or you can read what I wrote and respond to it, not what you wish I wrote. Guess you didn't learn what a strawman was. Maybe should have worked in 5 countries.
Amazing.
How many junior professionals have you hired (or at least interviewed as domain expert) and how many have you led in your career?!
I'll refrain from pulling rank here (I could, but having lots of experience and professional seniority doesn't mean I know everything and besides, let's keep it serious) so I'm just wondering what kind of engineering area do you work in (if it's not too much to ask) and what in your career has led you to believe that formal education is capable of bridging any training gap that might form if the junior-professional-stage dissapears?
In my professional area, software development, all I've seen so far is that there are elements of experience which formal education won't teach and my own experience with professional education (training courses) is that they provide you with knowledge, maybe a few techniques, but not professional insight on things like choosing which elements are best for which situation.
This is not to say that education has no value (in fact, I believe it's the opposite: even the seemingly "too theoretical to be useful" can very much turn out to be essential in solving something highly practical: for example, I've used immenselly obscure knowledge of microprocessor architectures in the design of high performance distributed software systems for investment banks, which was pretty unexpected when I learned that stuff in an EE Degree). My point is that things such a "scoping a job", "selecting the better tool for the job" and even estimating risk and acceptability of it in using certain practices for certain parts of a job, aren't at all taught in formal education and I can't really see the pathway in the Business Process (the expression in a Requirements Analysis sense, rather than saying it's all a business) of Education which will result in both formalizing the teaching of such things and in attracting those who can teach it with knowledge.
Maybe the Education System can find a way of doing it, but we can hardly bet that it will and will do so before any problems from an AI-induced junior-level training gap materialises (i.e. there won't be any pressure for it before things are blowing up because of a lack of mid-level and above professionals, by which time it there will be at least a decade of problems already in the pipeline).
I've actually mentored several junior and mid-level developers and have mainly made them aware of potential pitfalls they couldn't see (often considerations which were outside the nitty gritty details of programming and yet had massive impact on what needed to be programmed), additional implications of certain choices which they weren't at all aware of and pointed to them the judgment flaws that lead them to dead-ends, but they still need to actually have real situations with real consequences to, at an emotional-level, interiorise the value of certain practices that at first sight seem counterproductive otherwise they either don't do it unless forced to (and we need programmers, not code monkeys that need constant surveillance) or do it as a mindless habit, hence also when not appropriate.
Maybe what you think of as "junior" is a code-monkey, which is what I think of as "people who shouldn't even be in the profession" so you're picturing the kind of teaching that's the transmission of "do it like this" recipes that a typical code monkey nowadays finds via Google, whilst I'm picturing developers to whom you can say "here's a small problem part of a big thing, come up with a way to solve it", which is a set of practices that's way harder to teach even in the practical classes on an Educational environment because it's a synthetic environment with were projects have simulated needs and the consequences of one's mistakes are way lower.
PS: Mind you, you did put me thinking about how we could teach this stuff in a formal educational context, but I really don't have an answer for that as even one-to-one mentoring is limited if you're not dealing with real projects, with real world users (and their real world needs and demands) and implications and real lifecycles (which are measured in years, not "one semester"). I mean, you can have learning placements in real companies, but that's just working at a junior-level but with a different job title and without paying people a salary.
Maybe 6 countries and I would be impressed.
And?
It it makes you feel better the alternative can be much worse:
People are promoted to their level of incompetence. Sure she is a terrible manager but she was the best at sales and is most senior. Let's have her check to make sure everyone filled out expense reports instead of selling.
You don't get the knowledge sharing that comes from people moving around. The rival spent a decade of painful trial and error to settle on a new approach, but you have no idea so you are going to reinvent this wheel.
People who do well on open-ended creative tasks are not able to do as they failed to rise above repetitive procedural tasks. Getting started in the mailroom sounds romantic but maybe not the best place to learn tax law.
The tech and corporate and general operational knowledge drifts further and further away from the rest of the industry. Eventually everyone is on ancient IT systems that sap (yes pun intended) efficiency. Parts and software break that it is hard to replace. And eventually the very systems that were meant to make things easier become burdens.
For us humans there really is no alternative to work and thinking is the hardest work of all. You need to consistently reevaluate what the situation calls for and any kinda rigid rule system of promotion and internal training won't perform as well.