In my experience the value of junior contributors is that they will one day become senior contributors. Their work as juniors tends to require so much oversight and coaching from seniors that they are a net negative on forward progress in the short term, but the payoff is huge in the long term.

I don't see how this can be true when no one stays at a single job long enough for this to play out. You would simply be training junior employees to become senior employees for someone else.

So this has been a problem in the tech market for a while now. Nobody wants to hire juniors for tech because even at FAANGs the average career trajectory is what, 2-3 years? There's no incentive for companies to spend the time, money, and productivity hit to train juniors properly. When the current cohort ages out, a serious problem is going to occur, and it won't be pretty.

It seems there's a distinct lack of enthusiasm for hiring people who've exceeded that 2-3 year tenure at any given place, too. Maintaining a codebase through its lifecycle seems often to be seen as a sign of complacency.

Exactly this

And it should go without saying that LLMs do not have the same investment/value tradeoff. Whether or not they contribute like a senior or junior seems entirely up to luck

Prompt skill is flaky and unreliable to ensure good output from LLMs

When my life was spreadsheets, we were expected to get to the point of being 99.99% right.

You went from “do it again” to “go check the newbies work”.

To get to that stage your degree of proficiency would be “can make out which font is wrong at a glance.”

You wouldn’t be looking at the sheet, you would be running the model in your head.

That stopped being a stochastic function, with the error rate dropping significantly - to the point that making a mistake had consequences tacked on to it.