I did not learn this job from a course. I learned it from two years of unglamorous work that anyone would now hand to a machine without hesitation. Chasing down why a batch job failed. Writing the small scripts nobody senior wanted to write. Reading through logs line by line because I did not yet know the shortcuts and had to find them the slow way. Every one of those tasks was, in isolation, low value. Together they were the apprenticeship, and it is the apprenticeship I am watching quietly disappear.
The immediate economics are hard to argue with. If a tool can produce the first draft of a script in seconds, no manager can justify assigning it to a junior for a day and a half. Multiply that across every routine task and the entry rung of the ladder gets efficiently optimised away. The work still gets done, faster and cheaper, and nothing appears to be lost, because the thing being lost does not show up in this quarter's output. It shows up in five years, when the seniors we did not grow are the seniors we cannot hire.
Because senior judgement is not a body of knowledge you can transfer in a workshop. It is pattern recognition accumulated through consequences, through having been wrong in a specific way and having felt it. You learn what a suspicious log line looks like by reading thousands of unsuspicious ones. You learn what a risky change smells like by having shipped one. Take away the low-stakes repetitions and you do not get juniors who skip straight to seniority. You get people who can evaluate a machine's answer only as far as their own experience reaches, which is not far.
I do not think the answer is refusing the tools, which would be both futile and daft. I think it means being deliberate about something that used to happen for free. If the routine work no longer generates experience, the experience has to be designed in on purpose, through review, through ownership of real things with real consequences, through deliberately letting someone struggle with a problem the tool could have solved instantly.
Every senior in this industry was manufactured by work we are now automating away. Somebody has to decide what replaces the factory.
– Serguey Shinder
Top comments (0)