It already was the case wasn't it, that you could either get one senior dev to build your thing in a week, or give them a team of juniors and it would take the whole team 4 weeks and be worse.

Yet somehow companies continued to opt for the second approach. Something to do with status from headcount?

>> Something to do with status from headcount?

And usually projected as ensuring bus factor > 1

n=1 but my experience is the ratio of what'd I'd class "senior" devs (per the example given) to everyone else is comfortably 10:1.

Do you mean that for every 11 devs, 10 of them are "senior" as per the example? Or that only 1 is?

1 senior to 10 everyone else. Sorry that wasn't super clear.

“Wasting” effort on juniors is where seniors come from. So that first approach is only valid at a sole proprietorship, at an early stage startup, or in an emergency.

Yes, there are companies that opt for broken organizations for a variety of reasons. The observation though is this; Does this lead to a world where the 'minimum' programmer is what we consider today to be a 'Senior Dev' ? It echoes the transition of machinists to operators of CAD/CAM workstations to operate machining centers, rather than hands on the dials of a mill or lathe. It certainly seems like it might make entering the field through a "coder camp" would no longer be practical.

It'll be interesting to see if in a decade when a whole cohort of juniors didn't get trained whether LLMs will be able to do the whole job. I'm guessing a lot of companies are willing to bet on yes.

The issue is there's a kind of prisoner's dilemma going on - probably some people can see that there's a serious risk of still needing software engineers in 10 years' time and there not being enough because nobody is training juniors in 2025.

However, noticing this doesn't help because if you invest in training juniors in 2025 but nobody else does, someone else can just recruit them in 2030 and benefit from your investment

Yes exactly if workers can just up and leave and treat the job transactionally, that creates a race to the bottom. Workers have to train themselves then.

As long as LLMs aren't the 'Cold Fusion' of this cycle, sure. :-)