There is a huge pool of exceptional junior engineers

Hiring juniors is always great if you, somehow, have a much better filter for finding the stars than the rest of the market. But if you don't, hiring bad juniors is a disaster: No different than outsourcing bits to a bad satellite office.

So are you actually good at finding the good juniors in this very difficult environment? Can you change your hiring machinery to improve, as most traditional ways have stopped working? Because hiring a lot of juniors that don't work out sure can kill companies.

Hire one junior per team. Don’t overload your senior staff with OKRs and managerial tasks. Let mentorship and apprenticeship happen.

I guess what’s the value of the junior there? Why is that superior to just having the seniors have their heads down coding and not being pestered by a junior?

As an industry we can't just cut off the pipeline of future senior devs.

This is the fundamental contradiction of LLMs. The promise today is that the tooling can largely replace juniors, and honestly that may be true.

The hope behind that promise, though, is that the tech will catch up with senior devs before the pipeline dries up and that we have found a sustainable social and economic model before humans truly aren't employable at any meaningful numbers. That hope seems ill placed to me, but I guess we'll see if we develop such skilled LLM or similar tools at all.