> and the employer can hire a new senior engineer at below market rates to accommodate the specific learning they have to do

It sounds like what you're saying is actually that the last engineer was being paid above-market, because the price that employers are paying new employees is literally the market rate, seeing as it's the rate in the literal market.

> the employer can hire a new senior engineer at below market rates to accommodate the specific learning they have to do for their new role.

Money doesn't cleanly convert into time.

Having juniors and mid-levels is about being able to promote an existing mid-level that knows the team and the system, with zero downtime. It's much easier to replace a junior than a senior because of the lower expectations and risk.

Furthermore, a lot of companies are struggling to hire right now because the market conditions creates a flood of applications and its quite hard to discern who's a waste of time or not which leads to hiring processes taking longer.

Seems like you’re only imagining interchangeable people who dont have bargaining power?

How do you value people who learnt to code in the 80's, 90's or 2000's today?

Will new developers know/understand what they don't know, or will the new state of things simply become normalized?

From another perspective, the problem is people entering the workforce without sufficient skills to be valuable to employers anymore. The solution would be to spend more time in training so you can reach senior level when you start. Software has been an anomaly among high-paying professions in the low bar for entry. Maybe that's ending.

If this was a "your company" problem, it would sort itself out soon enough. The real concern is that it might a "your industry" problem.

The hypothesis is completely wrong. With AI, juniors can catch up with the codebase / domain must faster and deeper than before. It's just a matter of putting time.

I have seen this happen in some companies already. A slightly different scenario, the CEO actually wants to hire new juniors but seniors refuse to train them .

I work in a company like this.

The senior engineers, who built the main product that pays the bills have all been there for 25+ years. They held shares in the company back when it was worthless, and now they are all very wealthy. At this point, they literally show up to work just for fun and they aren’t shy about making this known.

The result is that the company has massive insurance policies on these guys in case they die. They also call the shots; they have outsized influence over a range of functions they know absolutely nothing about, ranging from HR to finance to security.

It’s not how companies work today, but it could be how companies operate in the future. Imagine a situation where single engineers manage a fleet of agents and own entire systems. This is already happening. If that engineer leaves then it’s game over for that system.

Often enough they don't care or realize it. I've seen all the data analysts that were eiter (1) senior or (2) also had data engineering skills leave.

They all got 25% more after leaving. And this is in the Netherlands, where pay is already kind of low. What was even weirder was that this company is a F500 company and the people that left, they left for all kinds of organizations (small and large) and still got paid more.

That includes me by the way. I was doing 4 roles (data analyst, pentester, software engineer through web development, AI stuff + data engineering and project manager). It was a lot of fun though. But it paid decisively mediocre.

Currently going to a fun job that pays way better.

It gets worse. I've seen some managers hold back strong developers because they want everyone to be a replaceable cog. They push for average work across the team so no one becomes irreplaceable--even if it means the product ends up weaker than it could be.

This is such a childish mindset. How much did you pay your plumber to fix your toilet last time? Why didn't you pay 40% more than that?

"Value" is not this objective measure that can be deduced from someone's output. It depends on many variables like cost of living, the job market, tech trends, and industry competition. Could very easily fluctuate 50% or more in a short period of time.

The employer and the employee have different goals and metrics for "success". This mismatch comes up all the time whenever "interviewing is broken" threads come up. Many interviewees think the goal is to find the best person for the job. It isn't. It is to find someone suffciently good to do the job for the least money possible. This mean that if you filter out "better" candidates, it's not a failure if the position gets filled anyway.

So the mistakes being made here are:

1. You think you're irreplaceable. You're not. "But--". "--Nope";

2. You think it's more expensive to replace you. Possibly but irrelvant. You see, if they give you a 40% raise, there now might be 10 or 100 other people who will demand a 40% raise. It's cheaper overall not to give you that raise.

This comes up all the time when landlords lose good tenants by raising rents $100-200/month. Tenants will rightly point out that they'll lose more with the vacancy period than they'll get from $100-200/month. Also irrelevant. The landlord will often have 10 or 100 or 1000 or 10,000 units. They give a $200 increase to all of them and not all of them are moving. The increased income from those who don't will exceed the losses from those who move.

Plus, the $200/month extra increases the property value. Someone may lend against that increased value to buy even more units;

3. Ultimately any enterprise can only increase profits by raising prices or lowering costs, particularly wages. Suppressing wages becomes the entire business of the company. That's what permanent layoffs culture is for (to get more unpaid work on those that remain and to stop them asking for raises). That's what AI is for. Supressing wages is THE product for AI.

Remember there's a fundamental imbalance here. If a company loses a particular employee, most likely they either won't notice (at least for awhile) or they'll simply be temporarily inconvenienced.

What happens if you don't have a job? You might lose your house, your car, your health insurance, your childrens' school and so on.

The stakes for you are so much higher so in any difficult hiring market, you will be squeezed.

If the knowledge work of Seniors is fully automated, wont pretty much all knowledge work be fully automated?

Furthermore, if the source of your value and wealth is that you have an app, what does it mean when anyone can easily build an app?

One day we might see a UI toolkit (so many of our modern problems are because our UI toolkits suck; my hot take) with deep AI integration and then apps will just be some microservices on the backend and the AI UI on the front that responds to natural speech and can adjust its display however the user requests.

They don’t even care about profit! It’s well documented that having long-tenured employees saves you money in a ton of ways (the tangibles are: recruiter fees, ramp-up time, higher pay for new hires… and the intangibles are all the hidden work or keep things running smoothly, building relationships between teams or departments, and innovation). But individuals have to quit to get a market-rate job, and the company ends up paying out the nose for someone new.

Whats your background in the industry, where this seems plausible?