The apprenticeship is breaking
…and every individual decision causing it is correct
Entry-level work is precisely what the tools are now best at. So the hiring logic follows: a capable tool outperforms an inexperienced person at the tasks juniors were historically given, and it does not need managing, training or a desk. Firm by firm, not hiring the junior is the rational call.
But senior judgement is not taught, it is accumulated. It comes from having made the call, been wrong, and lived with the consequence. The only known process for producing an experienced person is putting an inexperienced one through work that matters, which is exactly the work that has just been automated away.
So the profession is drawing down a stock of experience it has stopped replenishing. Nobody in the chain is behaving irrationally. Each firm’s decision is individually correct and collectively ruinous, which makes it a commons problem rather than a failure of nerve. The bill does not arrive for a decade, which is why almost nobody is pricing it.
The obvious counter deserves stating properly: that the tools will also compress the learning curve, so juniors reach competence faster than they used to. The answer is that they compress the acquisition of knowledge, not the acquisition of judgement. You can be told what good looks like; you cannot be told the feeling of having shipped the wrong thing. Explanation that requires no experience to absorb is teaching facts, not taste.
Which raises a question the diagnosis does not answer: who is still making experienced people? A firm that keeps putting juniors on work that matters is not being generous, and it is not being sentimental about training. It is acquiring the one input that will be scarce in a decade, at the moment everybody else has stopped bidding for it. Bravery is the wrong word for that. The cheapest time to buy something is while the market has agreed it is worthless.