The Extinction (or Execution?) of The Junior Engineer - from your friendly neighborhood former moderator

The Extinction (or Execution?) of The Junior Engineer - from your friendly neighborhood former moderator Hi all, it saddens me the sub that I put 4 years of my time into providing honest and from the heart advice in is dying. Coding bootcamps have been dead for months now. Codesmith's GitHub repos look like a ghost town. Launch Academy never came back from their 'pause'. So I started written very thoughtful essays about what's going on and this one is particularly relevant: [https://michaelnovati.substack.com/p/the-extinction-of-the-junior-engineer](https://michaelnovati.substack.com/p/the-extinction-of-the-junior-engineer) **SUMMARY:** * Entry-level software roles are disappearing because the “training work” (simple, bounded tasks) is increasingly automated or absorbed by senior engineers using AI, reducing the need to hire juniors. * Employers now prioritize “judgment” (real-world experience handling failures, tradeoffs, and systems) but that judgment traditionally came *from* entry-level roles, creating a circular problem. * The traditional pipeline (universities + bootcamps → junior jobs → experience) is breaking down, with fewer entry-level hires and collapsing bootcamp viability as demand shrinks. * AI is shifting the bottleneck from writing code to making decisions about correctness, deployment, and system behavior... skills beginners haven’t had the opportunity to develop. * In the absence of formal apprenticeships, aspiring engineers must self-train through unpaid, real-world projects, creating a more unequal system where opportunity depends on time, resources, and luck.