[LapsangGuzzler]

Nobody aspires to peak as a junior software engineer even though they mostly just do small, easily automated tasks. Is that a valid reason to completely gut a set opportunities that provide a foot in the door to something bigger?

[zamadatix]

Sure, if it's so valuable to have a training type role we'll keep it on those grounds (or find some alternative) instead of roundabout reasoning which requires us to be inefficient to hide the real reason it's valuable.

Anyone not expecting job roles, opportunities, or pathways to change in their career is going to have a very rough time, even more so than the hard time people from the last 50 years had.

[LapsangGuzzler]

> Sure, if it's so valuable to have a training type role we'll keep it on those grounds

There’s no guarantee of this happening whatsoever. We’ve already seen private companies gut internal training programs in favor of increased hiring of experienced people and this is only going to continue.

Economies have to provide work in order to facilitate consumption. If there are a handful of people making all of the money and gutting pay and job security to the core (i.e. improving efficiency), people are going to start rejecting the system wholesale and it’s not going to be pretty.

The French Revolution didn’t happen in a vacuum, once people lost all hope of having a semblance of a decent standard of living, they didn’t just let rich keep on living, did they?

[zamadatix]

I think this is a great argument on the future role and place of loosely-controlled capitalism as these kinds of advances continue to come but, at the same time, a sorely lacking argument for why we should avoid technological advances which replace existing jobs for the sake of keeping the same jobs we have now. After all, the aforementioned French Revolution happened prior to the 1st (for the French), 2nd, and 3rd industrial revolutions but you don't see the French rallying to disown all technology and go back to the jobs of the time as a way to increase their standard of living - because it wouldn't, even if everyone were 100% employed and worked twice as much in doing so.

As a further point, by this logic the very tasks of the Junior Developer role itself would never have been available - hell, society wouldn't even be investing in teaching everyone how to type in school because computers take jobs and people need work to do! It follows that societies are quite capable of A) finding new meaningful sources of work to be done B) having people do more than one course of work throughout their lives C) changing the ways they educate and train beyond the way they did it before D) ensuring fairer distribution of wealth by means other than artificially keeping previously useful jobs around (which is not what the e.g. French Revolution aimed to do).