Amazing.

How many junior professionals have you hired (or at least interviewed as domain expert) and how many have you led in your career?!

I’ll refrain from pulling rank here (I could, but having lots of experience and professional seniority doesn’t mean I know everything and besides, let’s keep it serious) so I’m just wondering what kind of engineering area do you work in (if it’s not too much to ask) and what in your career has led you to believe that formal education is capable of bridging any training gap that might form if the junior-professional-stage dissapears?

In my professional area, software development, all I’ve seen so far is that there are elements of experience which formal education won’t teach and my own experience with professional education (training courses) is that they provide you with knowledge, maybe a few techniques, but not professional insight on things like choosing which elements are best for which situation.

This is not to say that education has no value (in fact, I believe it’s the opposite: even the seemingly “too theoretical to be useful” can very much turn out to be essential in solving something highly practical: for example, I’ve used immenselly obscure knowledge of microprocessor architectures in the design of high performance distributed software systems for investment banks, which was pretty unexpected when I learned that stuff in an EE Degree). My point is that things such a “scoping a job”, “selecting the better tool for the job” and even estimating risk and acceptability of it in using certain practices for certain parts of a job, aren’t at all taught in formal education and I can’t really see the pathway in the Business Process (the expression in a Requirements Analysis sense, rather than saying it’s all a business) of Education which will result in both formalizing the teaching of such things and in attracting those who can teach it with knowledge.

Maybe the Education System can find a way of doing it, but we can hardly bet that it will and will do so before any problems from an AI-induced junior-level training gap materialises (i.e. there won’t be any pressure for it before things are blowing up because of a lack of mid-level and above professionals, by which time it there will be at least a decade of problems already in the pipeline).

I’ve actually mentored several junior and mid-level developers and have mainly made them aware of potential pitfalls they couldn’t see (often considerations which were outside the nitty gritty details of programming and yet had massive impact on what needed to be programmed), additional implications of certain choices which they weren’t at all aware of and pointed to them the judgment flaws that lead them to dead-ends, but they still need to actually have real situations with real consequences to, at an emotional-level, interiorise the value of certain practices that at first sight seem counterproductive otherwise they either don’t do it unless forced to (and we need programmers, not code monkeys that need constant surveillance) or do it as a mindless habit, hence also when not appropriate.

Maybe what you think of as “junior” is a code-monkey, which is what I think of as “people who shouldn’t even be in the profession” so you’re picturing the kind of teaching that’s the transmission of “do it like this” recipes that a typical code monkey nowadays finds via Google, whilst I’m picturing developers to whom you can say “here’s a small problem part of a big thing, come up with a way to solve it”, which is a set of practices that’s way harder to teach even in the practical classes on an Educational environment because it’s a synthetic environment with were projects have simulated needs and the consequences of one’s mistakes are way lower.

PS: Mind you, you did put me thinking about how we could teach this stuff in a formal educational context, but I really don’t have an answer for that as even one-to-one mentoring is limited if you’re not dealing with real projects, with real world users (and their real world needs and demands) and implications and real lifecycles (which are measured in years, not “one semester”). I mean, you can have learning placements in real companies, but that’s just working at a junior-level but with a different job title and without paying people a salary.