They're not hiring juniors and now my roles consist of 10x as much busywork as they used to. People are expanding to fill these gaps; I'm not seeing much evidence that AI is "replacing" these people as much as businesses think they now don't need to hire junior developers. The thing is though, in 5 years there is not going to be as many seniors and if AI doesn't close that gap, businesses are going to feel it a lot more than whatever they think they're gaining by not hiring now.
>> The thing is though, in 5 years there is not going to be as many seniors.
This is already happening. Over the past 4-5 years I've known more than 30 senior devs either transition into areas other than development, or in many case, completely leave development all together. Most have left because they're getting stuck in situations like you describe. Having to pick up more managerial stuff and AI isn't capable of even doing junior level work so many just gave up and left.
Yes, AI is helping in a lot of different ways to reduce development times, but the offloading of specific knowledge to these tools is hampering actual skill development.
We're in for a real bumpy ride over the next decade as the industry comes to gripes with how to deal with a lot of bad things all happening at the same time.
