A future without senior employees

 As AI replaces human input at the junior level, young graduates will have trouble getting jobs, leaving no one to take on senior level roles in the future.

From Najman Husaini

In my previous article The uncertainty that AI brings, I pointed out how artificial intelligence (AI) is disproportionately affecting junior positions. It is worth elaborating why this is the case, and what this will lead to.

What distinguishes a senior from a junior? In many industries, it is the scope of the roles they play.

A senior has a far more in-depth knowledge of the business, and they carry many responsibilities and trade secrets. A typical term used to describe what juniors do is grunt work.

Sure, many juniors are often given challenges such as executing high-level decisions, but most of their day-to-day work is to take the tasks that their seniors devise.

In the early days of AI in the tech industry, juniors used software like GitHub Copilot to write repetitive code. But, as AI slowly progressed in capabilities, it began to replace the juniors.

It has now reached the point where some seniors delegate tasks to AI directly. In that sense, a senior in the near future may manage a fleet of AI agents instead of human juniors who would each manage their own agent.

If juniors don’t get jobs, they don’t build up loyalty at any company and they don’t develop the critical thinking skills they need to become senior material.

This means that eventually companies may start looking for seniors that don’t exist. It will be slow, since the churn rate of seniors is necessarily slower than juniors, but it is a risk nonetheless if juniors are not hired.

In an optimistic future, companies realise this mistake and start hiring juniors again. Another possibility is that more university students pursue post graduate degrees instead of entering the market with just a Bachelors or equivalent. However, that is more money upfront that some people may not have.

What awaits us in a future with no seniors?

It depends on what state AI will be in. If it progresses rapidly, it may be ready to fill in the role of seniors by then.

This point is often misunderstood, as many of my peers believe this is only possible with AGI (artificial general intelligence), the holy grail of intelligence.

I believe AGI is not necessary. This “senior level” AI will still need guidance, but this won’t come from senior employees. Rather, the C-suite themselves will prompt the AI.

The AI will not need to be smart enough to figure out what business decisions to make. The C-suite pick a direction they want to go, and the seniors are the ones to make it happen.

If an AI had the proficiency of a senior level employee, then the C-suite would happily prompt it instead. All the internal business documents and IP can be pumped into the AI to give it a senior level perspective.

After all, it’s an AI so it needs no sick leave, no maternity leave, no holidays, and no sleep.

If AI fails to replace senior employees, we may experience a reduction in corporate productivity.

In software, this could mean services that fail to maintain themselves, effectively leading to cyber attacks.

Indeed, cybersecurity is very much a continuous process that requires people in the loop with deep knowledge about the inner workings of a piece of software to keep it safe.

With how deeply integrated we are with technology, I don’t believe I need to emphasise just how bad it would be if a major bank or payment processor were vulnerable to cyber attacks. We best hope that they are able to keep a stable group of senior employees.

Given my poor outlook on the job market, you might think that I would suggest we all start our own companies to maintain the growth rate of jobs.

To that I say, start a company with what money and what professional network? Pretty much all business ideas need the two, since the easy ideas have already been taken.

There are eight billion humans, 30 million of whom are Malaysians; coming up with original ideas is hard.

Sure, we can all be so excited when we can all use AI to finally pursue the business idea we had written in NotePad back in 2019, but society can only tolerate so many to-do apps and fitness trackers.

Besides, what makes you think the ultra wealthy won’t want to compete with you in the future? The difference is they have the money and network to make any of their ideas come to life.

Even worse, what’s stopping AI companies from gatekeeping their best AI? Anthropic has already kept their Mythos AI at the gate, so who’s to say the other big AI companies won’t as well?

Perhaps the best option is to pursue jobs that really won’t be replaced by AI? Is there even such a thing?

The answer surprisingly is yes, but that doesn’t make it a viable strategy. - FMT

Najman Husaini is an FMT reader.

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.