The examples in the article are good. The conclusion is quite weak. It seems very likely that we simply won't need as many mid or senior staff in these roles in 10 years, and the whole "but where will all the sniors come from" hand wringing is overdone.
There is an alternative development: we might not need as many seniors in the future as we have now. Juniors are still recruited, just a lot less. Maybe it is just that so many are no longer needed.
The piece nails the structural shift. What it doesn’t say: the junior role wasn’t just training ground. It was how senior people stayed calibrated. When the person asking basic questions disappears, so does the institutional check on whether your assumptions have drifted. The 2029 talent gap is real. The epistemic rot problem shows up sooner.
Read this nodding the whole way. The freelance writer section hit close — I know three people who lost recurring gigs in 2025. What's interesting is nobody talks about the flip side: the same companies building AI doc review pipelines now need prompt engineers and template designers to maintain them. The new roles pay better but they're not labeled as "AI tooling specialist" yet, so they're invisible to job boards. The ladder didn't vanish — it just moved to a different building.
THE AI CORNER nails the real problem: the $60K entry path is vanishing, not the $150K destination. In security operations this is already playing out. The junior analyst who used to triage alerts for two years before earning a seat at the table is being replaced by token consumption. My argument is that this is actually a good thing, but only if leadership is honest about the trade. When you swap a headcount line for an API bill, you finally see what that work actually cost, and you can't hide inefficiency behind "we need more analysts." The token bill forces that transparency.
So fascinating..... and admittedly slightly terrifying. WOW. Guess the next step predicted is the elimination of the higher roles.... So hang on- because we are going to be thrown into a tornado of emotions as millions of humans find themselves replaced by bots.... THESE ARE HUGE TOPICS! Talking about many of them in my new book WHAT ARE WE? Humanity in the Age of AI- please come find me- this is sooooooo important!
The 'missing rung' framing is the one that should be in every boardroom conversation right now. We're not eliminating the $150K role, we're eliminating the only path that built the person who could do it. The 2029 talent cliff is going to surprise a lot of companies that thought they were just being efficient.
THIS! Great job as ever @Ruben
The examples in the article are good. The conclusion is quite weak. It seems very likely that we simply won't need as many mid or senior staff in these roles in 10 years, and the whole "but where will all the sniors come from" hand wringing is overdone.
There is an alternative development: we might not need as many seniors in the future as we have now. Juniors are still recruited, just a lot less. Maybe it is just that so many are no longer needed.
The piece nails the structural shift. What it doesn’t say: the junior role wasn’t just training ground. It was how senior people stayed calibrated. When the person asking basic questions disappears, so does the institutional check on whether your assumptions have drifted. The 2029 talent gap is real. The epistemic rot problem shows up sooner.
Does it lead to shortage of senior profiles from 2029 and consequently to higher salary for these people ?
Read this nodding the whole way. The freelance writer section hit close — I know three people who lost recurring gigs in 2025. What's interesting is nobody talks about the flip side: the same companies building AI doc review pipelines now need prompt engineers and template designers to maintain them. The new roles pay better but they're not labeled as "AI tooling specialist" yet, so they're invisible to job boards. The ladder didn't vanish — it just moved to a different building.
THE AI CORNER nails the real problem: the $60K entry path is vanishing, not the $150K destination. In security operations this is already playing out. The junior analyst who used to triage alerts for two years before earning a seat at the table is being replaced by token consumption. My argument is that this is actually a good thing, but only if leadership is honest about the trade. When you swap a headcount line for an API bill, you finally see what that work actually cost, and you can't hide inefficiency behind "we need more analysts." The token bill forces that transparency.
https://cyrilsimonnet.substack.com/p/the-token-bill-is-the-first-honest
So fascinating..... and admittedly slightly terrifying. WOW. Guess the next step predicted is the elimination of the higher roles.... So hang on- because we are going to be thrown into a tornado of emotions as millions of humans find themselves replaced by bots.... THESE ARE HUGE TOPICS! Talking about many of them in my new book WHAT ARE WE? Humanity in the Age of AI- please come find me- this is sooooooo important!
First paragraph repeated accidentally. Looks like copy editors are still needed. 😀😀
The 'missing rung' framing is the one that should be in every boardroom conversation right now. We're not eliminating the $150K role, we're eliminating the only path that built the person who could do it. The 2029 talent cliff is going to surprise a lot of companies that thought they were just being efficient.
Well researched. My opinion is careers of the future will focus less on corporate. What do you think?
https://supriyasubramaniam.substack.com/p/the-future-of-work-10-careers-that?r=3klxxr&utm_medium=ios