The Borrowed Ladder: How AI Is Changing Everything for New Graduates and Interns in Tech
The Borrowed Ladder: How AI Is Changing Everything for New Graduates and Interns in Tech Entry-level tech hiring is collapsing. Junior engineers who use AI don't understand their own code. And the industry won't feel the full consequences for another decade. Here's the honest picture. A Deceptively Promising Start Imagine starting your first data engineering job in 2025. You open your laptop, face a task that would have taken a week to learn two years ago, fire up GitHub Copilot or Cursor, and have working code in an hour. Your senior colleagues are impressed. Your manager notes your output. You feel productive, capable, ahead of schedule. Now imagine it's three years later. A production pipeline fails in a way nobody can immediately explain. Your team looks to you — a now mid-level engineer — to trace the problem through five interconnected systems. And you realize, with growing dread, that you've never actually had to do that before. Every hard problem was ...