At some point, the competition for anyone who has any material experience will skyrocket, and salaries will go well into the six digits for anyone who can understand what a `for` loop is.
I’m betting this will happen within 5-8 years, especially if the number of people going into the field is cratering in ways that degree attendance is suggesting. Reports out of some universities are seeing a 30+% YoY decline in their CS programs, which has never been seen before in modern (post-1900) higher education.
And of course, this will still destroy companies, because the most effective users of AI are the seniors with deep domain experience, who know a lot about frameworks and data structures and how the products they build are put together. Because what AI lacks is judgement and taste, which is what seniors need a lot of experience with. Any company refusing to hire juniors now will eventually lose this deep domain experience, either mostly or fully, due to a lack of juniors coming up through the ranks.
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