How concerned are you about the long-term impact of reduced entry-level positions on your leadership pipeline?

I voted neutral because it really is too early to tell, but something about this argument smells off. A bit boomerish if you forgive the phrase.

I've been working since 1986. Every tech wave since the 80s (PCs, internet, mobile, cloud) was called a leadership pipeline killer. And each time, it was the 25-35 year olds who mastered the new technology and cultural paradigms and who in progressive companies (those defining the corporate times) and leapt to VP or Managing Director. My wife's second set of bosses were kids. And they schooled the "gray-hairs" in web development and internet marketing. Goldman's quant recruitment revolution led to an average age of 31 as Managing Director. Perplexity's Head of Product is 29. Anthropic's Go-To-Market Lead is 31. So, no, I change my position from neutral to contrarian: AI isn't breaking the pipeline, it is just bypassing, as usual, and the gray-hairs like me had better adapt to new pipeline dynamics or succumb to evolutionary dynamics.

There will always be entry level positions, in the literal sense... Here is a possible entry level job for 2045: "Agent Architect Level 1 / No experience required / Pay structure €4-5 Mio Yuan/yr based on entry test / equity-heavy 4-year vest with 2x refreshers / No fixed hours - no fixed location; performance measured by delta impact / Responsibilites: own an agent swarm of 100B parameter agents; fine tune world models on proprietary data you generate; ship new capabilities weekly; red team your own agents 1Mio Yuan bounty; Publish internal papers min 5 pages bi-weekly that are taken into corporate training pool. / Intake test: Build 3 agents that each make 50K Yuan; shipped 1 world-model fork; 10 recommendations from Opus Leaderboard top 100.

Possibly we don't mean entry-level, but low skill, or irrelevant skill. After all, I don't recall articles worried about the leadership pipeline for... Blockbuster Store Managers, Secretarial Pool Leaders, Travel Agents. Hmmm, actually maybe I do remember those.

The point is that the concern over development junior investment banking analysts, junior legal officers, junior marketing operations coordinators ignores the point that there was never truly any leadership pipeline in those jobs. They required college degrees, masters, and even PhDs and then paid 80K-180K for a lifetime, with little chance of promotion. Entry level jobs don't go away. Fake entry level jobs go away. And that is the real concern. What do we do with all of those people? Different politics and geographies have different solutions. Most of them grim, or answered by flimsy pseudo-solutions that collapse under a stress-test to the equally grim.

And when my concern on this point rises to anxiety, I remind myself that we have seen tech waves come and go, and human society adjust. I try and keep faith in human progress. I'd rather live today after the demise of VHS, Betamax and DVDs then live in 1825. And that's why I replied... "Neutral; too early to tell." Because it is always too early to tell ;-)