There's something cruel about the arc of career training that's occurred in tech over the last few decades.
The first group of people through the door were a group of people that taught themselves in a field that wasn’t quite yet defined. With the best of intentions this group turned to the next generation and tried to formalize and encourage where possible. Everyone can learn how to code, we said. There were programs at universities, independent boot camps, and online learning courses. The goal was to funnel as many people as possible into the most promising area of growth in the economy: tech.
And now that same door open to all is being slammed shut.
A Harvard study found the effect is even sharper in firms actively adopting AI: junior employment fell 7.7% relative to non-adopters within six quarters. The managers who used to mentor early-career engineers are being cut or stretched across larger teams. And the tasks that once served as training ground, such as the small bug fixes and incremental features, are increasingly being handed to AI tools instead.
Stainer has a relatively straightforward solution for individuals. Develop scar tissue.
There’s a term that comes to mind for how one progresses from junior to senior: scar tissue. The scars come from shipping something that broke in production and staying up to fix it, from proposing an architecture that didn’t scale and having to rebuild it, from navigating a difficult stakeholder relationship and learning, the hard way, what actually works.
This is great advice. It’s a practical and straightforward way to learn and grow in tech, which is particularly prone to change and evolution. Experience brings with it the ability to solve problems on the fly and see around corners. And there is no attaining experience without scar tissue.
But it’s still grounded in an assumption that tech is somehow special. That it should require personal dedication and sacrifice. But tech is just a job, and it’s one that is being deskilled. If we don’t fight for it, there won’t be anything special left about it.