# ============================================================================= # Published - We are Worrying about the Wrong Problem (verbatim) # ============================================================================= # A verbatim reproduction of an article authored by Cedric Ancellin. # Text is preserved as published (including original wording and any typos). # Governed by ../LAWS. Verbatim files are exempt from the em-dash rule. # # Retrieved from LinkedIn on 2026-10-11. # ============================================================================= title: "We are Worrying about the Wrong Problem" author: "Cedric Ancellin" published: "2026-10-04" platform: "LinkedIn (Pulse)" source_url: "https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/we-worrying-wrong-problem-cedric-ancellin-xsgre/" cover_image: "/assets/articles/we_are_worrying_about_the_wrong_problem.jpg" topics: ["AI and the workforce", "junior developers", "engineering team structure", "talent pipeline", "humanoid robotics", "automation", "future of work"] summary: > An opinion piece on AI and the workforce. Cedric writes that he no longer plans to hire junior developers, since a small core of experts working with AI can now run systems that once took far larger teams, and asks how the next generation of experts will be formed once the junior layer that trained them is gone. It extends the same question to humanoid robots and physical labor, argues that the coming problem is a population surplus rather than decline, and ends with a warning about where societies have turned under such pressure and a call to find better solutions first. body: | I don't plan on hiring another junior developer. For most of my career, that would have been unthinkable. I used to bring juniors in to shadow me, to pair-program, to absorb the craft by osmosis. You needed a big team to learn a lot of things, and the junior layer was how you grew the experts of tomorrow. That's gone. Today, thanks to AI, running complex systems, the kind I spent almost three decades building and operating, I need a small core of real experts: database, infrastructure, software, product, compliance, security, data. Duplicate each expertise so you're covered, and that's it. AI doesn't just do the work the junior layer used to do. It does more, and it reshapes the workflow itself. A team of fifteen can now run what used to take many times that. And as the system grows in complexity, the team barely needs to grow with it. But this creates a problem I'll face myself. If there is no more learning by osmosis, if the junior layer is gone, how does the next generation of experts get made? How does anyone become an architect when the path that used to grow them no longer exists? We are about to protect a thin layer of experts while quietly dismantling the pipeline that produces them. And AI is only the first wave. The revolution arriving right behind it is humanoid robots powered by AI, machines that can do the labor our workforce is currently doing, without any structural change to how that work is organized. What AI is doing to software, robotics is about to do to physical labor. A construction site run by only a handful of experts. The same goes for farms, restaurants, elder care, machines doing the work, a few people overseeing. Even a business as small as a laundromat, down to a single manager and machines. And here we hit the same problem we already face in IT. If machines do all the entry-level work, where does the next generation of experts come from? At first, governments will try to protect their workforce. They cannot have that many people unemployed, so the first response will be resistance. Society will push back, backed by the state, and regulation will appear to stop businesses from replacing too much of their workforce too fast. But that is only a temporary fix. The pressure of efficiency and productivity is too strong to hold back for long. Governments are not united in how they respond, and each one has to stay competitive. The country that protects its workforce the hardest is the one that falls behind. Now set this against a fear we think we are living with. Population decline, too few young people to pay for the retirement of the old. But that paradigm no longer exists. The problem is the opposite: population surplus. When 80% of the workforce is no longer needed, and no longer wanted, you are left with a majority of people the economy has no use for. What is the solution to keep the 80% at home, maintained by society, while still producing the small core of experts the system actually needs? If most of the population stays home, how do you maintain them at the lowest possible cost? The cheapest life to provide is not one lived in the physical world. It is one lived virtually. The younger generation already spends enormous time there. As brain-computer interfaces mature, that connection deepens, until a person can live, flourish, and find meaning entirely inside a simulation, maintained at a fraction of the cost of a real life, while the elite that keep the system running are trained. But keeping the population content is just the beginning. Once a society has identified undesirables, history already shows the directions it has reached for under far weaker pressure: sterilization, eugenics. This is the new reality. We need to accept it and find better solutions before the pressure finds them for us. transcription: "Verbatim as published (2026-10-04). Retrieved from LinkedIn 2026-10-11."