In academia there’s a pretty solid understanding that grad students need to be included broadly not just for their own edification but because they are the next generation of scientists and if we want the whole enterprise to keep rolling we need new generations.

It will be interesting to see how this pans out in the tech sector. Typically upgrades in technology that allow the workers to be more efficient towards a task only briefly make a company more money than their competitors (limited to the gap of time where others haven’t made the same ‘upgrade’). If they all cut out low level engineers to tighten profit margins they’ll have to pay increasingly large amounts to a shrinking and aging pool of engineers who have experience.