Everyone's been firing junior devs and patting themselves on the back for being "AI-forward." 🙄

IBM just decided that's a terrible idea.

They're tripling entry-level US hiring this year not in spite of AI, but because of it.

IBM's CHRO put it bluntly: companies cutting entry-level hiring now will "hollow out future leadership."

The logic is simple: humans who learn to work alongside AI early become your most valuable people. And the firing a bunch to save a quick buck is ruining your talent pipeline.

This is actually a smart move, and I don't say that lightly about corporate HR strategy…

The uncomfortable question nobody's asking when they celebrate AI replacing entry-level work is: where do senior people come from?

You don't hire a VP of Engineering off the street. You grow one slowly, over a decade, starting with someone who wrote bad code at 22 and got better.

We've already seen this play out in real time. Companies fired people, assumed AI would cover it, and then started rehiring when the gaps became impossible to ignore.

And here's the thing: AI hasn't actually replaced a single job yet.

Tasks, yes. Workflows, sure. But a full job? End-to-end, no manager needed, ship it?

The only role that comes close is maybe a VA or PA, and even that's a stretch in most real-world contexts.

My actual prediction: the next five years reward the people who know when not to use AI more than the people who use it for everything.

The person who can look at an AI output and say "this is wrong, here's why" is the high-value skill right now. Critical thinking about AI output is already becoming rare, and rare gets paid.