> They aren't considering the long term downside to this.

This echoes sentiments from the 2010s centered around hiring. Companies generally don’t want to hire junior engineers and train them—this is an investment with risks of no return for the company doing the training. Basically, you take your senior engineers away from projects so they can train the juniors, and then the juniors now have the skills and credentials to get a job elsewhere. Your company ends up in the hole, with a negative ROI for hiring the junior.

Tragedy of the commons. Same thing to day, different mechanism. Are we going to end up with a shortage of skilled software engineers? Maybe. IMO, the industry is so incredibly wasteful in how engineers are allocated and what problems they are told to work on that it can probably deal with shortages for a long time, but that’s a separate discussion.