> I’ve just started transitioning my career closer to management, so I develop/manage roughly 50/50. At this point, if I had to manage a tight budget, I’d rather have an entry level salary as tokens for a senior engineer.

A high-potential junior you can at least justify as an investment in the future.

The other people who are going to get squeezed are the later-career developers who are below-average in ability. (I'm not using "below average" here pejoratively - just noting that by definition, half of developers are below-average.) Outside of big tech, there are piles of organizations with devs who don't make big-tech salary and who are only marginally productive for what they're getting paid.

If you're an organization that only has the budget to pay non-junior devs $80k... you can see the implications of having the option to spend your dev budget on seniors + tokens instead.

Masters degrees are a way for people to spend longer in the education-costs-more-than-the-value-to-the-educator phase of their career.

> But individual companies don’t have aligned incentives.

Be realistic. Would you start a business and risk it's viability giving away free training to the public? No, and neither would anyone else.

are you incharge of making those decisions at work?

maybe govt can tax ai companies and use that money to prearm juniors with tokens that only they can use.