Last month, JPMorgan’s consumer banking CEO told investors she’d “take the over” on cutting 10% of operations staff through AI. The stock jumped. The irony? She just bet against her own future talent pipeline.
Here’s what these executives don’t get: when you delete the bottom rung of the corporate ladder, you don’t just save on salaries. You destroy the entire ladder.
The Great Vanishing Act
The numbers are stark. Entry-level hiring in Big Tech has cratered 50% from pre-pandemic levels. Internship conversions dropped from 58% to 53% in a single year—the steepest decline in half a decade.
Marc Benioff is practically giddy about it. “AI is doing 30% to 50% of the work at Salesforce now,” he bragged to Bloomberg. His company implemented a hiring freeze for engineers while debating whether to hire anyone this year.
Listen to what’s missing from these executive statements: any mention of developing talent, building the next generation, or creating pathways for human growth. It’s all efficiency metrics and cost savings. No vision for how a 25-year-old becomes a future CTO. No plan for where tomorrow’s insights come from.
They’re not embracing the future—they’re optimizing their exit. Squeeze out every efficiency gain, juice the stock price, and leave the next CEO to figure out why there’s no one left who knows how anything actually works.
It’s the private equity playbook, self-applied. Except instead of leveraging debt, they’re leveraging AI. Same endgame: extract maximum value, minimize investment in the future, and get out before the music stops. They call it “AI transformation” but it’s really just an LBO where the L stands for “Large Language Model.”
The Prestige Paradox
Corporate prestige is a network effect. It only exists if the next generation believes in it. When Goldman Sachs deploys “hundreds, maybe thousands” of AI coders named Devin, they’re not just replacing junior analysts—they’re torching the very idea that Goldman is where bright kids go to make it.
Why would a Stanford CS grad dream of Goldman when Goldman dreams of Devin?
The second-order effects are already visible:
The Entrepreneurship Boom
Locked out of McKinsey, smart grads are building AI-native competitors instead. They’re not waiting for permission to innovate—they’re just doing it.
The Ladder-less Path
The kids you’re locking out? They’re not waiting for permission. They’re building their own world with their own rules—no ladders, no rungs, no climbing. Just building. Direct value creation without the decades-long hazing ritual of corporate advancement.
And here’s the kicker: when they succeed, you won’t even get an invite to the party. Your corporate badges won’t work in their universe.
They’re Building Their Own Disruption
Here’s the beautiful irony: by cutting junior roles, these companies are literally funding their own disruption. That intern you didn’t hire? She’s building an AI startup that will eat your lunch in three years. With GPT-4 and some venture funding, she doesn’t need your logo on her resume anymore.
Amazon’s Andy Jassy gets it half right. He says employees who “embrace AI will be well-positioned to have high impact.” What he misses is that the highest impact move is to leave Amazon entirely.
The Clock Is Ticking
The most telling data point? Despite all the executive chest-thumping about AI replacing workers, Challenger, Gray & Christmas found exactly 75 layoffs explicitly tied to AI out of 286,679 total planned cuts in early 2025.
That’s 0.026%.
The rhetoric-reality gap suggests we’re in the “fuck around” phase. The “find out” phase comes when these companies realize they’ve trained an entire generation to see corporate careers as a sucker’s game.
Josh Bersin nailed it: “Almost every HR leader told me they are rebuilding their entry level development programs.” The smart companies get it. The ones doubling down on AI-only strategies are writing their own obituaries.
What Actually Works
Instead of torching the ladder, smart companies should:
- Create AI-native apprenticeships where juniors learn to orchestrate, not just execute
- Measure interns on learning velocity, not immediate output
- Build hybrid teams where humans and AI multiply each other’s capabilities
But that requires thinking beyond next quarter’s earnings call.
The Bottom Line
The ladder matters because ambition needs a path. Break the first rung, and within five years the whole structure collapses. No new talent, no fresh ideas, no future leaders who understand how the machine actually works.
McKinsey without analysts is just a logo. Goldman without hungry associates is just a building. And Salesforce without engineers is just Marc Benioff talking to his AI agents.
The companies celebrating their AI-powered hiring freezes remind me of Kodak executives in 1975, proud of protecting their film business. They’re so busy pulling up the ladder, they don’t notice their future competitors building rockets.