Having observed how AI accelerates code development and simplifies the discovery of design and architecture, the next bottleneck is review.
The challenge with review is that it is ultimately a judgment call, and that improves over time. When an organization chooses to remove junior engineers because it sees only senior engineers as capable of conducting reviews, it is actually lowering its productivity threshold. The challenge you faced with reviews is that they are ultimately a human-biased artifact
Human beings bring their experience and their whole personalities into the review. Having a mix of senior and junior people from diverse backgrounds increases the likelihood that reviews catch defects. This is not novel, new science. It goes to pretty much every organizational principle since the hundred things I would do if I were the evil overlord list.
The list says if I were an evil overlord, I would have a five-year-old on staff whose only job was to tell me if a plan was silly and then fix it.
When you eliminate that diversity your effectively reducing the scope of your ability to detect problems Not the easy problems, but the really hard problems Furthermore, if your group is not diverse in its experiences, what will happen is that it will become less capable of tolerating dissent So although initially, you will get a productivity win over the long-haul, you will suffer from the collapse of your ability to detect issues.
As an industry, we know this very well, so when I see organizations that decide to go all in on a pattern where they retain a small number of similar people to do reviews and keep only them on the team, I see a team in danger of model collapse. They will have a short-term efficiency gain and a long-term failure as the Blindspot magnifies
I have seen this pattern at three different jobs where a senior technical team had a very homogeneous background and missed obvious trends because they saw them as alien to their experience In fact, it was one of those jobs that led me to conclude that the best thing a company can do is periodically, purge, their senior technical ranks, so as to ensure a fresh flow of insight, if the company is not growing sufficiently so that a large new body of technical leaders can be promoted to the highest levels
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