Are We Training Our Own Replacements? An Honest Engineer's Take

Nine years into this career and I'm starting to wonder if everything I built, documented, and taught is just a very detailed instruction manual for my own exit. Not paranoia. Just pattern recognition. 1. We're the Best Training Data Money Can't Buy Every PR review, every Slack thread where you explain why a design decision was made, every Confluence doc you wrote at 11pm... that's training data Not for your junior. For the model that'll replace both of you. Real World: GitHub Copilot didn't get smart by reading textbooks. It read your code. Your comments. Your variable names. You literally taught it to think like you. 2. Automation Tools Are Not Neutral Kubernetes, Terraform, CDK. We sold these as "engineer productivity" tools. They are. They also systematize expert knowledge into configs that a non-engineer can eventually run. Real World: A Terraform template good enough means your manager can spin up infra without you. You wrote that template. Think about that. 3. The Junior Engineer