The Missing Rung (Who moved my Cheese?)

A family member graduated from a top university this month with honors and no job. Most of the class was in the same spot. The bottom rung of the career ladder is being pulled up just as a new generation reaches for it — and the way we put it back determines who gets to wield these tools at all.

I watched a family member graduate from a major university during the thirty-day Velocity Launch run. Top honors, strong GPA, a real degree. And nothing lined up — no job, no internship. What surprised me wasn’t one person’s situation; it was that almost the entire graduating class was in the same place. Smart, credentialed, and standing in front of a door that used to be open and now isn’t.

Dovetail that with the graduation-speech stories from around the country — speakers telling the class that AI is the greatest thing ever and getting booed, and not understanding why. The students understand something the speakers don’t. The tool everyone is celebrating is, from where they stand, the thing that just ate the first rung of the ladder they were about to climb.

This is the workforce problem I came out of the run most worried about, and least sure how to solve. But we can talk about some ways forward.

The entry-level job was never really about the work product. A junior analyst’s model, a first-year associate’s memo, a new grad’s first slide deck — companies didn’t need those artifacts so much as they needed a place for a person to do reps, make cheap mistakes, and build the judgment that makes them valuable later. The rung was an apprenticeship disguised as a job.

What the tools automate first is precisely that artifact layer — the research pass, the first-draft memo, the starter deck, the turn-the-crank work. A director with good judgment and a model can now produce, in an afternoon, the output that used to justify a small team of juniors or an outsourced shop. So the rational short-term move for a lot of companies is to skip the rung: why hire a gang of fresh-outs or stand up an offshore team when one experienced person, heavily leveraged, covers the same ground?

The trap is that the rung wasn’t only producing artifacts. It was producing next year’s directors. Pull it up and you solve this quarter’s output question while quietly creating a senior-talent drought five years out. The companies optimizing purely for near-term leverage are eating their own seed corn, and most of them don’t feel it yet because the people they’d have hired are simply absent, not visibly missing.

The obvious rejoinder is that new grads should just wield the tools and leapfrog the rung entirely. I wish it worked that way. It mostly doesn’t, and the reason is the same one the whole run taught me: these tools are a multiplier on judgment, not a substitute for it.

A senior operator gets enormous leverage from a model because they already know what good looks like, what “done” means, what’s worth building, and what answer should make them suspicious. They can point the tool, read the output critically, and catch the confident-but-wrong result before it ships. A fresh graduate pointing the same tool at the same problem gets fluent-sounding output and no internal alarm bell — because the alarm bell is built from exactly the reps the rung used to provide. Hand maximum leverage to someone who hasn’t yet developed the judgment to aim it, and you don’t get a magnified expert; you get magnified mistakes delivered with total confidence. That’s not a knock on the graduates. It’s the structural problem: the tool amplifies judgment you have to have acquired somewhere, and we just removed the main place people used to acquire it.

I don’t have this fully solved, and I’m suspicious of anyone who claims they do. But the run pushed me toward a few things I believe.

The new entry-level job is plugging into an agentic flow, not turning the crank. When my own process outgrew what I could personally take on during the run, I didn’t hire people to produce artifacts — I brought in friends, coworkers, and other entrepreneurs to take over pieces of the agentic flow: running the lower-level scripts, watching the agents, keeping the machine fed and honest. That’s a real, learnable entry point, and it builds judgment fast because the person is close to the whole system rather than buried in one slice of it. The junior role of the next decade looks more like “operate and supervise a fleet of agentic workflows” than “produce the deliverable by hand.”

Apprenticeship has to be made explicit, because it’s no longer automatic. When juniors did the artifact work, they absorbed judgment as a byproduct. Remove the artifact work and the absorption has to be designed in on purpose — pairing new people directly with senior operators, putting them on the review-and-correct side of agent output where the judgment actually lives, rotating them across functions so they see the whole business. The companies that figure out deliberate apprenticeship will have a senior bench in five years. The ones that just skipped the rung will be bidding against everyone else for the same scarce experienced people.

Senior judgment becomes more valuable, and more leveraged, at the same time. The other side of the missing rung is a renaissance for people who already have director-or-above experience and can now wield tools that magnify it. The org doesn’t flatten so much as it stretches: more force concentrated at the experienced end, agentic flows in the middle, and a redefined entry point underneath. The grads aren’t competing with the AI. They’re competing for a seat close enough to senior operators to learn how to aim it.

I think this is a one-to-two-year dislocation, not a permanent state, and I say that as someone watching a new graduate live inside it right now. The snow globe is mid-shake. A generation of capable people is stalled at a door that hasn’t been rebuilt yet, and a lot of companies are enjoying near-term leverage without pricing in the talent drought they’re creating. Both of those resolve — but only if enough operators decide that putting the rung back is their job and not someone else’s.

That’s the part I’d ask other senior people to take seriously. We are the ones who can still see what the rung was for, because we climbed it. We’re also the ones with the most to gain from leverage and therefore the most tempted to skip it. If we want a generation that can actually wield these tools with judgment — and we should want that, urgently, because the alternative is a workforce that’s either over-leveraged and under-experienced or simply absent — then designing the new entry point is on us. The tool didn’t remove the need for human judgment. It raised the price of it, and quietly defunded the place we used to grow it. Refunding that is the work.