The thought is that other companies can grow the seniors.

Doesn't fucking work when everyone's doing it but I can tell you that at least round me that was starting to happen even before AI. Maybe 10% of companies would hire juniors.

Now they're lobbying the government to be able to import seniors from developing countries because "we need better talent in our own country"

I would like to strangle some CEOs. And those aren't even big companies, this is Estonia not Silicon Valley lol

The bubble will pop, but I'm not convinced the hobbyist PC hardware market is going to recover.

Realistically, the consumer market for PC components existed because there was a business market for desktop computers as employee workstations. That's mostly dead now. Businesses mostly buy laptops or mini PCs for employee workstations, they have less and less need for desktop hardware because most of the computing tasks have moved to SaaS platforms. The consumer PC hardware market isn't that profitable on its own, it exists on the margins of production for business purchasing, and it's been coasting on momentum built up in the 2010s.

Processor architectures are changing to support machine learning tasks, GPU production is shifting toward ML-specialization, and everyone in the design field is trying to remove the barriers between the CPU and the RAM, which means shortening the path, which means getting rid of the socket and end-user upgradability in favor of soldered components. With SaaS taking over everything in the business world, we're trending back toward the mainframe computing model and away from powerful local hardware.

I'm not saying there won't be a consumer PC market in the future, I'm just saying that it will be different. There won't be enough demand for common desktop components to keep the custom PC build market alive as it was five years ago.