The open door

David finally does the thing he has spent years telling other people to do: he hires a graduate. Ethan joins for a placement year, taken on as an experiment, because the awkward truth is that a graduate today is more capable than ever and less needed than ever. David sets out four hypotheses for why a young person is still worth it: someone has to check and own what the machine makes, managing a machine is real work, it builds judgement fast, and an open door lets useful things in. He borrows Richard Hamming's open-door idea and makes the moral case for keeping the door open, while the front door into work has rarely been harder to push. Plus three things worth knowing, three things to try, and what readers said.