I was watching a young sales development rep get interviewed recently, not saying much myself, the way you get when you're technically present but mostly thinking. At some point I found myself feeling sorry for the role itself, which is not a sentence I expected to end up writing.

What nobody really says about that job. It came with a kind of runway built into it, whether anyone planned it that way or not. Cold outreach took real time to do well whether it was researching a company, writing something that didn't read like a template, finding the one detail in a prospect's world worth mentioning. That slowness was, in its own accidental way, a training ground. A junior rep had seven or eight months of doing the work slowly enough to actually get better at it before anyone expected them to be fast.

That runway is shrinking. Personalization can be generated in seconds now. Outreach sequences that used to take a careful morning to build can be assembled before lunch. All the friction that used to double as an apprenticeship is being quietly removed, and what's left is a role that's expected to perform at a level it used to take the better part of a year to grow into, on day one, with none of the slow accumulation that used to get someone there.

It isn't really anyone's fault. Nobody sat down and decided to remove the learning curve from an entry-level sales job. More like a hundred small, sensible calls that added up to something nobody would have chosen on purpose.

I feel for it from both directions, honestly. I feel for the person starting out, who inherits a job with the beginner's runway sanded off, expected to sound experienced before they've had the months it used to take to become that. And I feel for whoever is hiring them, trying to judge, in a single interview, a skill that used to reveal itself slowly, over a long enough stretch of ordinary, unremarkable effort that you could actually watch someone get good at it. Neither side gets the version of this that used to exist. I'm not sure yet what replaces it. I don't think anyone does.