Next-Gen IT Professionals: Up for Doing a Good Job?
March 10, 2025
The entirety of the United States is facing a crisis when it comes to decent paying jobs. Businesses are watching their budgets like misers clutch their purse strings, so they’re hiring the cheapest tech workers possible. Medium explains that “8 Out Of 10 Senior Engineers Feel Undervalued: The Hidden Crisis In Tech’s Obsession With Junior Talent.”
Another term for budgeting and being cheaper is “cost optimization.” Experienced tech workers are being replaced with green newbies who wouldn’t know how to find errors if it was on the back of their hands. Or the experienced tech workers are bogged down by mentoring/fixing the mistakes of their younger associates.
It’s a recipe for disaster, but cost optimization is what businesses care about. There will be casualties in the trend, not all of them human:
“The silent casualties of this trend:
1. Systems designed by juniors who’ve never seen a server catch fire
2. Codebases that work right up until they don’t
3. The quiet exodus of graybeards into early retirement”
Junior tech workers are cheaper, but it is difficult to just ask smart software to impart experience in a couple hundred words. Businesses are also treating their seasoned employees like they are mentors:
“I’m all for mentoring. But when companies treat seniors as:
- Free coding bootcamp instructors
- Human linters for junior code
- On-call explainers of basic algorithms
…they’re not paying for mentorship. They’re subsidizing cheap labor with senior salaries.”
There’s a happy medium where having experienced tech experts work with junior tech associates can be beneficial for those involved. It is cheaper to dump the dinobabies and assume that those old systems can be fixed when they go south.
Whitney Grace, March 10, 2025
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