Have you noticed how every path into the middle class mysteriously disappears the moment regular people start using it? IT was one of the last ladders that truly anyone could still climb. You could learn the craft, bust ass, build a career, and maybe even build some wealth for yourself and your kids. And right on schedule, Wall Street showed up, smelled money in a place they didn’t control, and tore the whole ladder off the wall.
They didn’t misunderstand what they were doing (they never do). They saw an industry that actually innovated, an industry run by people who understood their tools and did things differently, efficiently, focused on merit. And they reacted like the parasites that they are. Hijack it. Drain it. While they walk off with the cash.
Then, along comes AI. Not as an actual revolution. Not as anything real. Just a prop. A lights-and-smoke financial trick to tell investors. A magic word that lets executives fire whole teams while saying they are “innovating.” And the sad part is they believe it. They honestly think hype is worth more than working systems. They think a slide deck about “AI transformation” contributes more value to a company than the engineer who actually knows how the systems fit together.
Remote work made the whole thing worse. I love working remotely too, but let’s tell the truth: remote work gutted the entire junior pipeline. You cannot train a new generation of engineers through Slack and Jira. You cannot replace the moment a senior looks over and says, “Stop. Don’t do that.” That is where people learned this job. That is where skill was built. Those moments are gone. Seniors kept the comfort. Juniors got pink slips, replaced with chatbots.
Leadership decided mentorship was too expensive and hand-waved it away because AI was supposed to fill the gap. Spoiler: it won’t. And in a few years, when the remaining seniors are burned out or laid off, there won’t be anyone left who actually knows how to run the infrastructure that by the way holds the modern world together.
Which brings us to the MBA and PE geniuses who think they run this industry. These are people who reboot their laptop by yanking the power cable out, but somehow they believe they should redesign global infrastructure. They talk in buzzwords which they barely understand. They buy whatever SaaS vendor has the shiniest marketing. They strip out whole infra teams and call it “efficiency.” They replace everything with contractors and chatbots and then congratulate themselves for “disruption.”
Meanwhile the actual systems, the ones running entire economies, are held together with baling wire, duct tape, and tribal knowledge. Cloudflare knocks out a third of the internet for an hour and everyone acts surprised. Surprised? You could see this coming a mile away. This is what happens when you fire the people who know how anything works and hand the keys to people who think uptime is something that comes from a SLA some sleezy account exec sold you.
There is only one way this ends. Failure. Real failure. Not a red light on a dashboard. Widespread, grinding collapse in the companies and industries that have been hollowed out for short term profit. And the people who caused it will do what they always do. Cash their checks. Blame the people they replaced. Walk away untouched.
When it finally hits (and it will), remember who's responsible. Remember who took an innovative working industry and fed it to private equity vultures to be feasted on. Remember who profited. I'm talking about the investors and boards who bought thriving startups, promising to nurture and mature them, only to force feed them to flesh eating zombies. They made out like bandits, with the generational wealth that belongs to the people whose blood sweat and tears built this industry.
Stolen from: https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1pbvaxz/the_tech_industry_is_dead_and_wall_street_is/