We Sold a Generation a Dream and Dismantled the Ladder While They Climbed
> ALARM // POST_03
Software management has slowly but surely become a protection racket with a Confluence page.
The migration never ends, and neither does the purpose of the people running it.
I'm sitting in the Saint Bow Lane in the City with three separate interviews happening around me, different tables, different companies, same conversation. Layoffs, cut too deep, now looking for people with AI experience to manage their outsourcing teams abroad. Not a coincidence, and not three isolated stories, just an industry looking at the hole where its skills used to be.
The deindustrialisation of the 80s was photographable, you could stand in front of a closed mine or an empty factory and point. This damage is invisible, a skill never trained, a problem never owned, an engineer who became a project manager because that's what the market rewarded. You can't photograph an absence. Keep the middle managers and the service economy thinking going for a few more years and we'll probably have something to photograph again.
The UK tech industry killed its own skills pipeline in three waves, each one rational at the time, each one compounding the last. Outsourcing moved the learning offshore, then a management class grew to fill the vacuum and had no incentive to shrink, and now AI is being used to justify not hiring the juniors who would have become the next generation of seniors. The result is a generation locked out of the career they were sold, and an industry that can't figure out why there's nobody left who knows how anything works.
Post-2008 the calculus was simple, engineers are expensive so you offshore the execution and keep the management. What seems like a rational choice at company level can have catastrophic unintended consequences at a civilisational one. You didn't just move the work, you moved the learning. The junior who grinds through a hard problem at 11pm and comes out the other side as a senior, that stopped happening here, and nobody seemed to notice until the seniors were gone too.
The pipeline didn't pause while we figured it out, it just stopped, and by the time anyone thought to check the people who would have raised the alarm had already moved on.
I was starting my software career in 2010 and entry level positions were already requiring two years of experience, entry level, requiring experience you couldn't get without the job you couldn't get without the experience. The 2008 crash didn't just trigger the outsourcing wave, it blocked the bottom of the pipeline the same year it deleted the top.
What grew in the vacuum was middle management, an entire professional class whose incentive is to extend the work rather than finish it. Most London tech firms spend their time migrating, modernising, embarking on platform transformations that need redoing by the time they complete, the same stack every three years, driven by the fact that when the migration ends, their purpose ends, so the migration doesn't end.
The product, the actual thing users need, became secondary to keeping the machinery of management justified and employed, and the people inside the machinery can see it as clearly as the people outside, they just can't afford to say so.
Senior salaries ballooned while the value produced stayed flat, because navigating the abstraction layers became a specialism in itself, and companies paid a premium for people who could manage the bureaucracy that those same companies had built. When the market turned, those salaries looked very different, and companies cut again, discovering they'd already cut the muscle last time and were now cutting bone.
The people in that pub are the norm, and the ones who've been in the industry long enough can trace the sequence of decisions that got them there, which is what makes it so hard to sit with.
Now the third justification is being written. Why hire juniors when AI can fill the gap? Same logic as outsourcing, faster, cheaper, better interface, another nail in a coffin that was already being built.
Some of those juniors did everything right anyway, bootcamps, degrees, side projects, GitHub profiles maintained like gardens, and then entered a market that had offshored the training ground, built a management class with no interest in being replaced by someone cheaper and hungrier, and is now automating the justification for not hiring them at all.
The dream wasn't false, it was just being discontinued while they were still buying into it.
No juniors means no future seniors means no next wave of companies, no success stories, no exits, no angel investors who came up through the industry and want to give the next generation the same shot they got, and the compounding is quiet enough that nobody notices until the whole pipeline is empty. Without success stories there's no pathway to entrepreneurship, and we've stopped producing them.
When we opened an entry level position at my last company we had 300 applications on LinkedIn in an hour and had to take the listing down, and the juniors are out there, trained, hungry, and ready, but the industry stopped opening the door. We ended up hiring someone with three years of experience because that was the minimum the market had conditioned us to expect, and in doing so we repeated the pattern we should have been breaking.
The big companies will move slowly on this because the bureaucracy that caused the problem will resist the solution to it, and the solution threatens the bureaucracy. The economics of building ethically are structurally hostile, but smaller teams need less capital and AI is making small-team building viable in ways it wasn't before. Don't wait for them.
If you're building something new, take a junior along for the ride and give them hard problems and real ownership, because the company you build will be better for it, not as charity. Law firms have understood this for generations. A newly qualified solicitor costs more than they generate, and the firm absorbs that loss deliberately as a structural cost of staying alive, because a firm with no pipeline is a firm one generation from extinction when the partners retire and there's nothing behind them.
I was talking to an apprentice engineer at a boatyard recently. He mentioned that Volvo now pays apprentice salaries directly, not the boatyard but Volvo, because someone at Volvo looked at the age distribution of the people who know how to maintain their marine engines and realised that when that generation retires there's nobody coming up behind them who knows how the thing works. A combustion engine company figured out the pipeline problem before the software industry did.
AI makes juniors more capable than ever and you should use that, a junior with good tooling today can move faster and learn harder things earlier than was possible five years ago. But the instinct that comes from owning a system that fails at 3am, the judgment accumulated over a decade of hard decisions, that transmission is human and it always will be, and we built the tools but building the people who'll use them well is still on us.
Build things that solve problems users have, and bring people with you. The junior you bring in today is the senior engineer, the founder, the angel investor of the next cycle, and that cycle either gets funded intentionally by the people building now or it doesn't happen at all.