How tech is losing its craft

The employment crisis in software development is real. Widespread. Brutal. AI is not the problem. It is an alibi.

Another crisis is brewing, a quieter one: an identity crisis of the profession, which, in the long run, is far more alarming.

The lost senior developer

Today, senior developers no longer really know what their role is. They are asked to write code, not to understand a system. They are forced to use specific tools, required to be present on-site for no good reason... but given no direction. Immediate performance is demanded, not robustness: be cheaper, go faster, produce ever more.

As if permanent urgency could replace a strategy.

So naturally they reject the AI being sold to them as more performant, when it does not replace the understanding of systems.

This pressure masks a void. The absence of:

• product vision,
• solid design,
• engineering culture.

And too often, the absence of a commercial strategy. We do not know how to sell what we already have, so we demand even more from the developer.

It is never enough.

The junior developer without bearings

The junior developer arrives in a world they did not choose. A universe saturated with tools, but where they struggle to find their place. In school, they are hyper-specialized before even mastering the basics. They are taught frameworks, not foundations.

They are asked to produce... but not to understand.

They are required to go fast. Very fast. Without being told why, or toward what. They must already be "performant" before having learned what "knowing" means.

Faced with AI, the shock is brutal. An AI that is announced as faster, more efficient, and cheaper. Not because the junior would be less competent, but because no one ever passed on to them the essentials: systems, layers, limits, critical thinking.

They are neither less intelligent nor less capable. They simply arrive in an environment that deprives them of the fundamentals and offers them neither meaning nor progression.

The broken transmission

But there is something even worse: in this context, knowledge transfer no longer happens. Not because of a generational conflict, but because of exhaustion. Seniors no longer have the time, the space, or the recognition to pass on their knowledge. Pressured, burned out, summoned to deliver, they watch their experience shrink to nothing in a world obsessed with tooling.

Many give up, or are preparing to.

Juniors understand that the path of their predecessors no longer exists. They see that commitment is not rewarded, that meaning will not come from the profession. So they stay a few months, then leave.

And they are right: nothing encourages them to stay. Between the two generations, nothing flows. Not because of individual fault, but because the ecosystem prevents it:

• no long-term vision,
• no technical strategy,
• no product strategy,
• no commercial strategy.

Just survival, quarter after quarter.

This is a political problem, yes. But above all a societal one: we have built a system where knowledge no longer passes on.

The drift of organizations

I know this observation will not change anything immediately. Not from those who should act... unfortunately. Because, for them, understanding a system:

• is slow,
• is costly,
• is invisible,
• cannot be measured in closed tickets.

Organizations have consequently drifted from:

understand -> design -> build -> maintain

to:

deliver -> deliver -> deliver -> recycle

The long term has been erased. The system has become a cost. Architecture has become a delay.

So they no longer want people who understand. They want fast executors.

In doing so, the market itself becomes dependent on systems it no longer understands. As evidenced by the sharp decline in job postings for developers in France since 2023. And with AI, employment is already falling in the most exposed professions, such as software development.

Another path

So another path opens up: that of new entrepreneurs. People with a product vision, an understanding of systems, and a simple idea: nothing solid is built without those who know and those who learn.

Because you cannot build a digital nation on a profession without identity and knowledge that no longer circulates.