politics

Yes, although I can tell you that the idiocracy is already here for some large companies. I just caught up with a friend the other day who recently started working at a certain unnamed but well-known software company, and he was horrified to discover that the "engineering" department consists almost entirely of people using AI to generate all code and automated tests iteratively until the tests pass, then AI to review the code, then merge and release. No human in the loop, including for all practical intents and purposes the "engineer." He said what might take a competent engineer 5 lines of code to accomplish and an incompetent one 10 lines is now 60 lines of barely functional garbage.

The result is frequent unreported downtime and an unmaintainable monstrosity that really doesn't "need" software engineers in the same way you don't "need" a structural engineer to inspect an addition to a house if it's never reported to any authority.

I told him this is the future and to stop getting in the way, as this is obviously by design and no one cares. The industry isn't hiring or training junior engineers, and the escalating demands of productivity from clueless execs are so outrageous that many engineers think this is the only way to survive. I advised him to make as much money as he can and escape in a few years after his kid graduates college, and while he can still look at himself in the mirror.

By the way, this isn't a screed against generative AI in software. It has its place—if the best models are used by experts. But for companies that don't use it wisely, which I suspect is most of them, it will just exacerbate the enshittification of everything.

"Institutional knowledge" is a dirty word to a lot of top managers.

It means that they would have to talk to lower level folks as equals. That they would have to rethink their plans.

It's much easier for them to do some team building exercises instead.

Agreed.
Also, I think it's exacerbates, not exasperates.

Leadership at most businesses have decided it is easier to hire experienced workers rather than grow and develop the next generation workforce.

Sadly this isn't new to 2025. In 2008 I was working at an employer that said this to my face when I asked for a paid training class on a tool we were using in our production "We don't train. We hire trained workers." This was a shockingly bad admission about the corporate culture there with implications I immediately grasped. Whats more, I looked around at my coworkers that had been there for 5 or 10 years, and I saw he was right. All of them were using old skills on old out-of-date tools which I quickly realized also forced them to stay at that employer because no other employer was using those out-of-date tools anymore so they couldn't switch jobs easily. I'd like to say I quit shortly afterward, but if you see that year you'll know what was coming. I was happy to have a job during the great recession, even at an employer that had these toxic ideas.

People entering the workforce are at an extreme disadvantage without a training, mentorship and ongoing support.

I agree with this, and wanting to be part of the solution, I thought about becoming a mentor. However, the path I took (entry level, working up) is closed. I can't say I have a great suggestion for an alternative for those I would mentor. They're walking a path I didn't take. I'd be figuring it out with them, but if I gave them bad advice, it could have massive negative implications on their career. Further, they're saddled with way more debt than I was during that time in life, which means they need to be more risk averse than I was. I've done some mentoring to the younger generation, but I haven't felt as useful to them as I had hoped to be, or as mentors I had coming up, were to me.

My general opinion of business leadership is not high, but this situation really exposes the depth of their laziness and lack of forethought.

Perhaps at a megacorp perspective it might be different, but for a small employer its not nearly that simple.

Each employee you have brings a cost (paycheck, employment taxes, healthcare subsidies, HR overhead, IT support burden, etc). These costs are worth it to pay because that employee produces something that brings in revenue at or above their costs. If that new employee cannot perform work that brings in revenue, then those costs have to come from somewhere else. Most solvent companies do have a war chest of savings that could be drawn from, but those savings are also used to weather periods of poor sales to keep paying employees or possible to pay for cost overruns if there is a mistake made by an employee that the company has to pay for. The war chest is not infinitely deep.

Further, this war chest money is also where raises come from. Any extra cost to the company has to be paid, and the raises or bonuses come from what remains. So if you bring on an untrained worker that isn't able to produce enough to cover their costs, the costs for that worker is essentially being paid through the money that would otherwise be raises for the employees that are covering their costs and generating more. You risk pissing off or discouraging your best people with lackluster raises or bonuses by trying to bring on someone that can't carry their weight. If you do that too much, your best people leave. Your company will fold shortly afterward with your talent departing. Your middle-of-the-road folks lose their jobs because the company went under.

There used to be "grunt work" that was capable of being done by new workers with little to no training. The work itself was an exercise that did partial training of the new worker. However, with automation, most of that work its gone. With repair costs being more expensive than replacement, that's another avenue for training lost. There's a "hollowing out" in the workforce ladder where you, as a new worker, might get one or two rungs up the ladder, but when you look to go higher you see dozens of rungs missing before you'd be able to climb again.

I recognize the problems, but I don't have a solution. I doesn't help that many companies war chests of funds are being eviscerated by trump tariffs or poisoning of international markets and business relations by trump's antics.

Leadership at most businesses have decided it is easier to hire experienced workers rather than grow and develop the next generation workforce

Who's going to train the juniors? We've been in lost-boys mode for 20 years, now, after the post-y2k shedding of mentors and documentors. Staff has been self-learning in the way some people "roll their own encryption" with similar effects. Now we have 2 generations of people living in this dark age with no mentorship to fill in blanks they can't fill themselves.

And you're thinking to let them go to hire more noobs. Are they going to train them from the bread line? Is your one remaining senior who knows the whys and the whats going to train anything before management cans his expensive non-coding ass?

May as well: every time we say "this is bad because it breaks these important rules and we don't want risk" we get "lol boomer" anyway from the sparkle-junkies. But I love how you've taken management's trimming of staff to brutal levels to be an us-vs-them among the staff.

Worked out pretty fucking well for them the last, maybe even last two, times.

It's basically a fire sale for the uber-wealthy.