How Info-Gurus Poisoned the IT Industry

Recently I came across a YouTube video titled "How to Earn 1 Million Rubles from Scratch This Summer." The presenter was an info-guru of the highest order — not merely selling dreams, but cultivating new info-gurus and manufacturing information products for them. Even the video itself wasn't educational content; it was a warm-up for his paid course. Naturally.

I won't recommend watching it — I sat through it so you don't have to. The core message: you'll never get rich working a regular job, but if you create an information product in your field, millions come easily. Then come the "case studies": students knocking together courses over a weekend, selling to 300 people at 100,000 rubles each, clearing 30 million in a single launch. Then buying Lamborghinis and posing in Dubai. The math is simple, after all.

For a moment I doubted myself — maybe I'm doing something wrong? Then I thought of someone I know: a woman who has run a psychology blog on Instagram for eight years. Every day, without fail, stories, posts, genuine useful content. She's tried launching courses and marathons — attended mostly by friends. Only recently has she started making meaningful money. But these stories don't sell, so info-gurus never tell them.

How to Spot an Info-Guru

The presenter from that video was persuasive, no question. It's not hard to see why people let themselves be taken in. But there are reliable warning signs:

• They show only the rare wins, hiding 99.9% of failures — and even those wins are often staged.
• Their interest ends at the bottom of the sales funnel — attract, pressure, sell. After that: do whatever you want, they're on a flight to Bali.

Back to the IT World

And then I thought about IT courses. Here's a sector that really got shaken up. Info-gurus caught a whiff of high engagement and quickly colonized the marketing departments of online IT schools. This matters because many of those schools were founded with genuine enthusiasm and a sincere desire to help people. Eight years ago, the websites of online schools genuinely just contained learning materials — no promises, no guarantees.

A few years ago I worked with several well-known schools and was directly involved in course development. I won't pretend the content was terrible — it was fine, if recycled. The material had been chewed over a hundred times and drawn from publicly available sources, but that wasn't the real problem.

In every IT school, two factions emerged. One tries to make the course genuinely good — current, useful, accurate. The other — the marketing team — has one single goal: maximize sales. And every available tool gets deployed:

• Promises of impossible salaries — 300,000 rubles a month, free snacks included.
• Lowering the entry barrier to absurdity: any housewife can become a tester, any taxi driver can be a front-end developer. The funnel must be wide — that's Marketing 101.
• Seeding fabricated "success stories" across blogs and social media. It doesn't fly on Habr, but in schools' own media channels, there's no limit.
• Email blasts, course ads, drip campaigns: "Come on, become a developer already." "Take this quiz and check your chances" — wow, your chances are 99.999%! Join our free webinar!

Today all of this produces nothing but secondhand embarrassment — and, it seems, it's finally stopped working, at least in IT. Courses aren't selling the way they used to. Marketing consumes enormous budgets with diminishing returns. The internet is saturated with reviews, and reputations cannot be cleaned up anymore.

And there's no way back. You can't simply say: "Our courses are solid, but we promise nothing — results depend entirely on you" — not when the school next door is promising "guaranteed employment." No employment will materialize, of course. But people will always click the button that says "money."

The Damage

Thousands of broken lives. Disappointed people stuck with course debt, who bought into an easy dream.

Thousands of juniors who finished courses but can't find work, flooding job listings with their CVs.

Thousands of genuine specialists who now have to inflate their own résumés just to stay competitive.

Hiring is broken. The industry has been poisoned.

They played the marketing game all the way to the end.

And the legacy IT schools left behind? Emails sitting in spam folders that nobody opens anymore.

Which industry are they going to go break next? I think we all know the answer.