IT 2025: A Requiem for Common Sense

Instead of the technological singularity and the automation of drudgery, the industry has turned into a "cyber-surrealism" — a hybrid of an Eastern bazaar and a bureaucratic fortress where companies try to sell air, and processes are protected by layers of barriers.

Part I: The Great Filter — HR and Hiring

The Funnel of Absurdity

The hiring process has gone from simple to labyrinthine. ATS systems automatically reject 98% of resumes. The problem isn't the volume of filtering — it's the quality. Recruiters often don't understand what they're looking for. An expert can be rejected because the terminology in their resume doesn't match the keywords in the job listing.

Astrology in Corporate Service

"Cultural Fit" checks have devolved into pseudoscience. Systems like DISC divide people into four psychotypes by color. Candidates can be rejected because "the team needs a different psychotype for balance," even if the candidate is stronger than the current employees. An unspoken age ceiling and discrimination by hobbies have emerged.

Survival Interviews

There's a massive gap between interview requirements and actual job tasks. Interviews demand knowledge of competition-level algorithms, red-black trees, and Google-scale distributed systems. On the job, the tasks are mundane: recolor a button, write CRUD methods, fix layout issues. Cognitive load during screening is 100%; less than 5% of that knowledge is ever used at work.

Cultural Code and Hypocrisy

Professionalism has been displaced by corporate messianism. Companies demand fanatical loyalty, not expertise. Cover letters have become acts of humiliation. Candidates use ChatGPT to generate grandiose letters; recruiters use AI to analyze them — bots talking to bots. The true purpose of these rituals is a test of submission.

Part II: Office Plankton — Management

Anatomy of a 700,000-Ruble Button

A simple task — recoloring a button — becomes an epic saga in 2025:

• Initiation: Marketing decides to boost conversion
• Discussion: A kickoff meeting with 10 participants (an hour of expensive specialists' time)
• Approval: A designer creates a mockup, an analyst writes requirements
• Grooming: The team estimates in story points
• Development: 5 minutes to change CSS
• Internal dev meetings: Discussing the impact on architecture
• QA and release: Testing and deployment

Total estimated cost: 700,000 rubles. Around the actual production, an enormous layer of people has grown, justifying their existence by discussing the work.

Cargo Cult Agile

Agile has mutated into a rigid cargo cult. Form has defeated substance. Daily stand-ups that last an hour instead of 15 minutes have become status report meetings. Synchronization matters more than action. A developer's workday has become "Swiss cheese" — 30-to-40-minute chunks between calls, insufficient for entering a flow state. Asynchronous text communication is ignored in favor of voice, because managers need a feeling of control.

Managerial Feudalism

At the top of the pyramid sit managers for whom the product is a set of metrics in Excel. The goal is not service quality but the quarterly bonus. Management is detached from reality, living in a world of presentations with upward-trending graphs. Developers are patching holes in a sinking ship, trying to implement features that have already been sold but never designed.

Part III: The Simulacrum of Engineering — AI and Development

The Era of Vibe Coding

A new developer archetype has emerged: the "vibe coder," who programs based on feelings and AI suggestions without understanding syntax or algorithms. The concept of the "7/7 Team" has appeared — a 24/7 conveyor with no days off. The profession has shifted from writing code to reviewing code written by neural networks. But a junior, seeing working code, ships it to production "feeling the vibe" that everything's fine.

Technical Debt as a Business Model

AI generates functionality at incredible speed. Lines of Code charts rocket skyward. But AI code suffers from hidden defects: hallucinations about nonexistent libraries, security violations, logic bombs at edge cases. Projects turn into a "Big Ball of Mud" that becomes impossible to maintain.

Death of the Lords and the Generational War

A conflict is brewing between "traditional seniors" and the "new wave." The old guard knows about memory management, SQL optimization, and SOLID principles. The new wave considers this knowledge "intellectual garbage." Experienced engineers either leave or get pushed out as "toxic nitpickers." Expertise is being drained; the school of engineering is being replaced by the school of prompt operators.

Part IV: The Economics of Disappointment

From the Chosen to the Working Class

The myth of wealthy tech workers has evaporated. The profession has come down from the heavens to earth. Salaries that once seemed astronomical barely afford a middle-class lifestyle. The market faces stagflation: requirements grow, purchasing power falls. Seniors no longer receive offers with double salaries. A 20–30% raise when switching jobs is an unattainable dream.

Cookies Instead of Money

Companies compensate for falling salaries with "perks": offices with foosball tables, smoothies, sleep pods. Developers see through the masquerade. Loyalty can no longer be bought with snacks.

The Absence of Solidarity

The IT community is atomized. Taxi drivers unite against aggregators; IT workers do not. During interviews, people try to stump candidates for self-validation. Without unity, companies do whatever they want. Seeing a queue of 500 applicants per position, businesses slash salaries.

Part V: The Entropy of Quality

Resume-Driven Development

Developers use work projects as training grounds for trendy technologies. A simple API becomes microservices on Go with Kafka, K8s, and GraphQL — to pad a resume. The business gets an unmaintainable architecture; the developer gets experience and quits.

The Normalization of Bugs

Society has grown accustomed to glitches as background noise. Bugs are tickets in the backlog with a "Minor" status. Quality is sacrificed to Time-to-Market.

The Death of Expert Content

Quality technical content is disappearing. Expertise used to be a social elevator. Now the motivation is gone. AI has filled the educational niche. New knowledge isn't being generated; old knowledge is regurgitated by neural networks, losing meaning with each iteration — "informational incest."

Epilogue

The IT market of 2025 is a space of paradoxes. They search for geniuses to recolor buttons. They hate bureaucracy but create 10 meetings a day. They worship AI while drowning in technical debt. Those who survive will be the ones who understand "how a bit, a byte, and a transaction work" — people who can close Zoom and write working code. The ultimate criterion: "Does it work?"