Slack emojis and soft skills: How Gen Z became tech’s favorite patsy
Entitled, overexposed, and allergic to context—Gen Z brought ego to a systems fight and lost
We weren’t handed digital savants—we imported overconfident interns with influencer delusions and a fetish for Slack threads.
What we got? Vibe curators in startup hoodies who think Jira tickets are a vibe check.
The tech industry didn’t just overhype Gen Z. It weaponized them. Recruited them as low-cost labor with high aesthetic value. Cute on a keynote slide. Quiet in the war room. Cheaper than senior devs and less likely to question broken systems. Perfect.
And Gen Z played right into it.
They didn’t just inherit the myth—they cosplayed it. Told they were the smartest generation ever, they confused terminal fluency with architectural understanding. A viral LinkedIn carousel replaced a well-structured migration plan. Influence substituted for insight. And when the house caught fire? Half of them were livestreaming the smoke.
Here's what nobody’s admitting: Gen Z didn't just get duped. They overestimated themselves. Badly.
This isn’t about IQ or effort. It’s about entitlement. Somewhere between their college graduation and the first company offsite, a dangerous belief took root: that youth equals qualification. That showing up meant leveling up. That experience is optional if you have enough "personal brand."
The result? Slack channels filled with performative empathy and zero operational discipline. Meetings where no one wants to lead, but everyone wants to "normalize" their burnout. Systems where juniors are expected to own infrastructure they've never debugged—because the staff engineers were all laid off last quarter.
It’s not just incompetence. It’s theater. “Manifesting” a leadership role doesn’t make you a leader. Publishing a teardown of a system you’ve never operated doesn’t make you an expert. We’re not seeing the next generation of technologists—we’re watching tech-themed improv with real budgets.
And the kicker? When it all collapses, the blame loops back around.
"They’re just young. They need mentorship." Sure. But you can’t mentor someone who thinks they’re already the oracle.
This industry gutted its middle. Senior ICs left burned out or got booted in the name of efficiency. Mid-level engineers are MIA. And into that void walked Gen Z, holding Canva portfolios and TikTok hustle cred, ready to lead without learning.
They post thought-leadership threads after nine months in the role. They mistake tooling fluency for system insight. They demand seats at the table while refusing to read the runbooks. It’s not bold—it’s brittle.
Let’s be honest: Gen Z didn’t break tech. But they sure didn’t slow the collapse.
They became the ultimate stopgap. Human duct tape for broken culture. Asked to scale systems they don’t understand, with tooling they barely know how to use, in orgs where "mentorship" means watching last year’s all-hands recording. They weren’t set up to succeed—but too many never bothered to ask what success required.
And the industry? It loved the cover. Diversity optics with none of the hard conversations. Digital nativity as a smokescreen for institutional rot. Everyone got to feel progressive while avoiding the question: who’s actually shipping value?
It’s not all doom—but it is design. We keep hiring for personality and aesthetics, then panicking when systems go sideways. And Gen Z, with their market-ready polish and chronic overexposure, fits too easily into that hollow mold.
Until we fix the tech industry’s broken scaffolding—actual apprenticeship, cross-generational knowledge transfer, meaningful technical rigor—this cycle will keep eating its young.
Gen Z isn’t the problem. But they’re not the solution either.
Not yet. And not until the hoodie comes off and the humility kicks in.