Russian Top Tech Rector Urges Parents: Keep Your Kids Away From IT

Speaking directly to Vedomosti, Mikhail Gordin, the rector of Bauman Moscow State Technical University, dropped a bomb on aspirational parents: he actively advises all his personal friends against steering their children into software development. While acknowledging that entry-level tech roles still hand out absurd piles of instant cash, he insisted that knowing how to sling lines of code will no longer buy anyone a lasting, secure career path.

The root problem, as the academic chief lays it out, is a market bursting at the seams. Companies are no longer desperate for code-writing worker drones; they want strategists capable of climbing into executive shoes. Meanwhile, the entry-level grunt work traditionally handed to junior developers and QA testers is getting systematically chewed up by automation, putting a brutal brake on the explosive salary growth of recent years.

In Gordin's view, programming suffers from a ridiculously brutal expiration date. Software development is haunted by rapid obsolescence, where a fresh crop of twenty-somethings arrives every single decade to effortlessly obsolete the older generation on novel algorithmic tricks. Fundamental engineering, by contrast, allegedly builds the kind of mental muscle that survives automation upheavals rather than getting replaced by a snappy script.

Tech bootcamps promised a lifetime golden ticket, but reality is rapidly reshaping coders into the new digital blue-collar class, poised to be made redundant by the very machines they spent their twenties fine-tuning.