Tech didn’t just bet on Gen Z. It burned the rest of us to do it.
The tech industry’s obsession with youth isn’t new, but in the past few years, it’s metastasized into something more destructive. Executives didn’t just hire Gen Z to infuse “fresh energy.” They built entire teams, cultures, and strategies around them, while quietly pushing out older workers who carried the operational backbone of their companies.
Then the market corrected. The layoffs came. And who got cut? Not just the expensive employees , but the ones who actually knew how to get things done when the funding dried up and the vibes died.
Ageism made it easy to gut resilience
Let’s be blunt: experienced workers weren’t just laid off — they were systematically erased from tech’s culture. The assumption was that anyone over 40 couldn’t keep up, couldn’t code, couldn’t pivot. Never mind the fact that those same workers built the platforms Gen Z now TikToks their careers on.
Leadership saw experienced hires as overhead. Too expensive. Too slow. Too candid. So they staffed up with junior hires and told themselves that youth equals speed.
Spoiler: it didn’t.
Gen Z was overhyped, under-supported, and set up to fail
This isn’t an anti–Gen Z rant. It’s a reckoning with how the industry weaponized a generation as a branding strategy while giving them none of the structure, mentorship, or context to succeed.
Companies mistook digital nativity for readiness. They flooded teams with fresh grads and early-career hires, assumed Slack and Notion would replace onboarding, and tossed out the boring-but-critical playbooks that kept the wheels turning.
And when those teams underperformed? They didn’t blame leadership. They blamed “headwinds” and trimmed the fat.
But the fat was never the problem. The muscle was gone.
When you fire the people who’ve shipped through chaos, survived platform rewrites, and know how to debug organizational rot — not just code — you lose more than headcount. You lose resilience. You lose context. You lose the people who knew how to pivot a team through a downturn instead of crying about vibes on LinkedIn.
Layoffs aren’t just a market reaction. They’re the inevitable result of gutting institutional knowledge and pretending TikTok culture could replace adult supervision.
The culture play was a cop-out
To be clear, this wasn’t all bad hiring. It was bad leadership. Executives fell in love with “next gen” employer branding. They built office culture around emojis, async-first theater, and pastel-colored Slack threads.
But when cash flow dried up and investors wanted real results, that culture collapsed under its own weight.
Nobody was building for longevity. They were building for a funding round.
This is what happens when you replace experience with aesthetics
If your hiring strategy was to replace the people who could challenge bad decisions with people who’d retweet them, congratulations: you built a monoculture optimized for collapse.
Gen Z wasn’t the problem. The problem was treating them like a silver bullet , while discarding the people who’d already lived through five business cycles and knew when a strategy slide was just lipstick on a garbage fire.
The reckoning is here and it’s generational
Layoffs aren’t just about money. They’re about failure. The failure to integrate generations. The failure to balance energy with experience. The failure to recognize that execution isn’t a mood board — it’s a muscle.
Until tech admits that it chased youth at the expense of resilience, it’s doomed to repeat this cycle: overhire, underperform, lay off, blame the market. Rinse. Rebrand. Repeat.
Will Kelly is a writer, content strategist, and keen observer of the IT industry. Medium is home to his personal writing projects. His professional interests include generative AI, cloud computing, DevOps, and collaboration tools. He has written for startups, Fortune 1000 firms, and leading industry publications, including CIO and TechTarget. Follow him on X: @willkelly. You can also follow him on BlueSky: willkelly.bsky.social.
