The old factory consumed muscle.
The modern software factory consumes attention, memory, learning capacity, sleep, adaptability, and tolerance for unresolved complexity.
That is why the industry can look like cognitive vampirism at scale.
Not because youth is inherently better.
Because younger workers are often more willing to absorb new stacks, undocumented systems, technical debt, production chaos, and career risk before they have fully repriced the value of their own time.
Then the cycle repeats:
Complexity accumulates.
Senior labour becomes expensive.
Simplification is postponed.
Fresh cognition is recruited.
That cognition is burned absorbing the complexity.
Workers gain experience, boundaries, and bargaining power.
The system searches for another cohort.
The disturbing part is that software is supposed to automate repetition.
Yet many organisations choose to replenish human attention instead of eliminating the complexity consuming it.
Industrial capitalism learned to mechanise the body.
Software capitalism learned to industrialise cognition.
The real engineering breakthrough is not finding more minds to burn.
It is building systems that stop requiring them.
#Software #Engineering #TechIndustry #FutureOfWork #TechnicalDebt #Labour #Cognition