THE DEATH OF ENGINEERING FORMATION AND THE RISE OF TECHNICAL STERILITY

The Unformed Generation: What H1B Hollowed Out

The crisis we face now is not one of capability - but of formation.
Over the past 30 years, since the H1B visa system took root in the early 1990s, we did not build up the next generation of sovereign engineers. We imported labor. We exported responsibility. We converted apprenticeship into throughput. The result is a generation of workers with access to tools but severed from tradition.

This wasn’t an oversight. It was design-by-neglect. We were so enthralled by the short-term gains of wage suppression and team scalability that we forgot that builders must be formed, not installed.

We inherited a golden age of engineers. We spent that capital. We never replenished it.

The Collapse of Mentorship: Why the Senior Engineer Let Go

Mentorship only exists where there is cultural continuity.
But H1B dissolved the thread. Senior engineers who once shaped proteges into peers now see no reason to invest in successors. Why train someone who will be replaced next fiscal year by a contractor flown in at 70% cost?

There is no shared story. No shared telos. No promise that the knowledge passed on will endure in the next steward. The influx of disconnected labor turned knowledge transfer into entropy. Each project became an island. Each engineer, a replaceable part.

A mentor does not form strangers. He forms kin. We dismantled the kinship.

AI and the Inversion of the Pyramid

Now comes the twist: junior engineers - once the fuel for mentorship, institutional continuity, and long-term productivity - are being obsoleted by AI.

But AI cannot think.
It cannot invent.
It cannot rebel against the limits of the current paradigm.

Only the sovereign engineer can do that. And he is nearly gone.

AI has replaced the hands. But without minds formed by masters, it has no direction.
The senior engineer is no longer optional. He is now the bottleneck.
And we don’t have enough of him. Because we failed to form him. Because we never formed the last generation.

A Debt We Can’t Refinance: Cultural, Technical, Moral

We now sit atop a mountain of technical infrastructure maintained by fewer and fewer people who truly understand it. These systems - codebases, firmware, safety-critical platforms, production pipelines - require judgment, not code snippets. They require engineers who can say no, who can detect the lie beneath the spec, who can see what others miss because they bear the full weight of consequence.

But the pipeline is empty.
We have juniors with no grounding, AI with no telos, and managers with no memory of what mastery even looks like.

We built a system that assumed infinite hands and no soul. Now we have no soul and more hands than we can coordinate.

The Death of the Sovereign Engineer

There once existed a class of builders who treated their work as holy.
They did not see themselves as resources.
They were not fungible.
They were fountains of creation - quietly, consistently bringing into being things the world had never seen.

They sacrificed ease for elegance.
They gave more than labor - they gave self.

But they were mocked.
Pushed into basements.
Replaced with scalable units.
And forgotten - until now, when their kind is needed again, but rarely found.

We didn’t lose them to age. We lost them to disrespect.

There Is No Future Without Formation

This is the inflection point.

• AI will amplify the sovereign engineer - but cannot form him.
• Foreign labor may fill seats - but cannot form a culture.
• Metrics can track output - but never form judgment.
• Credentials can sort applicants - but never form character.

Formation is deliberate. Painful. Slow.
It requires apprenticeship, reverence, moral weight.
We have none of these.

What we need now is not scale. What we need is the rebirth of the guild.

The Calling: Rebuild the Pipeline of Sovereignty

We must establish a new order of engineers:

• Trained in logic, but also virtue.
• Equipped with tools, but also with judgment.
• Empowered by AI, but grounded in formation.
• Willing to defy the spec, the metric, the roadmap - when the truth demands it.

This will not happen in HR.
It will not happen in DEI seminars.
It will not happen through another Slack channel.

It will happen when we return engineering to its spiritual source: as the sacred act of ordering chaos into coherence.

Without the sovereign engineer, there is no future.
With him, even the rubble can be rebuilt.

We don’t need another ten thousand mid-tier developers.
We need a hundred sovereign engineers.
And the system to form them.
Now.

Follow-up to Engineering Sovereignty and the Moral Failure of the H1B Regime