Tech’s got a guru problem—every time a new shiny toy pops up, cheap gurus sprout from under rocks like mushrooms. Suddenly, everyone’s an expert in generative AI because they watched a YouTube tutorial. A few years back, it was crypto—everybody had a “system” to make you rich. Before that, cloud, big data, you name it. If it’s new, an army of instant prophets swears they’ve mastered it.

Spoiler: it’s dumb to buy that.

How? If something’s been around for two minutes, nobody’s an expert—not you, not me, not the guy with 50k followers on X selling a shitty course.

We’ve all seen job postings asking for X years of experience in tech that’s younger than the requirement itself. Take this gem from Sebastián Ramírez, the creator of FastAPI, a Python framework for building APIs:

I saw a job post the other day. 👔

It required 4+ years of experience in FastAPI. 🤦

I couldn’t apply as I only have 1.5+ years of experience since I created that thing. 😅

Maybe it’s time to re-evaluate that "years of experience = skill level". ♻

— Sebastián Ramírez (@tiangolo) July 11, 2020

It’s not a one-off—we’ve all gotten those weird vibes from recruiters or posts. But that’s a rant for another day.

The real issue? A species that thrives on this chaos, emerging from the shadows as THE GURU.

“The Guru”

The sector’s exhausted—every hype wave drags in a flood of clowns with half-baked demos and “10x your life” promises. For folks too busy or lazy to question them, it’s an easy trap—follow the guru (in every sense), buy the hype, and then, not long after, realize it’s all smoke. The “expertise,” the swagger, the cred they built? Gone overnight. It’s their game, their hustle—but what about your business, your time, your sanity? That’s the cost of chasing self-proclaimed saviors, fake experts, wannabe gods. AI that writes flawless code, frameworks with no bugs, workflows that “just work”—blah, blah, blah.

It’s noise, not signal. And the community’s fed up: we’re done chugging these jokers’ Kool-Aid just because they sound slick.

How to Spot Them

It’s tricky—they latch onto what’s trending, riding the hype train with dummy examples, often without even testing the stuff they’re preaching. Sure, some are good at something—marketing, mostly.

That’s why people bite: in a sea of lazy thinking, they don’t need to prove squat. They just say it, and the algorithm does the rest—oh, that sweet algorithm! They peddle “the solution” without knowing your mess—always in a controlled sandbox, no real-world grit.

Here’s the truth: it doesn’t work that way.

Be critical—test it yourself. Don’t trust a glossy stream demo; throw it into your terminal, your team, your chaos. If it can’t survive a sprint in your trenches, it’s junk. Cheap gurus crumble under real code—you won’t.

Conclusion

If you’re still here, props—you’ve waded through my rant on these fakes. Tech’s too messy for their “expert” schtick.

Got your own guru fatigue? Drop your thoughts on LinkedIn or Twitter/X, or subscribe to Tech Trenches for more from the trenches.

Happy coding!

{C3P}