(FORTUNE Magazine) – Irked by ponytailed Web masters with more attitude than ability who command six-figure salaries plus options? Jealous of journeyman programmers who oh-so-casually double their day rates by defecting to competitors? Stunned by the C+ graduates with B.S. degrees from B- computer science programs who manage to snag $50,000-a-year starting salaries? You are not alone.

The good news is: It can't go on. The bad news is: It's your fault. Really. It's the tax on taking the path of least resistance. The millennial reality is that today's digital-development marketplace mimics the worst excesses of free agency in professional sports: Even known mediocrities demand--and get--outrageous premiums. Organizations may loathe that reality, but who deserves the blame? The most expensive wounds are always self-inflicted.

To add emotional insult to economic injury, few 40-plus managers with children and mortgages are thrilled to pay top dollar--while bending over backward--to recruit and retain snotty Gen X propeller heads who think a recession is something you skateboard around. Wounded managerial pride and premium labor pricing are a combustible combination. The situation cannot endure.

So there's a war going on. However, it extends far beyond the irritating generational divide. This war is being waged against twin evils that every firm wants to eradicate: cost and dependence. Because the financial and human capital costs associated with digital technologies--intranets, extranets, e-commerce, data mining, ERP, etc.--are so high and rising rapidly, organizations desperately need to manage them better. But cost management is complicated because organizations have grown more dependent on the people who manage the digital media that the organizations have grown more dependent on. It's a vicious cycle.

For example, companies did themselves no favor by anointing "Web masters" and building e-commerce infrastructures around them. Over 25 years ago software management guru Jerry Weinberg keenly observed, "If a programmer is indispensable, get rid of him as quickly as possible." That's not counterintuitive cleverness; it's the essence of good management. To this day, Weinberg notes, that's the single piece of advice for which he receives the most thanks. Of course, each new generation of digital management has to painfully rediscover this truth on its own.

Consequently the 1990s' half-decade of the Web master actually represents a pathology of bad management, not a thoughtful embrace of technological opportunity. Companies promoted the practice of indispensability at the precise moment labor costs were surging to unprecedented highs. Sorry, but there is no computational innovation or digital developer that is ever more expensive than bad management.

That said, it's clear what the future will look like. Companies will do whatever it takes to crack their cycle of digital dependence. Most will continue to take the path of least resistance; a few will skillfully use this as an opportunity to reinvent themselves. But make no mistake: The goal is to make the enterprise less safe for techies who earn as much as executives a decade their senior. Internecine corporate warfare is never pretty, but it can be fun to watch.

So expect increasing clamor for H1B visas to ensure the steady flow of youngish, technically trainable, and cheap developers from overseas. Fluency in English ultimately matters less than fluency in Java, right? At least that's what management fervently hopes. As the Internet globalizes at ever higher bandwidths, expect that nifty corporate wwwebfrastructure to be crafted in either Bangalore or Budapest. Like Nike's Air Jordan's, the designs will be done in the U.S., but the digital scutwork will be performed by binary braceros overseas.

The most provocative tomorrows will come when entrepreneurs pour their ingenuity into figuring out how to automate Web mastery for the managerial masses. If data mining, customer-relationship management, and tech support software can be made as easy to use--and as reliable--as a spreadsheet, then just how many in-house gurus would a corporation need? Using cheaper Web technologies to eliminate expensive Web technologists is precisely the delicious irony that much of the baby boom's managerial generation hopes to savor before retirement.

After all, a century ago worried telephone company executives calculated that everyone in America would have to become a telephone operator if Ma Bell scaled up to reach out and touch the nation. In fact, that is precisely what happened: Instead of operators dialing numbers, we do. Automated switches have created a nation of people who "program" the overwhelming majority of the calls they make. When that becomes the design metaphor for managing the net-centric enterprise, the war is over. Those young digital whippersnappers who once swaggered to their desktops will be working harder for less money. And, really, isn't that what every executive wants?

MICHAEL SCHRAGE is co-director of the MIT Media Lab's e-markets initiative and author of Serious Play. He can be reached at michael_schrage@fortunemail.com.