[lame88]

The right answer to this, as usual, is probably somewhere in the middle. Perspectives like this are pessimistic, but important because the industry has age bias and yet we need to understand where technology might be going full circle. But instead of taking that as a bad thing and stopping there, we need to understand why and how the context is different this time and what that means. Managed services in general seem to be the ultimate cloud computing offering so far, and aren't reinventing the wheel. They are expensive and costs can be hard to reason about (probably on purpose), and cloud computing companies are profiting greatly from inefficiencies, but they take care of entire categories of operational concerns. This feels like the natural progression of the field. We can take advantage of these things selectively while being conservative in when and how we adopt them.

Complexity is a difficult topic, not the least because the many ambiguous meanings it has taken on. When people bring this up, they talk about it like it's a fixed thing that could go to 0 if only someone actually tried hard enough. Yes, complexity is a problem, but that complexity is always increasing is inevitable as long as technology advances. The first episode of the 70s series "Connections" comes to mind. We need to be able to identify and eliminate waste while dealing with this fact.

[TheColorYellow]

> Perspectives like this are pessimistic, but important because the industry has age bias and yet we need to understand where technology might be going full circle. But instead of taking that as a bad thing and stopping there, we need to understand why and how the context is different this time and what that means.

I feel like this is a critically important aspect of software engineering that we are missing. I want to say this is because the field is so young relatively speak. The fundamentals have been changing so rapidly and are truly not completely well understood enough to be captured as reliable axioms. So instead we go down this path of recreation, sometimes with improvements, sometimes without.

In a hundred more years maybe things will be better, but for now this is taking on a bit of a vicious cycle. Literally people in the wrong age group are getting "moved" out of the scene not to mention the thousands of others in the "wrong" industries, tech stacks, and culture.

Software in today's age is a fickle industry when it comes to people...