[eastbound]

But each person in this expertise is less expert. Today you can totally “cargo cult” being a software architect, which means recommending the solutions that everyone recommends, whereas earlier in computing you had to understand the entire lower layers and be an ace at everything before you’d recommend the same solutions.

The difference being that the architect today has problems reasoning about problems, and can’t advise much. They’d tell you what the cargo cult says.

[oreally]

This is a problem of mimicking/learning the cargo cult subject and missing the prerequisite lessons leading up to it. If expertise is defined as knowing the whole stack leading to the top-end subject and it's relationships, then yes it's a problem of incorrect growth and therefore the pool is widened and yet has less actual experts in it.

Jonathan Blow's 'collapse of civilization' talk goes into this quite a bit.