[shadowgovt]

The issue is the alternative does not scale.

It's not that companies are being lazy at our expense; it's that nobody wants to pick up the bill. If you write something to work against an online system, the fact it is online implies it adheres to some standard that you can work with, so solving the problem for one online client creates an artifact that is likely applicable to many clients.

Air-gapped systems drift. They get bespoke. They get very out of date. So you have the two practical problems of labor: (a) the product created solves the problem here, today, but nobody else benefits from repurposing that solution and (b) the developer isn't gaining as many transferrable skills for the next gig, and they know it, and so the developers who are willing to do the air-gapped work are harder to find and more expensive.

(I believe this is also the reason you see air-gap a lot more often in government security and banks: they can afford to retain talent past the current project with the certitude there will be more projects in the future).

[reaperducer]

The issue is the alternative does not scale.

That's a feature, not a bug.

Almost the entire downfall of the modern tech industry can be attributed to two things: greed, and the fetishization of "scale."

Not everything has to scale. Not everything should scale. Scale is too often used as an excuse to pinch pennies. If you business model only works at massive scale, then your business model might be broken. (Not always, but more often than most people think.)

[ByThyGrace]

how isn't b) a contradiction? You're stating the demand is there, but the developer is not seeing it? Did you mean to say the opportunity to remain in the same kind of gig is not as profitable/career advancing?

[shadowgovt]

Basically. I mean the demand is there, but the developer recognizes a small island of architecture is a risk for long-term skill dev and wants compensation for that risk. For a developer to take the kind of gig that requires working bespoke air-gapped tech that sees few updates, they're going to want to be paid X+N over the median salary X (or have some guarantee of / expectation of job security).

It's a sucker's play to take the gig at price X, work on it for a year or two, and then get tossed to the curb when the project wraps with the only skills growth to show for it a combination of those ineffable fundamentals ("everything Turing-complete is fundamentally equivalent") that are useful forever (but can be picked up on any job) and some knowledge of Bob's House of Air-Gapped Machine's circa-1997 Flash install that their in-house kiosk infrastructure ran on.

There are jobs that'll pay for that Flash experience, but they're a lot harder to find than if Bob's House had been using some modern web architecture and you'd picked up, say, AWS experience.

[dqft]

Hey, that's the problem with global homogenous culture too!