The current generation of engineers couldn't invent the internet

I was thinking about today's development culture of sprints and MVPs.

There is a legend that in South America, there is a tribe of natives who collect axe heads left behind by another ancient tribe that died out millennia ago.

They assume the axe heads come from the gods, and they don't make their own, they re-use the old ones.

Apocryphal or not, it the legend reminded me of today's startup culture.

Are we just building obvious applications on top of technologies created by a previous generation—mining it like a natural resource?

So many of the technologies that are being hyped take us farther and farther away from even understanding what they built. ¹

Firewalls too hard to understand? (use k8 ingress/egress instead or an AWS control panel), can't bother to package your dependencies (use Docker), is Linux userspace too hard to understand? (go serverless) and so on...

I wonder if the lego style development culture we practise today would even allow us to invent these foundational technologies if they weren't there for us to build upon.

I'm sure I will get ripped into for dashing off these quick thoughts. And I'll admit the argument hasn't been fleshed out as well as it could have been.

Is there perhaps a grain of truth in it anyway?

1: I had to explain sockets recently to someone who thought that you could only accept a single connection when listening on a TCP/IP socket. He thought you had to use a separate port for each incoming client connection. In a way he was kind of right (ephemeral ports), but this is despite having used and consumed other network enabled applications for his entire career.

3 comments

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mindcrime 6y ago ↗

Well... I think your headline is clickbait, and I'm tempted to flag this post as such.

But I think there is a kernel of an interesting idea to what you're asking. Certainly as layer builds on top of layer on top of layer on top of layer on top of... some subset of the population becomes increasingly removed from the "first principles" stuff.

But one counter-point is "specialization of labor". There still are people who work at those lower levels, and I don't see any reason to think that they could not still invent the Internet. Just like, there are still people who could invent the transistor if it didn't exist yet. It's probably a small group in both cases, but consider that the population of people who could have invented the transistor or something was probably very small to begin with.

codingslave 6y ago ↗

Actually I think the quality of engineers now, atleast at the top 5% level is the highest its ever been. There's more money to be made as an elite software engineer now than ever. Top graduates who previously would have went into banking or consulting may now go into software engineering (if math is their preference). I think we are seeing instead an explosion of open source software, some of which has dubious quality, but other pieces done very well. The lego style engineering culture exists because of great open source, the top 5% of engineers are writing all the code, everyone else is just gluing together their results.

maxwin 6y ago ↗

But you also don't want these stacks to be reinvented again and again like js frameworks. If it is working , don't change it unless you can bring it up to another level.