asyncmind on Nostr: The software industry gimped an entire generation of engineers. Not by making ...

The software industry gimped an entire generation of engineers.

Not by making software too hard.

By making it too easy to avoid understanding.

We replaced operating systems with dashboards.
Networks with APIs.
Machines with “cloud.”
Concurrency with frameworks.
Databases with managed services.
Deployment with YAML.
Debugging with observability products.
Architecture with vendor diagrams.
Engineering with dependency selection.

Every abstraction was sold as productivity.

Enough abstractions stacked together became dependency.

A generation learned how to assemble software without ever being forced to understand the machine underneath it.

Then the machine started leaking through.

Latency.
Distributed failure.
Supply-chain compromise.
Cloud bills.
GPU scarcity.
Data sovereignty.
Network partitions.
Consensus.
Cryptography.
State corruption.
AI-generated code nobody can explain.

Suddenly the “old” skills are frontier skills again:

processes, protocols, memory, filesystems, cryptography, distributed systems, compilers, operating systems, deterministic state machines.

The engineers who never stopped learning the substrate now look like relics from another order.

Except the Death Star is on fire and somebody still has to understand the reactor.

The last Jedi were never obsolete.

They were just waiting for abstraction to hit physics.

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