What I’ve Learned in 45 Years in the Software Industry
What I&#x27;d be really interested in is how tech churn is perceived by people older than me. I&#x27;m only 30 years in, so I tend to defend my generation&#x27;s choices such as POSIX, SQL, XML, SOA, Java, and C&#x2F;C++ before that (plus special-purpose pet peeves of mine such as markup&#x2F;SGML and logic programming which came before) though I&#x27;m also claiming to be proficient in and generally open towards new tech. I consider most of supposedly new tech as rehashes of things past rather than real progress, and to be just lock-in schemes and sucking in another way compared to the tech that it is supposed to replace. But I&#x27;m really uncertain if I&#x27;m just falling victim to generational effects, like, say, the proverbial COBOL programmer being ridiculed by younger devs to instinctively grow their own tech career. Still, for me, there&#x27;s a moment around 2006-2012 when the industry went all-in on &quot;the Cloud&quot; and consumerisation of IT, when before I saw canon, progress, and consensus through standardization.<p>I guess this is something that can&#x27;t be objectively measured; but I can say that initiatives for standardization have almost dropped to zero compared to the 1990s and 2000s.