Yeah I used to have a massive spreadsheet tracking the entirety of household finances. I was worried that no one would know where the money was if I suddenly died, so I started a monthly finance 1:1 with my spouse. Even wrote an "upon death or incapacitation" playbook for her.
The second session was just her saying WTF I can't keep track of the location, ownership and tax benefits of 40 accounts!
I've since closed 3/4 of all accounts because of that.
Liking the smell of pine does not mean I want the smell of a pine forest fire in my house all day long. You don't see caffeine addicts rolling up coffee grounds to set fire to it, do you?
There's nothing subjective about not wanting smoke in my lungs. If someone wants to get pot buzzed, go eat an edible and waste a day of productivity for all I care. Smoking the entire house, and costing me my deposit while justifying it with "George Carlin wrote jokes on weed" is peak pothead narcissism that makes me want to have it permanently banned.
While I agree on the withdrawal symptoms, the main differentiating point for me is that drinking coffee doesn't waste time. Marijuana consumption is one of the most unproductive things to do for leisure. I don't do alcohol for the same reason, it's a massive waste of time. Both render the consumer functionally useless for hours, and, if you're older, assures that the next day will be extremely unpleasant.
There's also a big difference on a social level. Have you ever had a pothead as a roommate? The entire house smells like a garbage dump 24/7. Whereas freshly ground coffee actually smells good. Coffee addicts only bothered me with their unwashed V60s lying around in the sink.
The Tesla cars are the only cars I've ever driven that can simultaneously provide one with the very best, and yet absolute dog shit driving experience. It's a weird car that I honestly don't understand. Especially when people talk about the software being the best on the market. I don't recall the last time I cared about car software more than being able to use the turn signals properly. Great acceleration though.
Well yes, but whatever milk/water you serve in it right afterwards will still taste and smell of burnt plastic. I take it as something inevitable because no one's going to be giving a glass milk bottle to an infant.
Maybe I should dump every single child plastic drink/dinnerware for 18/10 stainless steel.
What data? I never said anyone can do coding. My spouse sure can't. Code is the easiest part of the job in my company where almost everyone is a genius (sans me). But few enjoy (nor do well with) syncing project goals with other teams. Someone has to do the dirty work while getting dissed by juniors for lack of code. I'm not sure if this experience applies to where you're working at so YMMV.
But I must admit that this is karma. For I have had an almost identical take as you more than a decade ago. Feels like I'm looking in a mirror.
There's a misunderstanding here due to context. Someone working in a startup (been there) will find it difficult to understand just now much communications are required to get anything done in a large MNC. Out of necessity, people who have pushed enough code to understand the systems have to step up to do the comms instead of being siloed. I had many a time freaked out some other team because the phrasing of my email made them think we're going to dump more work on them. This is the actual difficult part about engineering at scale: Getting everyone on the right page.
You can opt to keep coding, but it won't get you far in your career. Does this mean the communications have more value than actual implementation? It depends. Again, this value differs at different company sizes.
I just got the chance to code again last month, and I've already completed 5 features (code reviewed) that the juniors couldn't complete in a year. I won't say they are worse at coding, but more that I am more familiar with how dependencies work because I've already done the same thing when I was a junior. Also, knowing who to ask for help also helps a lot.
I stand by my statement. Code is easy and code is cheap. One day you'll understand.
Let me explain. Coding is the easiest because it's the most fun I get from my job. I don't have to talk to most people, I can have my alone time just writing code, cleaning it up, making it beautiful and lean, refactor as I like, whine about the unit tests taking more time than coding, and go home feeling like I've accomplished a lot. It's easy because that's all I have to focus on. Give it two weeks of junior devs telling me my coding style is outdated, and I've already adapted to the new meta.
System design at scale? Just trying to convince a separate team to work with us is a nightmare that I get insomnia from.
Coding is the easiest part of my job. FWIW I was just like you when I was a junior dev. Wondering why senior devs and engineering directors can't code. Now I know they can, but their time is better used to negotiate projects so that the junior devs can have their fun. Then I have to take time out to mentor junior devs on how to talk to people without being condescending, because that gets absolutely nothing accomplished in a large company.
To be fair, unless you're building some low level infrastructural systems, coding is the easiest part, and code is cheap.
Drop any senior dev into coding duty, and their skills return after one to two weeks. On the other hand, asking a junior dev to implement a new system that integrates with 3 other departments, and you'll have to wait two quarters for them just to figure out who to talk to and how to get consensus.
Isn't what you described as The Slog essentially just SMEs? That's not so bad. Perpetual meteoric growth for everyone is not healthy on a macro level. Couple of friends of mine are in what you describe as the worst outcome, yet they can buy houses and put their kids through schools (outside the US).
There's a middle layer of B2B that props up the economy in a more fragmented manner, and I don't think they should be dunked on.
I remember the good old days of having to script my own deployments on our own on-prem servers, with linter free wild west testing. It went to crap pretty easily because we were always customizing something, automating something, customizing the automating of something. Dependency checking was also very manual.
Nowadays we work with way more traffic that incentivizes strict bin packing of traffic within the tightest bounds of the resource pool, with the fastest actuation time. VMs won't give you that. Containerization just makes that so much easier and snappier for large amounts of traffic. But then we had to go global, and orchestrating containers across continents is a PITA. So there's value in k8s for dealing with that. These tools vastly reduce the complexity with regards to managing globally distributed services. But as usual, we start customizing these tools, leading to more complexity.
With that said, I believe startups need to focus on the fastest development and deployment times. So stuff like Docker, Kubernetes or Terraform are entirely unnecessary. As I commented elsewhere before, no one with a total QPS of 10 needs anything beyond GCE or EC2 or on-prem servers. People born in the Cloud age seem to have forgotten that they can just run the cheapest Linux machine with HAProxy and httpd behind a static IP. The focus on always going straight to Cloud complexity, if anything, smells more like engineers in on some VC grift.
Side note: It's hard to hire senior/motivated Java developers. It became a self-fulfilling cycle. Happened somewhere around 2011-2014, no one other than fresh grads graduating from legacy courses still used Java or .NET.
The second session was just her saying WTF I can't keep track of the location, ownership and tax benefits of 40 accounts!
I've since closed 3/4 of all accounts because of that.