The challenge of becoming a well-traveled technically-adept Renaissance man is much harder than it used to be. People say this is an incursion of more people just looking for a solid job, that we have less-engaged less-hackerly people, but ideally that wider funnel would also grant a much wider amount of people access to this incredibly compelling interesting field; I'd hope we'd still see a flourishing of hackerness. Alas.

The workforce tends to be employed at much larger organizations. This creates very narrowly focused teams, isolated to very different areas of product & platform: people are pdigeonholed in very specific tasks. Cranking out React widgets as the decades go by is all too probable (there are interesting challenges & arch questions here aplenty).

The irony is a ton of the money funding the large-scale industrialized computing came from the first internet booms. Where hackers did get rich, making small companies, & selling them to their more profitable peers & established businesses. Now the scale & industrialization inhibits the conditions of creativity that begat such a rise.

The industrial workforce isnt even the worst part of this sad saga, this march away from intelligible sharp systems knowledge. The system itself has ossified greatly.

The cost of technical diversity is being felt. We had such an explosion of open source means & ways, became so powerful. And that has diluted the intelligibility of systems, has a huge isolating effect. Rather than most folks using C/C++, there errupted php and perl and Java, which each had their own burgeoning ecosystems. The frontier kept expanding, with countless niches developing. While you might be great in your domain, might be totally on top of Django & just a genius productive whiz, your skills might not port. The fundamentals became diluted, and people specialized higher. Technical ecosystem diversification was a wonder & has let us explore & find so many great ways of doing things, but: Babel fell. A fairly unified culture became many. Tru polylingualism & polysystemism, being an Ur programmer, is much wiser a journey today, and that isolation has hurt & encumbered the view of most developers, has kept them from seeing a wider scene. Chained to the wall, being very industrially productive at marionette play.

And then the worst hit. The great ossification & stalen-ing of computing as a thing in the world. The dematerialization of computing the massification. Most computing floated up to a place where no one can see or learn or experience what is happening, has left the box, effervesced into the cloud. No one can touch computing today, there's no mortal computing, no personal computing left. Intelligent sharp computing offerings like Yahoo Pipes and IFTTT disappear & shrink. The output of the industry has gotten more and more uninteresting, less and less expert, less and less exposing of computing; endless appification, consumerizatio. How is anyone going to fall in love with & properly obsess-like they ought-over a world of black boxes?

Eventually we'll reawaken to cool human computing. Stop using computing only as a means to an end & start caring about the medium itself. And beget new cultures of truly epic hackers. It won't even look too too different from today I'd guess, it'll be built on the Titanous skeleton of open source. But it'll also have access & packages in to the beast, not merely be riding atop it's shoulders.