Comment by johnnyanmac

Hmm, I agree and disagree. Seniors were expected to take more responsibility, but they worked on smaller code bases. I agree the demansa have changed to meet the codebase and scale, though.

As an example, I'm sure the first Unreal Engine was made by a crew in their garage, in times where they were trailblazing techniques we take for granted 30 years later. That isn't something most modern seniors could do, but the engine could also reasonably be contained in one or two minds in its entirety.

But by UE5 you have teams that maintain every module of the engine. Millions upon millions of lines of code, hundreds of modules, dozens of features per module. It's a completely different beast. No one maintain all of that by themselves.

Maybe thars a part of what makes me want to go indie as an end goal. I want some semblance of the kinds of "responsibility" that involves a full product to ship, not just a portion of a module to maintain. Something somewhat close to what "old seniors" would do (even if I'm not coding every line of the engine like they would do).

I have spent most of my career with seniors that cannot stand up a new application of any size. The reductio ad absurdem of it is that most seniors today can trace their expertise two distinct areas: 1) superior refinement of basic literacy, 2) configuration of external tools. This is the direct result of business attempting to game economics by pushing cost centers out of their organization thereby resulting in a more factory like environment of hire/fire and then config and go. From a cost perspective this has worked masterfully, but the other side of that coin is that expertise is lost and never recovered.

As an experiment look at the hiring board for new YC companies. https://www.workatastartup.com/

Some of these companies actually are focused on product first, but most are focused on idea exploration and sales while building out the product as necessary. I understand that sales make money and code does not, but sales still isn't a product. Focusing on product first is a luxury only available to those that can do so from prior experience and with the confidence that user acquisition is more readily available to their product offering.