Yeah I’ve noticed the sage/wizard archetype has been pushed out.

SWE culture was very different in a low interest rate environment. Teams were over staffed. No new tech came around for a long time so everyone was focused inward on how to improve the quality of the craft. At my big tech company some teams had 2-3 people dedicated to purely writing tests, maintainability, documentation, and this was for a <1m MAU product.

Then boom free money gone. Endless layoffs year over year. Companies pushing “AI” to try and get SWEs to deprecate themselves. It’s basically just trying to survive now.

That wizard that used to nag everyone about obscure C++ semantics or extremely rare race conditions at distributed scale has disappeared. There’s no time for any of that stuff.

Like all cultures, this was all performative. People astutely observed how to say and care about the things that they saw, the people above them, saying and caring about, and mimicked them to promotions. That doesn’t work anymore, so that wizard culture is long gone.