The folks who keep the power grid running, write compilers, secure the internet, and design dependable systems don’t get viral fame, but their contributions are far more critical. That imbalance is no small thing; it shapes who gets funded, who feels validated, and who decides to pursue a challenge that doesn’t promise a quick TikTok moment or a crypto-style valuation bump. A complex technological civilization depends on people willing to go deep, to wrestle with fundamentals, to think in decades rather than funding cycles. If the next generation of capable minds concludes that visibility is more rational than depth, we’re not just changing startup culture. You can survive a lot of hype. You can’t survive a steady erosion of mastery.

It’s not limited to young people, unfortunately. About fifty years ago, executive leadership became far more visible in the public eye and combative with workers, all to juice share prices for their own compensation bumps. Conglomerates built on monstrous estates of interconnected business lines were gradually gutted and slashed to promote price bumps on shares, at the expense of profitable lines of business.

The net result is a (mostly) American business model predicated on Celebrity C-Suites doing highly visible things while those doing the hard work of creating value are shunted into offices and paid less compared to productivity gains over time. It shouldn’t be a surprise that social media and the internet have supercharged this, especially with groups like YC, Softbank, a16z, and other VCs splashing out Capital on flash over substance, exploitation over business fundamentals, “disruption” over societal benefit and symbiosis.

The net result is a growing schism of resentment by those who do the work towards those who get the credit, glory, and reward, versus those who bask in stardom and truly believe they can replace the perceived entitlement of labor wholesale with an instant gratification machine and somehow survive the resulting societal collapse such a device would bring about.

You think the power grid fell out of the head of some master craftsman thinking in decades? They dont teach the history of science for various reasons, but its basically a ledger of how over rated 3 inch chimp brain intelligence is. The power grid is thing of beauty. Today. But the path to that Beauty is one train wreck after another. Boiler explosions that kill hundreds. Wiring that burns down towns. Transformers that cook themselves and everyone around them. Hurricanes that blow half the grid into the sea in 5 minutes etc etc etc. We learn things the hard way. And always have. There was never any master plan. Beauty happened inspite of it with huge hidden costs that only historians tabulate and very few have the time and luxury to study. Individual Mastery is not magic. Because complexity and unpredictability in the universe is way more than what one 3 inch chimp brain can fully comprehend or ever handle. But we create more problems by pretending limits to what chimps can do dont exist. Look up Theory of Bounded Rationality.

> You can’t survive a steady erosion of mastery.

That sounds like an onset of a certain type of dark age. Eventually the shiny bits will too fall off when the underlying foundation crumbles. It would be massively ironic if the age of the "electronic brains" brought about the demise of technological advancement.

I thought about it recently. Not that long ago, it was perfectly reasonable to be as invisible as possible. But now, this strategy is not only not easy, but also has drawbacks, when compared to being visible ( and understood as useful by the masses ). I don't like it. It effectively means we all need PR management.

This idea seems to be lost on a lot of people. It's a shame to see mastery (and by extension, quality) becoming an anachronism and frankly, terrifying. There's a certain hubris associated with all of this that seems to be blinding people to the reality that, no, you actually do want humans around who actually know how things are put together and work.

That being dismissed as a "nice to have" is like watching people waving flags while strapping c4 to civilizational progress.

An example of this I've personally seen is a friend who works on COBOL mainframes at a bank.

He writes COBOL and maintains a banking system that keeps the world running. Literally like a billion people die if the system he maintains fails. I maintain a VC funded webpage that only works half the time. I make more than him, a lot more.

Has it ever been any different? In school, the majority of kids just wanted to have fun. As one example, in 9th grade I took "yearbook class". This was a long time ago, no idea if they do yearbooks still but I'm old and so this was before desktop publishing, it was 1979. In any case, of 30 kids in the class ~3 of them did all the work. The others couldn't or wouldn't follow the print company's instructions for layout.

Maybe it will be worse now but I kind of feel like the 90% is just more visible than it used to be.

The original system that created those folks was also quite hype driven. I think more signal than "is there a lot of hype" is needed to determine if the system is broken.

The scary part is that you can't just "hire mastery" on demand. You have to grow it

Have you seen "Tech Ingredients"? People like that and Dutch scientist/engineer who runs "Huygens Optics"

Just wanna say, I love this paragraph so much, I created HN account just to upvote it.

Imagine a space ship, hurtling through space, to some destination unknown to passengers. The systems that maintain the ship were all masterfully designed eons ago and the generations of passengers have no idea how they work, but the creators made sure to make them to be self maintaining in perpetuity. The passengers don’t even think about the systems or even have awareness of them, the knowledge of their construction has long been lost. This is the future of technology, the space ship is Earth.

I mean I'm literally a compiler engineer who's worked on dependable systems in the past, and I think this article is a load of crock to be honest. As is usual for many Americans (a great disease in the American mind, IMO), they greatly value the random lunatic over the person actually doing something. Calling people driven to do things as having strange 'psychosexual neuroses' is just shaming people without any evidence. What's wrong with having a drive to do things? That is literally what America was set out to do. It's hard to read these sorts of critiques as anything other than racism against the latest class of American migrant (mainly Asians) who are driven to not fall into the very poverty their parents sought to escape. Yes, if the answer is becoming shit-ass poor or being well off via pursuing success, then you are going to be highly motivated to take the route of success.

I'm glad you appreciate the contributions of compiler engineers, but seeing as my current job is writing compilers for AI chips... I am proud everytime I see someone use AI, in their business, in their life, etc,, because it's my small contribution to the ever-growing American economy and the forward march of human progress.

I'm also so tired of people making fun of techbros. I'm glad techbros exist. They actually make the world a novel place to live in. People who want to go back to living in the dark ages should go move in with the Amish. The sudden turnaround of tech workers (supposedly paragons of human progress) into unquestioning Luddites is disappointing

> The folks who keep the power grid running ...

I find this a great choice for an opener. If linesman across the nation go on strike, its a week before the power is off everywhere. A lot of people seem to think the world is simple, and a reading of 'I, Pencil' would go far enlighten them as to how complicated things are.

> secure the internet...

Here, again, are we doing a good job? We keep stacking up turtles, layers and layers of abstraction rather than replace things at the root to eliminate the host of problems that we have.

Look at docker, Look at flat packs... We have turned these into methods to "install software" (now with added features) because it was easier to stack another turtle than it was to fix the underlying issues...

I am a fan of the LLM derived tools, use them every day, love them. I dont buy into the AGI hype, and I think it is ultimately harmful to our industry. At some point were going to need more back to basics efforts (like system d) to replace and refine some of these tools from the bottom up rather than add yet another layer to the stack.

I also think that agents are going to destroy business models: cancel this service I cant use, get this information out of this walled garden, summarize the news so I dont see all the ad's.

The AI bubble will "burst", much like the Dotcom one. We're going to see a lot of interesting and great things come out of the other side. It's those with "agency" and "motivation" to make those real foundational changes that are going to find success.

[dead]

We have AI now. The machines will manage their own infrastructure.