I’ve encountered a heap of group 2. They’re the ones sick of learning new things, for whatever reason.

I think it's easy to dismiss that group, but the truth is there was a lot of flux in our industry in the last decade before AI, and I would say almost none of it was beneficial in any way whatsoever.

If I had more time I could write an essay arguing that the 2010s in software development was the rise of the complexity for complexity's sake that didn't make solving real world problems any easier and often massively increased the cost of software development, and worse the drudgery, with little actually achieved.

The thought leaders were big companies who faced problems almost no-one else did, but everyone copied them.

Which led to an unpleasant coding environment where you felt like a hamster spinning in a wheel, constantly having to learn the new hotness or you were a dinosaur just to do what you could already do.

Right now I can throw a wireframe at an AI and poof it's done, react, angular, or whatever who-gives-a-flying-sock about the next stupid javascript framework it's there. Have you switched from webpack to vite to bun? Poof, AI couldn't care less, I can use whatever stupid acronym command line tool you've decided is flavour of the month. Need to write some Lovecraftian-inspired yaml document for whatever dumbass deploy hotness is trending this week? AI has done it and I didn't have to spend 3 months trying to debug whatever stupid format some tit at netflix or amazon or google or meta came up with because they literally had nothing better to do with their life and bang my head against the wall when it falls over every 3 weeks but management are insisting the k8s is the only way to deploy things.

That in itself feels like second-system syndrome but instead of playing out over a single software project it’s the large-scale version playing out over the entire industry.