In 18th- and 19th-century German philosophy, a Zeitgeist (lit. ’spirit of the age’) is an invisible agent, force, or daemon dominating the characteristics of a given epoch in world history.

In my opinion, we are entering a time where there will be more chaos and uncertainty. More dangerous times, not because the world has changed, but because we stayed in relatively safe and stable situation for too long. No one noticed what price has been paid for the creation of such times, and what we lost because of good times.

World and IT

It cannot not to impact the IT industry as well. I tried to review predictions of what IT areas will rise and what fall and go through several articles on the current state of the IT industry. And see 1 constant change in all of the areas - the bar of knowledge and requirements has risen. Industry wants to see Full-stack engineers, instead of Front-end + Back-end; SRE and Platform engineers instead of just System Administrators, even if you are working with on-premise; dedicated Security and Network engineers who have really deep expertise in it; as well as AI/ML engineers, who of course should have had working experience before the AI hype!

How and why it happened? Probably because of the current world speed and inertia… In some moment we got more abstractions and delegated part of the work to the new layer, without expecting from this layer understanding of the things, that stay underneath, right? I think that’s the answer. And I suppose all the future engineers just started using it, without worrying about underneath things or other parts of systems. And then BOOM, no one wants to see engineers who don’t understand how all the layers work together as a whole system. But it is really easy (probably even “normal”) to not have an interest in the things, that do not impact you directly by months or even years….

So what to do to overcome these challenges? Understand the processes that lead to such changes and extract from them the things necessary to ensure a stable existence in the developed situation (nowadays). Learn things deeper, don’t overestimate yourself even if you achieved something, but never underestimate yourself either. Strive to work on more challenging things, that you have worked on before. Or if you have some other goals, like getting more money, for example, learn how to sell your skills to others, and than scale it.

But what about those who built solutions that led us to this situation? Take responsibility. Be accountable for what you did in the past and what you should do now to stabilize the situation. It can’t be fixed only by the work of one side or another, there should be mutual agreement on what happened, why, and how to live with it…

Probably, we even got some drift in fundamental things and should review them. As well as our views on the fundamentals…