There are two main schools of thought in software development about how to build really big, complicated stuff.

IT vs OT?

The career path of most application programmers is fairly short.

I think it’s due to the crazy growth programming has (and is) gone through. I think there’s still a relative ton of greybeards around, but they are vastly being outnumbered by the newbies.

This is also why I think we keep reinventing shit, typically in a worse way, because there are not enough greybeards to go around.