Don’t say “impressive productivity gains” when they are doing less and worse.

Yeah it got bought up by Microsoft and Meta at the same time. They are using it to lay off people.

“Be gentle,” I whispered to the rock and let it go. It fell down and bruised my pinky toe. Very ungently.

Should we worry about this behavior of rock? I should write for Futurism.

“We are gonna use MechaHitler for good we promise”

I understand.

Obviously, “knowing which cloud services to enable” is a lesser skill than knowing how those services work. That is not a parallel or equal skill in any way.

But do you assume people are just going drrrrr brain off when they don’t learn that one skillset you are accustomed to spotting?

Yeah I can see that.

However, you are now arguing a different point than I am getting from your original post. Maybe my fault in interpretation ofc, but the main difference (in my view) is:

You say “incompetent” and “less skilled” as general statements on senior engineers. Those statements are false.

You also say “missing the skills you are looking for” which is obviously true.

And the implication that before cloud, people developed the specific skills you need more naturally - because they had to. This makes sense and I believe it.

That being said, I am genuinely frustrated by how little people know or care about the plumbing these days. :D

I am so fucking tired of seeing someone spin up 3 cloud databases for what could be a 40k in-memory hashtable.

That is technically correct in a way, but I’ll argue very wrong in a meaningful way.

Cloud services are meant to let you focus less on the plumbing, so naturally many skills in that will not be developed, and skills adjacent to it will be less developed.

Buttttt you must assume effort remains constant!

So you get to focus more on other things now. E.g. functional programming, product thinking, rapid prototyping, API stuff, breadth of languages, etc. I bet the seniors you are missing X and Y in have bigger Zs and also some Qs that you may not be used to consider, or have the experience to spot and evaluate.