@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange
Post #2017461
2026-05-05 09:14 UTC
@dckim @elizayer
In software, though I am not myself an expert, I see a nearly identical thing. You have modularization across all levels.
Brad Cox wrote a lot about this in the '80s and early '90s, but with a more positive spin. There are different skills at different levels of abstraction and the goal of the people working at the lower levels should be to provide tools that enable people working at higher levels. This isn't about deskilling, but about specialisation. Very few people need to know how to write a filesystem or a network stack, for example, to be able to build networked applications that persist data.
Replies (1)
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@elizayer@mastodon.social 2026-05-05 14:12
@david_chisnall @dckim I don’t think this transition is just about specialization — and this dynamic seems very different from Cox’s era! Take software testing. Agile sweeps in, companies axe a separate testing phase, testing falls of a cliff as a specialty. Yes, sure other skills emerged in this time, but we lost something important when we collectively overindexed on productivity over quality in that transition.