We were lucky enough to experience explosive growth of tech industry in the past 20 years. A perk of this golden age is that one did not have to work on legacy code at all, if so we chose. Better, we got to build 0-to-1 systems[1] that could make a difference, like the first search engine, the first key-value store, the first machine learning pipeline, the first resource orchestrator, the first data pipeline, the first real-time OLAP system, the first distributed logging system, the first bespoke compiler, and the list went on.
Unfortunately, we had this level of luxury because we had growth, especially new business scenarios that involved thousands of companies and millions and millions of users, thanks to the confluence of internet, mobile, social network, cloud, and machine learning applications. I'm not sure we are going to have similar growth in the coming 10 years, but I hope I'm dead wrong.
[1] The downside, of course, is that engineers tended to abandon a project after version 0.1, like what Twitter engineers did to their Manhattan project.
Unfortunately, we had this level of luxury because we had growth, especially new business scenarios that involved thousands of companies and millions and millions of users, thanks to the confluence of internet, mobile, social network, cloud, and machine learning applications. I'm not sure we are going to have similar growth in the coming 10 years, but I hope I'm dead wrong.
[1] The downside, of course, is that engineers tended to abandon a project after version 0.1, like what Twitter engineers did to their Manhattan project.