The Golden Age of Tech was when *I* was young and growing

There’s a subreddit dedicated to people who talk about how they were born in the wrong generation because they only really like the good stuff - the music from before they were born. People like what they want, but it is almost easier to like older music - it gives you hipster appeal, only the best stuff survived and it’s often played in movies and dispersed throughout popular culture so it’s a bit familiar too.

I have something like this belief but with respect to the tech industry. Specifically, I believe that there was a golden age of figuring out distributed systems and how to serve millions of users really cheap. That was done by 2011, we knew as a society how to build reliable, scalable systems, and most importantly had begun commoditizing these things. The rise of cloud technology is basically giving the power of late 2000s giants like Google and Facebook to literally anyone with enough cash.

This has one side effect for a self-identified coder - coding isn’t really the competitive advantage it used to be. If it ever even was. Or maybe I think of it in even narrower terms - there was a time when your company lived or died based on the quality of your coders. But because coding was such an expensive thing to get right in terms of money and time, people built tools to make it cheaper and were wildly successful. Now you can build a very successful business writing No Code.

That’s good. It’s also an effect that percolates through the industry - to begin with, giants like the FAANG are not competing with each other very much. When they do compete, I would argue they rarely compete on the quality of technology - Google Assistant is IMHO, much better than Alexa or Cortana or blech, Siri. But Alexa is much more useful since it plugs into the Amazon walled garden. I would argue that it is precisely the walled gardens that stamp out competition on technology. When the web was wild and open, whoever wrote the best crawler and indexer won the search engine wars. Now whoever has the largest real world logistics capability wins, just like before tech.