Sometimes I wonder if modern corporate culture has adopted soviet style newspeak.
Why are we immigrating to the new thing? For the same reasons as we migrated to the old thing. Why is the new thing better? Because it’s just so much better.
If you can convince the higher ups that migrating tooling provides business value, you can do something that requires zero insight or creativity for a few months and at the end of it be promoted for organizing a successful migration despite delivering zero measurable business value. The effects of the migration are gonna be second and higher order effects that are impossible to separate from the rest of the business so you can just claim the tooling was the leverage that let the people doing first order work succeed. Being a tool astronaut lets you claim a portion of everyone else in your orgs success without ever taking a professional risk, since your odds of being called out for an ineffectual change are near zero, since there’s no first order signals.
I’m not saying modern tooling is useless; I don’t use ed, cc, and make for my development. But there’s a huge difference between a zero to one tooling effort and an N to N+1 tooling effort. The first one requires figuring out all the implicit/implied/manual parts of the process. The second one is often just turning one set of configuration languages into another.
Holy cow. This! Exactly this! It happened in big corp., I am working at right now. As an engineer, I just watched it happen. When I tried to explain to other engineers, most didn't get it. Only a few got the trajectory we were put in by higher ups for credits they were aiming to get. But those few were onboard or powerless as me.
We just observed it happen. As the engineers, we did our job best we could regardless. Things broke, we fixed. Somethings rolled back, and even for those they claimed credit & celebrated for re-inventing the wheel.
Why are we immigrating to the new thing? For the same reasons as we migrated to the old thing. Why is the new thing better? Because it’s just so much better.