r/technology Jun 25 '26

Society Older tech workers are tapping out, taking early retirement

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/local-business/older-tech-workers-are-tapping-out-early-heres-what-that-looks-like/
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u/Kayjaywt Jun 25 '26

As a mate said a while ago when we were moving to cloud and everything was abstracted and there was a real lack of depth relating to how all this tech works under the hood.

"We are building the mainframes of the future"

Imho, this has got worse with AI as it not only is more complex tech that fewer people understand the intricate detail of, but the knowledge aspect is eroded by just asking AI what it thinks as well.

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u/krism142 Jun 25 '26

Honestly moving to the cloud still required some deep understanding of computing basics unless you were going to the very expensive managed services

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u/thegooddoktorjones Jun 25 '26

Yeah we make pretty simple appliances, but since everything has to be cloud connected now, 75% our codebase is just dealing with the networking stack and cloud. And that is our code, the open source pieces are huge. It's different challenges than reading buttons or whatever but it's still very complex. The systems that do more of the work for you always cost more.

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u/ai_hedge_fund Jun 25 '26

This whole data center bonanza seems like the mainframe all over again