❯Thechno-Sensationalism and Engineering Magic
Exploring the Effect of the Modern Zeitgeist on Engineering Culture.
There is nothing so absurd that it cannot be believed as truth if it is repeated often enough and dressed in complex language.—Michel de Montaigne
The main theme of this article is how the modern zeitgeist, the tendency to reward novelty, sensationalism and produce simplified representations, has reshaped the way we talk about engineering. I have already written about this tendency and its effect on hiring in a previous article, trying to underline how that field is replacing expertise with product knowledge and trendy peculiarities.
The incentives governing modern technical communication increasingly reward the appearance of sophistication and rapid consumption, creating a gap between how engineering is represented and how engineering is actually practiced and making long-form technical documents unpalatable.
After years of reading tutorials, I've become skeptical of how technical knowledge is presented online. I often get the impression that appearing sophisticated matters more than offering a sober and realistic view of engineering. I think the way we talk about engineering matters in subtle ways.
This is not a critique of the tutorial industry itself, that's just an example that offers a field of observations. I fear this tendency is spilling over to the less technical side of the IT industry and is persuading people that technology is more akin to magic than deliberate design based on principles. In my perception, there is an increasingly wide gap between how we represent engineering, and how it really is, between what we think we need, and what we actually need.
Technological Magic
It's hard to find tutorials that paint a realistic picture of how systems work. I don't blame people that try, explaining complex subjects is genuinely difficult. But overall the results are not beyond criticism.
A junior engineer today might learn Kubernetes before process management, distributed systems before transactional consistency, data lakes before relational modeling and event sourcing before CRUD. There seems to be an inversion in how these subjects should be learnt.
Another issue is the overall trivialization of design. Understandably, appealing visuals are almost a necessity nowadays. Over time, however, the production of fast content has become so overwhelming that it has shadowed the avenues that teach writing technical documentation and system design with more than arrows and icons. Leaning excessively on polished visuals creates the impression that engineering is more akin to a game than to a deliberate design effort.
Another classic are the tutorials that promise life-changing knowledge after watching a 10 minute video. This is a well-known criticism that I'm not going to indulge on.
As I mentioned this isn't a critique aimed at of tutorials. I'm highlighting that, though we may be guided by good intentions, we may still produce undesirable effects. I feel part of the IT industry may be led to believe that a "petabyte-scale, event-driven, mission-critical, serverless architecture for a real time dashboard" is easily achievable, and there's an easy tutorial to follow for that. Or that perhaps, even small businesses need one, even the one around the corner.
A Return to Reality
There’s also another subtle effect: tutorials often remove the negative space of engineering. Real engineering is mostly tradeoffs, constraints, legacy systems, budgets, politics, and partial knowledge.
Tutorials present systems in idealized vacuum conditions where every technology cleanly fits its intended purpose.
A healthy engineering culture would teach:
- start with the simplest thing that works
- complexity is a liability to justify
- architecture exists to reduce operational risk
- scalability problems are rarer than maintainability problems
The irony is that genuinely senior engineers often converge toward simplicity after years of exposure to complexity failures. Too much is done to chase trends and this attitude has shadowed what's solid and reliable.
Conclusion
This criticism is not really against teaching or tutorials. Presenting technical content in a clear and compelling manner is a difficult endeavor. It points at how the prevailing spirit of our time is giving an image of engineering as easy magic. Technology is increasingly presented through narratives of novelty, transformation, and apparent sophistication, while the underlying constraints, tradeoffs, and principles become less visible. The result is an image of engineering that resembles magic more than design and perhaps the tutorial industry is contributing in giving this image.