I’ve come to see it as a consequence of the industry’s pivot toward every firm of every size becoming more enterprisey. The enterprise habit of using 3rd-party vendors in particular.

15, 20 years ago, me and my T-shaped skills could get by just fine with a database server, a NAS, and some frank conversations about priorities.

Nowadays it’s not enough to to know how to work with databases and files. There’s also all these platforms: databricks, snowflake, new relic, sentry, datadog, GitHub actions, prefect, dbt, kubernetes, cassandra, elastic, and on and on and on. Each brings a new set of idiosyncrasies, its own terms for things, its own enterprise integration headaches. It’s just a hell of a lot of knowledge to ask one person to cram into their head on top of whatever skills and domain expertise form the actual core of their job.

That makes sense for an enterprise. Enterprises have a lot of bodies to throw at the problem, so they can have an expert for each tool who’s available to support everyone else. And they like to have support contracts and SLAs, which you can get from à B2B vendor but not from the KISS principle. And they don’t mind great heaping piles of unnecessary and mutually conflicting abstractions because that sort of thing is just SOP for a large bureaucracy.

But if you want - need - a system that one person with T-shaped skills can reasonably fit into their head, this is not the way.