2026.05.06
In this new world, you're the head chef of a world-class kitchen. As such, you don't personally dice every vegetable, sear every steak, swish away every cockroach, or plate every dish. You have sous chefs and line chefs for that. But when a meal leaves the kitchen, it's your reputation on the line and your Michelin stars at stake. When the customer sends back the fish because it's overdone or the sauce is broken, you can't blame your sous chef.
To do anything, we often feel like we have to know everything about everything, all while everything is changing. As one example, at the time of this writing it's fashionable to ridicule the complexity of JavaScript development. Let's peek at why.I To build a web app, you might need to understand this daunting list (which is probably already outdated):
-package managers (npm, Yarn)
-bundlers (webpack, Rollup)
-transpilers (Babel)
-task runners (gulp, Grunt)
-testing frameworks
-CSS preprocessors
-build toolchains
-deployment pipelines
And that's before so much as glancing at modern JavaScript language features. Each of these components has many available contenders. Some depend on each other, some conflict, and it's almost impossible to navigate the graph of what works with what unless you live and breathe that ecosystem every day.
It keeps going. Because of the DevOps philosophy of "you build it, you run it," you also need to learn Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, and infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform, not to mention a whole host of AWS, GCP, or Azure services. If you're especially cursed and your company is multi-cloud, you might have to learn two or more clouds.
Thanks to these "advancements," you can now find yourself simultaneously worrying about how to center a div element on a web page, while you struggle with Docker networking issues because your CI pipeline broke after you tried to change to Terraform scripts.
Superior pilots use their superior judgment to avoid situations which require the use of their superior skill.
Dr. Dan Sturtevant and his colleagues did research that showed how developers working in tangled, non-modular systems are 9x more likely to quit or be fired
(And, as the saying goes, you can't un-blend two frogs.)