Because we still have no licensing body in software engineering (and I like that), the exponential growth of hiring during industry booms means that many teams are working with very thin access to historical knowledge because there are zero or few “old timers” around to convey past technique.

The new generation inevitably reinvents practices and sometimes resurfaces them through independent archaeology, and so there’s a lot of cyclical repetition of both successes and failures. There’s also sometimes lucky innovations when old ideas get aired out in a new context and yield different results than in the past.

If you’ve been around for a while, it’s easy to call out these repetitions and it can be satisfying to do so. But at the same time, it often means that the new generation is finally catching up on things that nobody’s been around to teach them. That’s something worth celebrating, not diminishing.