The End of the Beginning

Basically, starting around 15 years ago, there's the proliferation of bootcamps teaching fullstack development, because software startups were the new hot thing, and they desperately need generalist engineers that were capable of spinning up web app quickly. Rails was the hot thing those days because of this as well. Hence we saw many new grads or even people who change careers to fullstack development and bootcamps churning out these workers at an incredible pace (regardless of quality) but the job market took it because the job market was desperate for fullstack engineers.

During that time, the best career move you can do was to join the startups movement as fullstack engineers and get some equity as compensation. These equities, if you are lucky, can really be life changing.

Fast forward now, the low hanging CRUD apps (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc) search space has been exhausted, and even new unicorns (i.e., Uber) don't make that much money, if they do for that matter. Now those companies have become big, they are the winners in this winner take all filed that is the cloud tech software. Now these companies these days have no use for fullstack engineers anymore, but more specialists that do few things albeit on a deeper level.

Today, even the startup equity math has changed a lot. Even with a good equity package, a lot of the search space has been exhausted. So being fullstack engineers these days that join startups don't pay as much anymore. Instead, a better move would be to try to get into one of these companies because their pay just dwarfed any startups or even medium / big size companies.

Just my 2c as someone who is very green (5 yrs) doing software engineering. Happy to hear criticism.

Now, looking back, it makes sense that the next logical step after PCs was the Internet. But from each era looking forward, it's not as easy to see the next "horizon".

So, if each next "horizon" is hard to see, and the paradigm it subsequently unlocks is also difficult to discern, why should we assume that there is no other horizon for us?

I also don't know if I agree that we are at a "logical endpoint of all of these changes". Is computing truly continuous?

However, I think Ben's main point here is about incumbents, and I agree that it seems it is getting harder and harder to disrupt the Big Four. But I don't know if disruption for those 4 is as important as he thinks: Netflix carved out a $150B business that none of the four cared about by leveraging continuous computing to disrupt cable & content companies. I sure wasn't able to call that back in 2002 when I was getting discs in the mail. I think there are still plenty of industries ripe for that disruption.

> The case for big tech today is still the economy of scale and not network effects (maybe facebook have those, but it exists only if the interface to facebook does not change).

This is only true if you believe that the greatest cost of developing software is running hardware. The greatest cost of developing software is developing software. Not only are economies of scale in compute management negligible except at massive scale, the cost of compute has declined dramatically as the companies you've described have made their datacenters available for rent through the cloud. Yet the tech giants persist.

Facebook, Google, Netflix, Amazon all have considerable network effects that you're not considering. For each of these companies, having so many customers provides benefits that accrue without diminishing returns, giving them a firm hold on market share. See https://stratechery.com/2015/aggregation-theory/

Ben is saying that the only way to topple the giants is by working around them and leveraging new computing technologies better than them. He makes the (admittedly speculative) case that this is no longer possible because we can't bring compute any closer to the user than the mobile devices.

> However, with Kubernetes operators, there is a way to move those capabilities into any Kubernetes cluser.

Kubernetes, at the scale of technologies we're discussing, is a minor optimization. Introducing k8s costs more than it helps far until far into a company's infra maturity. Even if most companies deployed k8s in a manner that significantly reduced costs, it's not enough to overcome the massive advantages existing tech companies have accrued. Not to mention all of the big tech companies have internal cluster managers of their own.

Network effects are THE factor in software because the marginal cost tends towards zero with each incremental user in the network. The edge adds cost per node.

Up until the point that users are paid to connect to the network and/or the network is directly linked to the user with the I/O line completely obviated, the economics of hardware and management underlying the network will tend towards economies of scale... which is the point Ben is trying to make.