I think that faith in "disruption" is one of those modern business myths, that's applied in hindsight to famous entrepreneurs. I don't think it's something you can plan, hire, or even hope for. There are two analogies that give me pause:
1. The "insurgency" problem: The people who can overthrow a government are never the same people as, or are even willing to cooperate with, the people who can govern.
2. The "second system effect" described by Fred Brooks. The workings of a bureaucracy seem analogous to a massive, complex software app that must be kept running while it's being completely re-written from scratch.
I'm thinking 1 is more like: "The devs who can write a new system are not the same as the devs who can keep a system running."
That's definitely true in my experience. The people you can hire to write a totally new system are out there in abundance. But finding a guy or gal good at maintenance is actually surprisingly difficult. Good maintenance devs are worth their weight in gold.
Yes! Was trying to keep the 2 points tightly integrated but your thinking is definitely closer to analog31's interpretation of the political economics.
There can be a cyclical aspect to the situation: the new hire gives up fixing legacy and rewrites the base out of anger. Probably many other archetypes that I missed, all of which resemble the basic setup. One might also generalize "coding culture" to "culture around legal codes".
To pile on your point: meanwhile, the suboptimal job market conditions (shall we say) preps the engineering culture for vicious spirals
These are all good points, but the people I'm talking about at a high level are more like managers, not devs. The managers haven't even expressed an interest in managing anything.
The thing with disruptive tech these days is that they are more or less inevitable once component manufacturing has enabled it to be built in bulk. This is because no one is rolling their own factory and creating end product from raw material input anymore. They want a $new thing it better be something they can assemble from mass market components today they can order to create inventory of end product for customers.
Even going back to the ipod. Was it really disruptive, or was it inevitable we’d get mp3 players when the cost of their components hit a certain price? I think the latter although the legend is of course the former. I’m not sure when the last time we had something truly disruptive and unpredictable emerge.
1. The "insurgency" problem: The people who can overthrow a government are never the same people as, or are even willing to cooperate with, the people who can govern.
2. The "second system effect" described by Fred Brooks. The workings of a bureaucracy seem analogous to a massive, complex software app that must be kept running while it's being completely re-written from scratch.