Comment by RossBencina

Excellent post. Two stand-out points are deskilling through abolition of apprenticeship (or equivalent progression through the rank and responsibility), and loss of institutional knowledge, especially tacit knowledge stored in individual people. These are people problems more than they are technology problems. Without continuity of process and practice stuff gets lost. Sometimes change really is progress, for example software safety and security practices have progressed over the past 50 years, but other times change is just churn, or choices driven by misaligned incentives which will bite later, as the article describes.