by Serguey Shinder
He had been writing software since before I was born, and when the team started moving to a stack that was entirely unfamiliar to him, I quietly expected him to be the one who resisted. I had watched other people with long careers dig in around the tools they had mastered, and I had privately filed it as an inevitability, the thing that happens to everyone eventually, including one day me. He did the opposite. He was the first person to volunteer for the migration work, and he was cheerful about it.
What struck me, sitting near him during those months, was that he was visibly slower than the rest of us at the surface layer. He asked how things were named. He got caught by conventions that the younger engineers had absorbed without noticing. And then he would look at a problem the rest of us were arguing about and say something that ended the argument in a sentence, because whatever the syntax happened to be that year, he had seen this shape of mistake in three previous decades and knew where it went.
That was when I understood what he actually possessed, which was not knowledge of any particular technology. It was a large and well organised collection of patterns about how systems fail, how teams talk themselves into things, and which kinds of complexity are worth paying for. None of that was attached to a language. It had survived every transition he had lived through because it had never been stored in the tools in the first place.
The people I had seen become defensive were, I now think, defending something different. They had built their identity on being the expert in a specific thing, and when that thing began to fade, the loss felt personal rather than technical. He had never done that. He talked about the systems he had built the way you talk about places you used to live, with affection and without any need for them to still exist.
I have started asking myself which category I am building toward, and the honest answer changes depending on the year. It is very easy to become the person who knows this framework extremely well, because that expertise is rewarded immediately and visibly, and the reward keeps arriving right up until the day it stops.
So I try to spend some part of my attention on the things underneath, the reasoning about tradeoffs, the reading of what a team is actually doing versus what it says it is doing, the accumulated sense of which shortcuts come back. That knowledge earns nothing this quarter. But it is the only part of what he had that transferred across forty years, and it is the reason he walked into an unfamiliar stack in his sixties looking genuinely interested rather than threatened.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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