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Notes -
I am not sure it is wokeism but rather that big tech are no longer startups but blue chip companies. When I worked as a dev for a blue chip company I barely ever wrote code, in fact I was losing my coding skills working there. There were so many meetings, so many stakeholders, so many considerations to make, so many other products that the code had to fit in with. Lots of time was spent testing, emailing and waiting for someone else to do something. Apple beat IBM not by having better tech, marketing or production but by being faster.
With that said the complexity of a huge ecosystem such as a large bank, the powergrid or Boeing is so vast that it becomes really hard to be nimble and many problems arise naturally. If one is buiding a space ship there will naturally be a lot of certifications, meetings, requirements etc which will make work slow. If you are working on google search you can't just push your code to prod and risk it crashing production. That feature that you thought you could hack together one night isn't worth risking a global piece of infrastructure over.
Tangential to the discussion, but immediately made me think of this classic article on how they build the spaceship code:
https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff
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