I think it’s more so that when you are an expert in a particular system and you have very little bureaucracy/overhead in any particular task you’re able to get a lot more done.
I was watching a video from one of the creators of Fallout and he was talking about how things that used to take a day now take 2 weeks for similar sort of reasons: https://youtu.be/LMVQ30c7TcA?si=eJm_u-i1xwttfcRL
Our industry in general has added a lot of overhead and bureaucracy and does everything overly cautiously in comparison to back then. Things take exponentially longer to do in software development today. You can also observe this in how long it takes a startup to build a feature vs a FANG company.
I'm not sure it's fair to say that the industry has added overhead versus the 90s. Unless you're talking about gamedev, which I can't comment about. But it's hard to say that tech in general is slower moving as an industry than thirty years ago; I think there's more nuance to it than that. What exactly that nuance is I'm not completely sure, but here are some counterexamples:
Intel shifted the entire direction of its company away from memory and into microprocessors as early as the 1980s, in response to smaller, allegedly faster moving Japanese competitors.
IBM has been a slow-moving behemoth for decades; the story of how DOS began is an idiomatic David vs Goliath tale of the industry.
Apple debatably rose to prominence on the back of tech lifted from Xerox, which for one reason or another (maybe they were too confident in their fax machines) didn't ship their own tech.
Google was at one point a fast-moving startup, up against slow-moving competitors like AltaVista, arguably Yahoo, MSN.
Amazon's original web stack was written in C, iirc. I personally would have a hard time arguing that things done today in web development could be done faster in C.
It’s not tech in general that’s slower moving, but rather that software development is slower moving today (in my opinion).
To launch a minor feature at a modern tech company you need to:
- pitch your idea to your manager and get alignment
- get approval from your skip manager and buy-in from your product managers
- align your idea with your partner team’s roadmap
- go through a design review with your team
- go through a design review with your principal engineers
- write a task breakdown
- actually write the code
- write tests for the code
- write integration tests for the code
- fix build issues
- push multiple code reviews and respond to comments
- whoops you need to rebase and that shared component you used just changed it’s interface yesterday breaking your tests
- your integration tests failed in preprod blocking your coworker’s launch, better fix that
- a couple rounds of AppSec, UX and PM review
- time to coordinate the launch of your feature toggle with 6 partner teams
- oops there was a minor bug you need to roll back your feature and resolve it overnight
How much of this overhead existed in the 90s?
If a single lone genius like Ken Thompson or John Carmack wants to write a new feature or product and get it out to customers they have 10x+ the work today (at a modern tech company).
I was watching a video from one of the creators of Fallout and he was talking about how things that used to take a day now take 2 weeks for similar sort of reasons: https://youtu.be/LMVQ30c7TcA?si=eJm_u-i1xwttfcRL
Our industry in general has added a lot of overhead and bureaucracy and does everything overly cautiously in comparison to back then. Things take exponentially longer to do in software development today. You can also observe this in how long it takes a startup to build a feature vs a FANG company.