2. See 1. We aren't disconnected from social trends. The cost of change is huge, because the cost of a software developer's time is extremely expensive. We are

2. See 1. We aren't disconnected from social trends. The cost of change is huge, because the cost of a software developer's time is extremely expensive. We are tightly networked into cities where the cost of housing is 2-8x elsewhere in the country. So that two week integration costs something like $7-10,000 to execute on. The other interesting thing is the volume, the raw size of the software we have today. We have tens, hundreds of thousands of lines of code - and it's getting spread out in distributed systems. 1. I will make a flat statement without more than a basic justification... it's extremely expensive to live in the US and achieve a healthy life without extreme amounts of risk. Health care costs are absurd. Housing costs in a region with adequate city services is absurd. Housing costs in a region where you can find a job when you lose your current one is absurd. In the US therefore, most people have to orient on survival far more than they did 30 years ago. For justification, I refer the reader to the Guardian. But. I also have spent time reading memoirs of different people who lived 1940-1990 and taking a note of how easily they could rent/buy/move/find work. It's far easier than anyone I've met my age. Those times are gone, gone, gone. Today, talk to most anybody who just graduated college, and you will hear a story of how finding work was hard. Another aspect that is playing out is that the Boomers and "Greatest" generation basically vacuumed up a lot of the wealth and power, siloed it into their children or or haven't really released it themselves. And when you're worried about your health care and mortgages, you don't really have a reasonable way to take a new risk on your own. And when your employees are insisting on living in expensive places that mitigate risk, you pay the cost and refuse to take the risks, because they are stupid expensive.