Things like this highlight to me how insanely underpaid system engineers, hardware engineers and software engineers are on a net present value basis. You get p

Things like this highlight to me how insanely underpaid system engineers, hardware engineers and software engineers are on a net present value basis. You get paid based on some short future time window perception of the value your labor is adding. When really random people were coming to work some random Tuesday adding a few lines of code, documenting something so that someone else a few years later could add robustness or change a capability a few years later, etc., and it adds up to something that gets the job done for 30 years. It’s a marvel. I’ve worked on various projects that resembled this in some ways, primarly a defense research system for simulating aircraft properties and susceptibility to threats, built in the 80s and 90s in C, and still being constantly used for top level intelligence briefings in the 2000s. To say that the engineers who made the foundational system to have a prayer of living for 20+ years were underpaid relative to the value they created is just a ludicrous understatement.