I know it's kind of wrong, but I miss being part of a smaller community. I wasn't even one of the really early pioneers, but when I started computing was still

I know it's kind of wrong, but I miss being part of a smaller community. I wasn't even one of the really early pioneers, but when I started computing was still small enough that I could find common ground with just about any other programmer I met. Sure we had our specialization and even our disagreements, but there was probably some overlap between what we each knew. We also got the chance to work on some genuinely new things. The early days of SMP or clustering were pretty cool. Nobody really knew all the answers or thought they did. We were all experimenting. Now there are so many programmers doing so many different things that we might have no shared knowledge, and so much of what most people do is reimplementing or papering over the flaws in some previous piece of software, layer upon layer like a giant midden. I'm exaggerating a bit, but it really does feel different in a way that makes me sad. Since this is phrased as "old guys" I'll also add that I miss working with more women. Remember when I mentioned the early days of SMP? In those days we were still working closely with the people who were figuring out how to physically connect the pieces, keep caches coherent, what kinds of lock instructions (let alone higher-level patterns) would be useful, etc. Hard core stuff, and maybe a third of the people I was working with were women. That's still not a majority, but it's down to less than half that in most teams I've been on for the past decade. Things have gotten worse, and that really makes me sad. In so many ways, I feel this industry has been going backward.