I’ve been into it about 25 years. Here’s a few of mine. 1. This industry is very faddish, and many fads are designed to make money for the people driving them

I’ve been into it about 25 years. Here’s a few of mine. 1. This industry is very faddish, and many fads are designed to make money for the people driving them or lock you into someone’s ecosystem. Avoiding those is a superpower. A ton of today’s cloud native trends fit into this category. They are gateways to a paradigm where you buy a lot of things as a service at a massive markup that are relatively easy to do locally or obtain at much lower rates. 2. Simplicity is harder than complexity. Managing complexity is merely clever while eliminating it is intelligent. Eliminating it without sacrificing coverage of the problem domain is genius. There is some very interesting academic literature on the idea that intelligence is or at least heavily involves data compression (and that this is what "learning" is), so this has some basis beyond the field. 3. Unfortunately re: #2 more complex less elegant solutions often win. Many argue that this is because they capture more of the problem domain, but I often disagree. I think it's a mixture of sophomore developers being impressed by complexity (having not yet learned #2) and the fact that complexity creates industries where money can be made on adjacent software, services, and consulting. As a result of the latter complex clunky solutions can be better at building an ecosystem full of self-interested evangelists. Recent example: Kubernetes vs. the Hashicorp stack. 4. If you make something work, you are only maybe a quarter of the way to making it a product. UI/UX is the rest of the journey. UI/UX tends to not be fun, so people have to be paid to do it. This is why open source and open systems almost always fail to achieve wide adoption beyond developers and IT people. They have no economic model, so they can't hire people to make the product usable for people other than nerds. 5. Infosec people are usually afraid of the wrong things. Most breaches involve social engineering or a passive mode of entry. Infosec people like to obsess about things that are sexy like cryptography but will happily type "npm install" as root on production and pay far too little attention to security against social engineering vectors. 6. There are 10X (ish) developers just like there are 10X athletes, 10X mathematicians, 10X writers, 10X salespeople, 10X musicians, and so on. The reason many people don't believe in 10X developers is that it's so hard to objectively measure developer productivity, especially at scale.