Yes. For me it's not so much distractions as how everything has become difficult. In the old days I had a PC and a Compiler. I would use an editor to write p

Yes. For me it's not so much distractions as how everything has become difficult. In the old days I had a PC and a Compiler. I would use an editor to write programs and compile them with the compiler. We shared source code and binaries via floppy disks. Then we got a LAN and we started using PVCS (an ancient version control system I can't really recommend) and life got slightly more complicated, but the benefits were well worth the increase in complexity. Fast forward to the 90s where we had better compilers, better version control and distributed software mostly over the intarwebs. We ran our software in our own data centers. There was a lot more complexity, but it was manageable. Everyone used programming languages that maintained reverse compatibility and operating systems whose interface between the kernel and the app code didn't change very often. Then we got Python. Programs I wrote in 2005 wouldn't run in 2007. So I had to update the code. Then in 2009 it stopped working again. And then in 2013 it stopped working again. Totally fine, management just added a couple weeks per year for language maintenance. Then we moved everything to AWS. It's fine, it wasn't too hard to figure it out. But then people started complaining about CloudFormation. Half our teams started using TerraForm. Then we made TerraForm our corporate standard, which meant corporate wouldn't pay for the CloudFormation training class. But only half of our projects had migrated to TerraForm, so every team had to teach incoming engineers "just enough" CloudFormation to get them moving forward. And then we decided JIRA was a useful tool. And then we decided Confluence was a useful tool. (The problem with Wikis isn't that it's hard to find information, it's that there's no way to figure out if the information you're looking at is current.) And then half of our projects started using Pulumi. Totally fine, but to understand my app stack, I now have to grok CF, TF & Pulumi. And it still doesn't do what we need it to do, so we wrote some scripts that call into the Cloud Development Kit. And then someone decided we should have a central DevOps group deploy new code, but the pipeline from release candidate in QA to production release takes 3 months. That's fine, I'll use that 3 months to rewrite / test third party packages that were EoL'd with their Python 3.6 release. And of course they don't run under 3.8 because it's Python. And my boss wants me to make accurate estimates for how long things will take.