This is a growing problem in a lot of industries, sort of similar to what Joel Spolsky calls the "Lord Palmerston" principle http://www.joelonsoftware.com/artic

This is a growing problem in a lot of industries, sort of similar to what Joel Spolsky calls the "Lord Palmerston" principle http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LordPalmerston.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LordPalmerston.html Everything's so big, but you can't learn any faster than people before you, when everything was smaller, so you focus on a tiny area. In the 60's an amateur mechanic could understand and tweak a car, now they're so complex a profession mechanical engineer would have a hard time. How many people could have actually understand the issue with the 787 or with mortgage CDO's before anything went wrong? Only a handful, and they're generally the ones making the things.