>>when I started working in the industry, I realized that it's absolutely exhausting.
It's been this way forever. For every level of the stack. When I started the physical hardware hadn't been settled (coax, ethernet, token ring etc.)
Fortunately when I started we only got paid when we shipped. So we were motivated to ship, not be distracted by rewrites. We were also lucky that as a boot-strapped company we had no managers calling the shots. We made decisions and stuck to them, and it's paid off over the long run.
Of course the product has changed immensely over 25 years - but the core code laid down in 1996 is still integral. We've spent the time on the product, not worrying about the sexiness of the tech stack.
Which is not to say we've ignored the tech stack, it's evolved a lot, but the stack serves the product, not the other way around.
On the other hand we don't have to raise investments, we don't have to attract endless streams of new programmers, we don't have to juice a stock price, so we don't have to appear modern or hip. We can just keep doing what we do, making money, focusing on the value to customers, not being (easily) distracted by the next shiny toy.
And yeah, after a couple decades you learn to see through the hype a bit and distinguish things that are good for you, not just the flavor of the week.
Well, some things did bring improvements, or new ways of thinking about existing problems, and some things really moved the state of the art. Taking your example of token ring -> coax (with terminators,eek!) -> ethernet is arguably a good progression (and now also wifi).
But there's also lots of churn in software and people solving the same problems in slightly different ways.
However ... this is also collateral damage from another improvement, imho - that is the ceding of control of the tech landscape from big companies (IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Intel, Sun, Borland) to smaller open source clusters of people and VC funding. There was a time when nothing happened without some big tech company behind it, and everybody waited for (particularly MS) to bless things and provide library support, IDEs and tools.
Those days are over, but the result is a bazaar of nosql servers, messaging servers, languages and front-end JS frameworks.
It's been this way forever. For every level of the stack. When I started the physical hardware hadn't been settled (coax, ethernet, token ring etc.)
Fortunately when I started we only got paid when we shipped. So we were motivated to ship, not be distracted by rewrites. We were also lucky that as a boot-strapped company we had no managers calling the shots. We made decisions and stuck to them, and it's paid off over the long run.
Of course the product has changed immensely over 25 years - but the core code laid down in 1996 is still integral. We've spent the time on the product, not worrying about the sexiness of the tech stack.
Which is not to say we've ignored the tech stack, it's evolved a lot, but the stack serves the product, not the other way around.
On the other hand we don't have to raise investments, we don't have to attract endless streams of new programmers, we don't have to juice a stock price, so we don't have to appear modern or hip. We can just keep doing what we do, making money, focusing on the value to customers, not being (easily) distracted by the next shiny toy.
And yeah, after a couple decades you learn to see through the hype a bit and distinguish things that are good for you, not just the flavor of the week.