While this is a nice essay, it also is purely an emotional argument hanging together from assumptions and fallacies.
Even if you are right in this instance, just brushing things off with the "you are old" argument will ensure that you end up in some horrible tech debt spaghetti mess in the future.
Being critical of the infrastructure you deploy to is a good thing. Because for all the new things that do stick around, there are dozens of other shiny new hyped up things that end up in digital purgatory quite soon after the hype phase is over.
That's not to say there isn't some truth to your statement. The older you get, the more critical you do need to be to yourself as well. Because it is indeed possible to just be against something because it is new and unfamiliar. At the same time, does experience provide insights allowing senior people to be more critical to things.
Well, I fully agree with you. Perhaps the -hate “cloud shit"- remark triggered me a bit. It's just such a 'drown the baby with the bathwater', curmudgeon thing to say. And, imho, it betrays age. It's like my grandfather saying, I hate all this digital stuff, "I will never put email on my phone because with emails come viruses." (Literal thing my father-in-law always claims, and perhaps he's not even wrong, he just stopped using new things, hating and resisting change. He has that right of course. And to be fair with his knowledge level it's perhaps even good to not have email on his Phone. But it's getting more difficult, i.e. he refuses our national Digital ID, making his life a lot harder in the process, especially because he also resists help, too proud). It's good to recognize this in oneself though, imho.
I don't think it betrays age really, I just think that a lot of this stuff with AWS and Azure and GCP is overly complicated. I am not convinced anyone actually enjoys working on it. I'm pretty sure that 21 year old me would have roughly the same opinion.
As I said in a sibling comment, you can genuinely get a bachelors degree in AWS or Azure [1], meaning that it's complicated enough to where someone thought it necessitated an entire college degree.
By "cloud shit", I don't mean "someone else hosting stuff" (which I tried to clarify by saying "give me a VM" at the end). I mostly think that having four hundred YAML files to do anything just sucks the life out of engineering. It wouldn't bother me too much if these tasks were just handled by the people who run devops, but I hate that since I am a "distributed systems engineer" that I have to LARP as an accountant and try and remember all this annoying arbitrary bureaucratic crap.
Even if you are right in this instance, just brushing things off with the "you are old" argument will ensure that you end up in some horrible tech debt spaghetti mess in the future.
Being critical of the infrastructure you deploy to is a good thing. Because for all the new things that do stick around, there are dozens of other shiny new hyped up things that end up in digital purgatory quite soon after the hype phase is over.
That's not to say there isn't some truth to your statement. The older you get, the more critical you do need to be to yourself as well. Because it is indeed possible to just be against something because it is new and unfamiliar. At the same time, does experience provide insights allowing senior people to be more critical to things.
*tl;dr:* The world is complicated, not binary.