I think you're both saying something similar, but there's a "why" in there to connect:
> Younger engineers are ignoring lessons learned
Why ignoring them? Beyond the 'youth' factor directly, the signaling from the larger companies mentioned (google, etc) is that those lessons don't necessarily matter, and... look, google did XYZ, you can too (ignoring that they threw potentially 3-5x as many people at problem XYZ than you even have, much less justify).
Maybe neither of you meant that, but that was the connection I just saw between your two comments.
Yes, that's basically what I meant. I think some of the highly visible projects from tech giants today are succeeding despite their approach to software development, not necessarily because of it, but a lot of the new developers coming into the industry lack the experience to realise that and think of these projects as examples of how things should be done.
Every time I see some young developer posting on HN about how the code we write today only has to work for a year or maybe two at most, or how 10,000 lines of code is a large program, or how some high profile company's web site that is still fundamentally just forms and tables and an API for talking to a database is a complicated UI, I weep a little for the future of our industry and our lack of ambition. Of course things like performance and stability and standardisation and portability don't matter very much if all you ever do is hop from one small throwaway project to the next every few months.
I think the culture around HN is unfortunate in this respect, because from a commercial point of view, it is an alluring idea to build some sort of trivial MVP, try and get crazy amounts of funding, and then if (and only if) you succeed, to throw it all out and start over. As a business strategy for building the next WhatsApp or Instagram, that's rational and perhaps quite effective. But it also contributes to the everything-is-expendable mindset that plagues our industry, and since the overwhelming majority of software development projects don't have the luxury of starting over every five minutes, I think it breeds a lack of respect for professional programming and the skills required to build good software without the benefit of an effectively infinite funding source from benevolent investors (or from the goose that keeps laying golden eggs elsewhere in the organisation).
That might be OK for Facebook or Google, but I wonder how many other startups that fail could still have been very successful, albeit not in unicorn territory, if their developers had paid more attention to some of these issues. I wonder how much time humanity collectively wastes today just because software quality and reliability aren't taken seriously by too much of the industry.
