This article helped me come to grips with why I quit my job at Google. I wasn't one of the "first 20" engineers who worked there but one of the 60,000 followers-on that those first 20 actually needed to monetize on their original work. It was the same cognitive dissonance that I detected while reading this piece.
I think the numbers speak for themselves. It takes 15-20 moderately intelligent people to work on the "worthwhile" problems and another 60,000 just to even attempt to solve one "boring" ones. When those 15-20 engineers create a culture and value system that places all the emphasis on what less than a fraction of one percent of engineers actually work on, then you may end up with a pretty toxic environment for the vast majority of everyone else.
I'm tired of the cop-outs. Maybe before the ancient philosophers of computer science about decomposing the "black boxes" and learning how to perform deep-level software debugging, they could actually learn to appreciate the higher level problems that one only starts to encounter when using frameworks to develop truly complex software systems.
Maybe then they could finally appreciate the importance of releasing API's that aren't buggy and opaque to the point of being malicious towards anyone who is the misfortune of using them. And maybe within their own companies they shouldn't actually ruin other people's efforts to advance the state of the art in front-end engineering.
I mean I get it. I grew up in a household with a father who had advanced degrees in quantum physics and electrical engineering and spent much of the 70's developing silicon wafer technologies. I have seen him debug software problems with an oscilloscope and I would absolutely love to see Jeff Dean or Linus pull that off. There is always a deeper level, always an abstraction on top of which everything is built, up until you get down to some guy shoveling sand.
But most of us don't want to shovel sand. We want to create something useful that other people can use and which can hopefully make the world a slightly better place. If we had frameworks that actually worked the way they were supposed to in the first place, then maybe we would have some spare time to admire what's underneath the hood. Maybe then it wouldn't take 60,000 engineers at Google to work on the kind of problems that the millionaire founders of these companies don't seem to believe anyone should be working on.