Tech Through the Barbarian Lens

How Modern Tech Silenced Its Engineers and Surrendered to Surface

When the Empire Forgot Its Engineers

Modern tech resembles an empire in decline. The barbarians are not outside the gates. They already run the place.

They do not destroy craft. They ignore it. They do not break discipline. They replace it with convenience. They do not question structure. They skip it entirely.

They value speed over mastery, conviction over competence, and aesthetics over architecture. As Alessandro Barricco explains, barbarians live horizontally: surface over depth, immediacy over understanding, experience over substance.

Tech has adopted the same logic. The people who skim dictate to the people who build. Engineers, those who understand weight, stress, stone, and time, watched the shift unfold:

• those defining flows never built a system
• those dictating architecture never carried long-term consequences
• those setting dates never validated feasibility

Yet they spoke with absolute confidence.

This is the Barbarian Empire: a civilisation where those who know are silenced, and those who skim rule.

How Non-Technical Roles Claimed Technical Ground

When Design Becomes Architecture

Design behaves like Barricco’s aesthete-barbarian: obsessed with surface, blind to structure.

High-fidelity mock-ups become non-negotiable system contracts. Visual fantasies override constraints. Architecture bends to pixels instead of physics. The decorators now decide where to put the load-bearing pillars.

Design increasingly mistakes surface design for architectural thinking. It confuses the arrangement of pixels with the conceptual exercise of shaping systems. It builds waterfalls disguised as prototypes, forcing engineering into fixed structures instead of enabling the iterative refinement that true system thinking requires.

Each iteration should bring new information. Instead, design locks the structure before the system has a chance to speak.

When Figma becomes law, Architecture becomes collateral damage.

When Product Forgets Its Purpose

Product was meant to articulate intent and value: the Empire’s strategists.

Now it behaves like a general issuing orders without reading the map: dictating solutions, sequencing, and technical shape while avoiding the burden of consequences.

With the rise of AI, this drift becomes dangerous. Product will soon believe that "vibe-coded" proofs of concept generated by AI are valid system prototypes. Surface-level artefacts will be promoted as MVPs, bypassing engineering entirely and collapsing the distinction between demonstration and delivery.

This is the barbarian’s confidence amplified by automation: ownership without mastery, now accelerated by tools that create illusions of feasibility.

Clean problem statements vanished. The basics, what, why, why now, have collapsed under the weight of urgency and superficial noise. Instead of framing intent, product manufactures scope. Instead of clarity, it delivers ambiguity. Instead of problem definition, it substitutes ambition. This is barbarian horizontalism: constant motion without understanding.

Product leads like a barbarian: loud, restless, incurious about how things actually work.

When Leadership Commits Without Foundations

We, leaders, adopted barbarian time: the eternal present. Reality becomes negotiable and physics becomes optional.

Dates are committed without technical validation. Promises are shaped by optics. Architecture becomes the sacrifice made on the altar of appearances.

We negotiate delivery dates like weather forecasts, confident, wrong, and immune to consequences.

The Barbarian Loop: How the "No" Died

1. Product dumps scope, unable to produce clean problem statements (what, why, why now).
2. Design expands it with aesthetic absolutism.
3. Leadership announces a date.
4. Engineering signals risk.
5. The signal is labelled as negativity.
6. Engineers adapt: they comply.
7. Truth disappears.
8. Systems weaken.
9. The next cycle starts with higher cost.

The Empire trained its engineers to stay silent. "No" died of selective punishment.

Silencing engineers is the first step of every organisational tragedy.

The Cost of Barbarian Rule

Historical Parallels: When Barbarians Silenced Engineers

NASA – Challenger: When optics overruled physics
Engineers warned that the O-rings would fail in cold weather. Non-technical managers pushed for launch to protect schedule and image. Reality did not negotiate. The shuttle was lost.
The shuttle did not fail because engineers were wrong. It failed because they were ignored.

Concorde – Excellence killed by non-technical priorities
Concorde was a masterpiece of engineering. It died not from technical limits, but from politics, image, and superficial economic arguments. Non-engineers weighed optics above mastery, and the civilisation of flight shifted backward.
When barbarians rule, excellence becomes too expensive to sustain.

Empires do not fall in a single day. They decay when the guardians of structure lose influence.

When engineering loses its voice:

• architecture rots
• quality collapses quietly
• velocity degrades behind theatre metrics
• seniors disengage
• juniors learn the wrong lessons
• systems drift into fragility

This is the cost of replacing engineers with barbarians: the triumph of superficiality over stewardship.

Modern tech does not collapse from incompetence. It collapses from superficial confidence.

How the Empire Can Be Rebuilt: Restoring the Right to Say "No"

The coming AI bubble will not save the Empire. It will accelerate its decay.

AI will give barbarians new confidence: faster mock-ups, instant answers, automated certainty, and the illusion of mastery without understanding. It will put weapons of apparent competence in the hands of those who already overrule engineering.

Non-technical roles will believe they can bypass the builders entirely. Leadership will make bolder promises with even less grounding. Product will dictate solutions generated by systems it cannot evaluate. Design will push fantasies rendered by tools that never touch reality. And the pressure to say "yes" will intensify.

AI will not replace engineers. It will empower barbarians to ignore them.

The Empire can recover, but only by reversing the inversion of values:

• Restore engineering as the arbiter of feasibility and architecture.
• Give design influence over experience, not structure.
• Force product back to intent, not implementation.
• Demand leadership ground commitments in technical truth.
• Treat "no" as the immune response that keeps systems alive.

Civilisation rises when depth governs surface. It falls when surface pretends to be depth.

Saying "no" is not resistance. It is Civilisation.

Barbarian Echo

In Rome’s final days, the barbarians were not stronger than the engineers. They were louder. And the Empire rewarded noise.

Tech is repeating that story line by line.

The last engineer who said "no" was not wrong. He was simply outnumbered.