The System Lives Longer Than You

In every mature engineering discipline, the creator disappears and the system remains. Railways, bridges, aircraft, industrial plants, power grids, and spacecraft are all built with this truth in mind. Their designers know that future generations will depend on the integrity of every decision. This forces seriousness, humility, and accountability.

Modern information technology behaves as though nothing will outlive its creators by more than a few years. Teams write systems with the expectation that someone else will rewrite them shortly afterwards. Organisations celebrate reinvention as competence and treat longevity as a burden rather than a measure of excellence. This is not agility. It is structural immaturity.

IT Lost Its Lineage

The first generations of software engineers came from physics, mathematics, and electronics. They understood constraints, abstraction, and consequence. They were trained in disciplines where careless thinking destroys projects and endangers people. Their mindset shaped early computing: clarity, rigour, and systems designed to last.

Today the field is diluted. Individuals receive weeks of training and move rapidly through inflated titles. Many reach seniority without mastering fundamentals such as state, complexity, or failure modes. Tool familiarity replaced conceptual understanding. Output replaced outcome. The apprenticeship culture collapsed. The lineage broke.

The Erosion of Long-Term Thinking

The Instant Delivery Mindset

A generation raised in an environment of instant gratification struggles to think beyond short cycles. Same-day delivery, constant digital stimulation, and frictionless interfaces shape expectations. Patience becomes unnatural. Long-term reasoning becomes alien.

When people are conditioned by speed, they build systems in its image: reactive, brittle, and shallow. The idea of designing for a ten or twenty year horizon feels unnecessary, even unreasonable.

The Corrupted Interpretation of Agile

Original agile encouraged teams to observe reality, adapt their process, and take responsibility for quality. It treated teams as thinking organisms.

Modern agile is process theatre. Tools dictate behaviour. Ceremonies replace judgement. Reporting replaces reflection. People follow scripts rather than understand problems. When questioning is discouraged, questioning dies. The capacity for long-term reasoning withers.

Product and Design Colonised Engineering

In many organisations, product managers and designers dictate solutions rather than defining problems. They impose long-term roadmaps detached from market volatility and treat engineering as a delivery function. This removes space for analysis, modelling, and architectural thinking. When engineers are not expected to think, they eventually stop.

Failures Born from Short-Term Thinking

Short-termism always extracts a cost.

Boeing 737 MAX

The MAX crisis was not a failure of engineering talent but a failure of institutional mindset. Competitive panic and cost pressure undermined a culture that once built the safest aircraft in the world. Immediate objectives overrode long-term safety. A company that mastered systemic thinking abandoned it, with tragic results.

Digital Transformations that Collapse Under Their Own Weight

Banks, telecom operators, and public institutions have launched vast modernisation programmes built on fashion rather than foundations. Consultants dictated architecture, timelines ignored uncertainty, and the work proceeded as if legacy engineering did not exist. These projects collapsed because they were conceived as prototypes rather than infrastructure. Billions were lost. Nothing endured.

Successes Rooted in Long-Term Thinking

Some organisations have renewed themselves by returning to engineering tradition.

SpaceX

SpaceX combines rapid iteration with uncompromising systemic thinking. Reusable boosters, standardised interfaces, and architectural consistency reflect a long-term vision. The organisation understands that systems must outlive their creators. Innovation comes from discipline, not from haste.

Toyota and the Discipline of Continuous Learning

Toyota never abandoned apprenticeship, craft, or long-term horizons. Its production systems are designed for decades of evolution. Engineers think about those who will inherit their decisions. Legacy is treated as a foundation, not a burden. This mindset accelerates progress by reducing waste and conceptual drift.

The Human Cost of Short-Term Systems

Short-term systems create short-term careers. Engineers inherit chaotic architectures and spend their days fighting entropy rather than delivering value. Juniors receive tasks instead of education. Teams drown in rework generated by past haste. Burnout flourishes where there is no continuity, no stewardship, and no meaning.

When nothing is built to last, people feel the same.

A Harsh Mirror

Consider your own team. How many expect their work to survive five years? How many design for the person who will maintain their code? How many understand the long-term implications of their decisions? How many shape systems rather than follow tickets?

If nobody feels responsible for the future, then nobody is building one.

Why This Matters Now

This is not nostalgia. It is a warning. AI hype fuels the belief that thinking can be automated. Juniorisation accelerates without apprenticeship. Architectural thinking collapses under frameworks and dashboards. Companies chase short-term narratives because they have lost the courage to build for the next decade.

Meanwhile, the industries explored in Gears, Triggers and Systems: What Cars, Guns, and Engineering Do That IT Does Not continue to succeed because they never abandoned craft, lineage, or responsibility.

IT must choose between maturity and spectacle.

IT Must Rebuild Its Lost Lineage

If IT wishes to evolve into a true engineering discipline, it must recover:

• responsibility to future maintainers
• intellectual honesty and conceptual clarity
• respect for constraints
• a culture of apprenticeship
• systems designed to last
• courage to think in decades, not sprints

Real engineering begins when you accept that the system will live longer than you. If IT continues to reject long-term thinking, it will remain a field defined by tools rather than thought, and by velocity rather than value.

IT does not lack talent. It lacks adults.

Real engineering begins when responsibility outweighs immediacy.