Also, there has been a huge amount of churn on the tooling side, and if you have a legacy app, you probably don't wanna touch whatever build program was cool that year. I've got a react app which is almost 10 years old, there has to be tons of stuff which is even older.

Not that I disagree — Win32/C#/Java/etc have 16-bit characters, your entire system is already 'paying the price', so weird to get frugal here.

Agree with other posters who say whatever you think of Musk, Tesla styling has gotten very stale.

In the 1920s, a lot of auto startups had a unique idea. Then they got crushed by Henry Ford's and GM's production lines. And then the depression.

The Model T was a farm car. 50% of the population lived in rural areas, and they didn't have electricity. There was a market for an urban electric short-range car, it just didn't hit the economy of scale at the right time. But not because it was a bad idea.

(I śaw recently that the USA market is about 16M cars.. this would have been low figure years ago. But they are barely selling 'basic commuter cars'.)

Previously there was that Rust in APT discussion. A lot of this middle-aged linux infrastructure stuff is considered feature-complete and "done". Not many young people are coming in, so you either attract them with "heyy rewrite in rust" or maybe the best thing is to bottle it up and run in a VM.

The internet assures me there are loads of these underemployed Unix/networking experts just sitting around waiting to set up your infrastructure. But in my experience, these people are actually really difficult to hire, and not at all cheap. (Possibly the sharp ones have 'sold out' and gone the SRE route and are now one of those '3000' people.)

So I wonder if there's a certain amount of wishful thinking on both sides here, like "I wish a 'clueful' company would hire me to be their head sysadmin...", while companies who have tried to do this on the cheap usually just have terrible ops. ("Whoops, the backups haven't worked in 2 years...")