I have an iPhone 16 and it has a sim slot.

Many mangers in large companies, derive their status and power from a knowledge of existing business processes and procedures. Any substantive changes to those procedures obviously represent an existential threat to that position and they generally resist it, often very vigorously.

For the reasons you rightly pointed out, the current edition is a disaster.

10 to 15 years ago, you could argue, however implausibly, that hardware constraints meant vertical scaling was impossible, and you were forced to adopt a distributed architecture. Subsequent improvement in hardware performance, means that in 2025, vertical scaling is perfect acceptable in nearly all areas, relegating distributed architecture to the most niche and marginal applications. The type of applications that the vast majority of businesses will never encounter.

It’s also a silly to believe that because it’s old it’s culturally significant. There’s plenty of ancient dross in the back catalogues.

I know an extremely clever young woman who graduated in performance arts. She had no difficulty in getting a job at a top tier consultancy company. This company was far more interested in her than some mediocre plodder who hacked his way through a comp. Sci degree.

As a sibling comment has pointed out, there are too many software engineers in the UK.

SPARK and its modern counterpart Databricks are essentially obsolete for these organizations. Whatever justification they may have had in the past is no longer true.

I’ve recently closed down several in house SPARK clusters and replaced them with single nodes.

In addition to the simplicity of the design and reduction in cost there was a massive increase in performance. I expect this will become more common in the future; leaving distributed architecture for a small and increasingly niche group.

We should be encouraging people to look at alternative careers to tech. Life after tech.

We should also be making it clear to students that while there are exciting things happening in tech this is not going to translate into large scale demand for people.

Large parts of technology are mature, indeed moribund. This is not a message that the technology industry wants to hear.