The 1970s Takeover

In the 1970s, software development entered a new organisational era. As systems grew larger and more visible, executives sought certainty, predictability, and reassurance. Engineering, with its ambiguity and iterative reality, struggled to provide that on demand.

Into this gap stepped a new class of intermediaries — people who could translate complexity into confidence. They brought methodologies, diagrams, and a promise of control at a time when software felt unruly.

This shift was not malicious. It was structural. Organisations rewarded fluency over understanding, presentation over mechanism, and narrative over architecture. Over time, this created what we might call the communication–competence inversion: the people who talked about systems gained more influence than the people who built them.

The Rise of the IT Consultant

Executives feared software. Engineers spoke plainly. Consultants spoke fluently. Fluency won. A new intermediary class emerged — people who could talk about systems without ever touching them.

Methodology Inflation

The 1970s birthed the great age of diagrams: waterfall, V‑models, structured analysis. Each promised certainty. Each added abstraction. Each moved engineers further from decisions.

The Senior Hand‑Waving Engineer

By the 1980s, a new species evolved: the Senior Hand‑Waving Engineer — a technical‑adjacent explainer whose primary skill was reassuring management that everything was under control.

Consequences

Delivery slowed. Systems bloated. Architecture became theatre. Engineers lost authority. Organisations forgot what competence looked like. This was the soil in which modern AI grew: rich in confidence, poor in understanding.