Technology Advances; History Repeats Itself  🔗 **Source:** [Technology Advances; History Repeats Itself](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XSk1XNEhEM&feature=youtu.be) > [!note]+ Document Notes > --- > tags: [engineering-leadership, institutional-memory, mentorship, cultural-transmission, skill-atrophy, total-cost-of-ownership, conference-talk] > author: Zoe Cunningham (Softwire) - self-identified in the talk > source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XSk1XNEhEM > reference: "Technology advances; history repeats itself" - conference talk, ~10 minutes > date created: 2026-08-26 14:45 > --- > > [!info] Generated analysis - not the speaker's words. Sections below are machine-written > > from the captured transcript. Only text inside `> [!quote]` blocks is verbatim from the speaker. > > Do not quote or attribute any other line to the named speaker. > # Title: Technology advances; history repeats itself > **Attribution - confirmed from the talk itself.** Reader's `author` field reads `YouTube`. **The speaker identifies herself in the opening seconds: Zoe Cunningham.** She states she has worked her entire tech career at **Softwire**, starting as a junior coder, serving as **CEO from 2012 to 2020** (*"when I did most of my learning"*), and now sitting on the board while doing **outreach and internal mentoring**. Attribute to Zoe Cunningham; the biography is her own account. > **Venue.** A multi-day engineering-leadership conference - she thanks "Mary" for the introduction, references a "Scott" who spoke immediately before her, a "Charles" who opened the day, a "code your future" talk from the previous day, and office hours in the following break. **The specific conference is not named in the transcript.** > **Register.** A **short conference talk**, roughly ten minutes, delivered as reflection rather than research. She frames it that way herself: *"I've been musing on this."* Auto-captioned, filler words intact. > **Why it matters here, and this is the reason to read it despite its length.** This is the **third independent source in this batch** to arrive at the same mechanism - and it contributes the layer the other two don't have. Lachance framed it as a documentation problem, the LeadDev manager framed it as an individual-development problem, and **Cunningham frames it as a problem of cultural transmission**: the knowledge isn't lost from the people who have it, it just stops being handed on. **She also directly addresses the counter-objection the LeadDev piece ignored**, which makes this the methodologically strongest of the three despite being by far the shortest. > ## Table of Contents > 1. Summary > 2. Main Content and Notes > 3. References > 4. Paraphrase > 5. Newsletter > 6. Action Items > 7. Hypotheses > 8. Methodology > 9. Questions > 10. Future Research > 11. Implications > 12. Learning Styles Assessment > 13. Accessibility Assessment > 14. DEIB Assessment > 15. Logical Validity > 16. DARVO Analysis > 17. Conclusion > 18. Refactor Appendix > 19. Template Library > ## References (in-page) > - **Dale Carnegie, *How to Win Friends and Influence People* (1936)** - her one named source, and it's doing real work: cited as evidence that people-knowledge doesn't expire. > - **"Total cost of ownership"** - named as a phrase that has quietly dropped out of professional vocabulary. Not a citation so much as an exhibit. > - **Two same-conference talks referenced but not summarised:** "Scott's" talk immediately prior (job adverts, headlines about AI-driven change) and a "code your future" talk from the previous day, which she cites as the counterweight - *"AI is changing, but actually, is it changing that much?"* > - **No other sources.** No studies, no data, no writers besides Carnegie. > ## Summary > **The question she opens with.** The conference has featured two contradictory messages: *"AI is coming everything is changing jobs are changing get ready for the future"* and, from other talks, *"yes, AI is changing, but actually, is it changing that much? Are people changing?"* Her framing: > > *"Are they both true? And if they're both true, then why is that?"* > **Her answer:** technology is advancing measurably - she cites watching everyone on the train use phones, *"totally different to 20 years ago"* - but people have not. And *"we need to not forget the old adage that if we don't remember history, we are doomed to repeat it."* > **The developmental arc she uses to make the point, which is also her defence against the obvious objection.** At ten, everything is new - she remembers seeing her first rainbow after only knowing them from pictures. Entering the workforce at eighteen or twenty-one, *"you kind of realized that times had moved on from like your parents"* and **"old people just really didn't seem to get it"** - *"why are you still doing what you've always done?"* Then you become a manager, working with people becomes the job, and: > > *"you start to realize that actually people haven't changed that much."* > Her evidence: the management lessons that mattered most came from books decades old. **"How to Win Friends and Influence People was written in 1936 and the lessons are still relevant today."** > **The squeeze, and it matches the LeadDev source almost exactly.** *"teams are flat out implementing new ideas. There's fewer junior engineering roles, fewer junior managers, less time for everyone to spend developing and training people."* And the sharper version: > > *"this is not just about the roles not being there. It's about as every level gets squeezed, there's just not the time in system to help train other people"* > Plus a substitution she treats with genuine ambivalence: *"there's people teaching themselves how to lead by talking to chat GPT, which can be a good thing, right? and it can free up resource but also these are not simple like one paragraph answers that we want to learn from."* > **The central risk - and this is her distinctive contribution.** Not individual forgetting. **Cultural forgetting:** > > *"we're not individually going to forget things that we've learned but culturally and as a kind of group of people we are going to [lose] some of the leadership, people specific and also tech specific lessons that we've learned over the last 20, 30 years. Because young people are not going to be relearning them."* > *(Transcription note: the auto-caption renders this as "we are going to learn some of the... lessons." Context - the sentence is about loss, and the following list is titled as things in danger - makes clear the intended sense is losing or forgetting. **Flagged as a caption artifact, not a quotation to rely on verbatim.**)* > **What she names as at risk:** > - Leading through values > - Prioritising culture > - *"remembering that everyone on your team is still a human being and thinking about the experience of those human beings and how they thrive and how they do their best work"* > - Building relationships with other human beings > - **On the technical side:** *"actually understanding exactly what your code does rather than feeding something into a box and reading it out again"* - and she notes *"we're already seeing like an overturning of this learning."* > - **Systems and best-practice knowledge** - with the concrete exhibit: *"It's been so long since I heard someone use the phrase total cost of ownership... Do you remember when we were talking about, oh well, you know, it's no good if you just roll it out super quickly."* > **On the fully-automated-organisation vision, briskly dismissed:** *"you can draw all the pictures you like where we all sit there and we don't have managers and we don't talk to each other and we do everything with AI. Organizations are never going to work like that."* > **Three prescriptions.** Double down on human-centric leadership skills, because *"that is what will give you the strength and support and power to shape your role and the role of your teams."* Spend time helping junior managers learn these lessons. And *"keep these concepts alive in our collective consciousness by speaking and sharing."* > **The closing line is the best thing in the talk**, and it reframes the whole problem as a demand-side one: > > *"make sure you're useful to your junior managers so that they want to ask you the questions and not ask chat GPT."* > ## Main Content > ### Notes > **The setup.** > - She has heard two contradictory framings across the conference: *"AI is coming everything is chan Thank you so much uh Mary and hello uh I'm Zoe Cunningham. Uh we have uh heard from a lot of people both yesterday uh and in fact just now saying AI is coming everything is changing jobs are changing get get ready for the future. And then we've also had a few talks that are like, well, I mean, yes, AI is changing, but actually, is it changing that much? Are people changing? Like the great code your future talk yesterday. And so I've been musing on this and I'm like, well, what is going on? Are they both true? And if they're both true, then why is that? And this is the conclusion that I came to like technology is advancing and we can uh plot this and measure it. We can see it in our uh our behaviors. I could see it on the train on the way here with everyone using their phones. Totally different to 20 years ago. But we need to not forget the old adage that if we don't remember history, we are doomed to repeat it. So, uh, yep, I think we've covered, uh, me. Uh, I've actually worked my whole tech career at at Softwire. I started as a junior coder and then I was CEO between 2012 and 2020 when I did most of my learning and now I I sit on the board still and I get involved in outreach and uh, also mentoring within the organization. Um, so to set the scene, I I want to um kind of get into the heart of this history repeating itself by setting the scene. I'd like everyone to uh remember when you were 10 years old. And when you were 10, everything was new. Everything you came across as a child was something that you, this new individual, had never seen before and it was all incredibly exciting. I can remember the first time that I saw a rainbow, which was something I'd only seen in pictures and how, you know, thrilling and exciting that was. Uh and then maybe you know remember the point when you entered the workforce you know maybe when you were 21 maybe a bit earlier when you were 18 and um and by this point you kind of realized that times had moved on from like your parents uh everything was new and old people just really didn't seem to get it. I don't know if anyone else had this experience like coming into the workforce you're like oh my goodness everything's changed. why are you still doing what you've what you've always done? And then you get a little bit older. Uh at some point you become a manager or you you move into kind of positions of responsibility and you start really working with people like working with people starts to become like a big part of your job. And then certainly this is what happened to me. you start to realize that actually people haven't changed that much. And um a lot of the lessons a lot of the management I lessons I learned were from books that were tens of years old. Um I learned so much from you know this the very famous book How to Win Friends and Influence People. How to Win Friends and Influence People was written in 1936 and the lessons are still relevant today. So with that in mind, let's think about what it's like for 10 year olds today or perhaps more more appropriate like 20 21 year olds, 30 year olds going into their their first management roles. Um, and I could not have asked for a better preparation or better introduction to this talk than the amazing talk from Scott just now where I've got a few headlines here. Scott obviously had a whole page of them just before me. Um, and also we we all know the rate of tech is increasing and that's increasing what we need to do. Um, but also this ma this messaging coming in. So you're in the kind of So let's just flick onto this. You're in the kind of mindset of everything is changing. Old people don't get it. All of these things aren't needed anymore. What lessons are you going to learn in that environment? Where are you going to prioritize your efforts? Um and how's that going to affect your your learning going forwards? So just to recap, teams are flat out implementing new ideas. There's fewer junior engineering roles, fewer junior managers, uh less time for everyone to spend developing and training people. So this is not just about um the roles not being there. It's about as every level gets squeezed, there's just not the time in system uh to help train other people and help people learn these subtle and complex uh lessons that we all learn over over our human lives, right? In our human careers. Uh there's people teaching themselves how to lead by talking to chat GPT, which can be a good thing, right? and it can free up resource but also these are not simple like one paragraph answers that we want to learn from. So I want to talk a little bit about what risks that introduces and I think the biggest one are uh is kind of this risk that we are going to forget like culture obviously we're not individually going to forget things that we've learned but culturally and as a kind of group of people we are going to learn some of the uh leadership people specific and also tech specific lessons that we've learned over the last 20, 30 years. Uh because young people are not going to be relearning them. And some of the most important things that I think I've learned that I think we're in danger of losing lead losing leading through values, prioritizing culture, thinking about remembering that everyone on your team is still a human being and thinking about the experience of those human beings and how they thrive and how they do their best work. building relationships with other human beings. Like you can draw all the pictures you like where we all sit there and we don't have managers and we don't talk to each other and we do everything with AI. Organizations are never going to work like that. We're always going to need to work with other human beings. Um and also on the tech side, actually understanding exactly what your code does rather than feeding something into a box and reading it out again. we're already seeing like an overturning of this learning. Um, and similarly, a lot of the learnings about systems and best practices with systems. Um, it's been so long since I heard someone use the phrase total cost of ownership. Total C. Do you remember when we were talking about, oh well, you know, it's no good if you just roll it out super quickly. I think there's a real risk we're we're going to uh lose this knowledge. So, what should we do about this? Well, first up, I think that uh despite the job adverts that Scott's just talked about going out, despite people clamoring for more and essentially clamoring for us to be superhuman, the way to counter that is to double down on your human centric leadership skills because that is what will give you the strength and support and power to shape your role and the role of your teams within an organization. Um, spend time helping your junior managers learn these lessons. Um, it is still um, as Charles said right at the start of the day, right, this is still one of the most important le um, responsibilities that you have as a leader. and then keep these concepts alive in our collective consciousness by speaking and sharing uh just like we're all doing right now. So in short, just keep being the excellent human humans that you uh all learned so well how to be already and make sure you're useful to your junior managers so that they want to ask you the questions and not ask uh chat GPT. So uh I love talking about this. I would uh welcome all and any questions. I will be in the office hours uh just right now just in the next break. And this is me on LinkedIn, email. Um yeah, get in touch. Thank you very much., Technology Advances; History Repeats Itself, Zoe Cunningham (Softwire), 01m0yb84prp6q1qtaq9w0yx2gt.