Really?

I was deeply enjoying reminiscing through fantastic memories - inflection points - throughout my 35+ years in IT as I was mentoring a younger cohort in a career discussion today.  After over an hour, I found myself repeating a point I made in the first minute of our meeting.  He asked me about the start of it all - .. I was sharing how I was a COBOL developer on IBM mainframes in the late 70's and how I would develop major applications by stitching together business and technical processes (subroutines) and compile them.  Perhaps I was just lazy - but I constantly searched (we didn't have Google or BING back then) by poking over the cubicle or meeting the long timers for lunch to ask about the existence of a certain set of logic my application required.  I didn't want to "reinvent the wheel".  That enabled me to leap frog fellow new employees in producing quality code at fast pace - and with agility to change it easily since it was not "hard coded".  Ironically, 35 years later - in fact just yesterday - I was having a discussion with a CIO of a very fast growing healthcare company who (like the picture) was laboring over the fact that he had too much backlog and not enough resource (people, talent, money and time) to keep pace with his company success.  After further discussion, it was clear to me that he was not aware of how far our industry has come and how easy it is now-a-days to "search and discover" that someone else has already invented what it is you need.  As an IT person, these days in the world of web services and now cloud subscriptions, there are literally millions of commercial or open source components from which to assemble rich and agile IT solutions.  No different than in the days of mainframe computing - just today much faster, cheaper, more secure and more capable.  ..... hummmm..... like the wheel - what goes around comes around.  Really!