Something is making us forget, and I can't work out what.

I meet a lot of engineers with as much experience as I have. Often more. Good people, sharp people, people I've learned from. And lately I keep bumping into things they don't know that they should know. Not obscure things. Foundational things. How the system they support actually works. Why a decision was made. What happens when the thing underneath the thing fails.

I've looked for the reason and I don't have one. Maybe it's laziness. I'd like to say it isn't, but I honestly don't know. Maybe the knowledge was there once and quietly went somewhere. Or it was never there, and the systems were forgiving enough that nobody noticed.

That's the part I can't stop turning over. Not "how do we fix it." I'm not there yet. I'm still stuck on when, and how, and why.

When did understanding stop being part of the deliverable? Was it when the tools got good enough that you could ship without it? Was it earlier, when we split every system into so many pieces that nobody was expected to hold the whole thing? Was it the reorgs, the handoffs, the rotations where you learn a system for a week and have forgotten it by the next?

A smaller version of this shows up around testing. Who owns it. Where it happens. Who decides what the tests are, and who says go. In my head, everyone is QA. Engineers test their code through whatever frameworks and processes they've built. The data folks do the same with theirs. Then the requirement arrives, from product or program or operations, and the testing stops at the handoff. The requirement is their work. They're the only ones who truly know what right looks like. Everyone else has to prove their piece. Why is this one different? A test is just understanding, written down and run. If the person who asked for the thing doesn't need to see it work, I'm not sure what they needed.

And why doesn't it bother more of us? That might be the real question. The forgetting is one thing. The comfort with it is what unsettles me.

I should be careful here, because I've always learned just in time. Pull the thing in when I need it, not before. So I can't be the one who says finding is the problem. But the finding always ended in knowing. It was the front door, and the map of how everything connects was what I built out of the scraps I picked up on the way through.

You might be the opposite, the kind who reads the whole manual before touching anything. Doesn't matter. The question is the same for both of us. Where does the learning stop? What feels different now is finding that stops at the answer. The ticket closes and nothing is kept. Same habit, different stopping point, and the stopping point is the whole thing.

Or maybe it isn't forgetting at all. It could be not caring, or caring about different things. I've been doing this long enough that my cares have set. I still want to know how a thing works, all the way down, before I'm comfortable putting my name on it. Someone a decade behind me might care just as hard about something else. Shipping faster. Reaching more people. Not being the one person who has to know everything. Those aren't worse cares. They're different ones, and I don't think I get to rank them.

Which leaves me with a question I didn't expect to be asking. Is it my turn to go quiet? Do the things I care about simply phase out, the way the generation before me watched theirs go? Part of me says yes, that's how it has always worked. The rest of me can't get past one thing. The systems don't know how old anyone is. They fail the same way for all of us. And when the tool can't answer, somebody still has to understand what's underneath.

I'm not writing this to scold anyone. I'm writing it because I'm curious, genuinely, and a little unsettled, and I'd rather ask the question out loud than keep guessing at the answer alone. I'm going to be quiet for a while after this, and listen.

If you've noticed it too, I'd like to hear when you first saw it. If you think I'm wrong, or that my cares have simply had their turn, I'd like to hear that even more.