❯Thechno-Sensationalism and the Tutorial Industry

There is nothing so absurd that it cannot be believed as truth if it is repeated often enough and dressed in complex language.

—Michel de Montaigne

I've come to the conclusion that the modern IT tutorials industry is having detrimental effects on engineering. Teaching occupies a prominent place among the most valuable endeavors. It's an activity that is considered beneficial to the society, it connects with our need to explore and grow and it supports progress. However, its value makes it vulnerable to exploitation.

Teaching is too broad a subject for a sweeping analysis, which can easily become vague or misunderstood. Instead, I want to focus on a specific, modern problem. This is not a critique of teaching itself, but of the vicious interplay between today's techno-sensationalism and the tutorial industry. This industry has been deeply infected by the modern zeitgeist; a culture where everything must be hyped, sensationalized, and designed purely for a 'wow' effect.

Tutorial Hell

The most evident result of this interplay is the production of either hyper complex architectures or very simple ones. Whether it's software, Cloud or data, no engineering field is spared.

Both approaches find an audience. Complex architectures appeal through their aura of authority and sophistication, while simpler ones promise mastery in just a few easy steps. Ultimately, both market themselves as impressive, they just leverage different angles.

The result is that many engineers are not introduced to technologies in a comprehensive way, built from solid foundations, but rely on superficial justifications. Many of these tutorials are mired with inaccuracies that can easily mislead those less experienced. Ironically, both trends rarely result in an architecture that is more extensible, controllable, resilient, or observable. Apparently, the boring but essential groundwork must be avoided at all costs.

I’d hate to go too far with the critique, but there’s part of our industry that likes to build moats of performative complexity. It’s a deliberate (or subconscious) effort to create an impression that their job possesses a rare sophistication that puts it out of reach for common mortals (Hello AI engineers!).

But engineering in production usually rewards the opposite: reduction, clarity, stability, operability, and maintenance cost.

This creates several distortions where engineers start associating “good engineering” with visible complexity. The result is that we can’t consider simplicity and reliability as a goal.

A junior engineer today might learn Kubernetes before process management, distributed systems before transactional consistency, data lakes before relational modeling and event sourcing before CRUD.

A Return to Reality

Nature is hidden by the complex; it is restored by the simple.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

There’s also another subtle effect: tutorials often remove the negative space of engineering. Real engineering is mostly tradeoffs, constraints, legacy systems, budgets, politics, and partial knowledge.

Tutorials present systems in idealized vacuum conditions where every technology cleanly fits its intended purpose.

A healthy engineering culture would teach:

• start with the simplest thing that works
• complexity is a liability to justify
• architecture exists to reduce operational risk, not increase prestige
• scalability problems are rarer than maintainability problems

The irony is that genuinely senior engineers often converge toward simplicity after years of exposure to complexity failures. Too much is done to chase trends and this attitude has shadowed what's solid and reliable.

Conclusion

This criticism is not really against teaching. It’s against the transformation of teaching into entertainment, branding, and status performance. We have access to infinite streams of information, but we fail to produce anything of enduring value. There's a way to serve information that is seductive and produces a feeling of having learnt something, but that feeling vanishes quickly in front of a test. Perhaps struggling to reach a goal is learning or at least big part of it. Put yourself in front of a blank page and force yourself to write, it's one of the best exercises.