Nobody is coming up behind me
Somebody used to be learning this behind me, and that is the part I notice most.
Almost everything I know arrived from other people, a bit at a time, and a good share of it arrived while I was explaining it to somebody newer. A junior with a broken thing on a desk, me talking through what I would try next, both of us better off by the time it worked. The explaining was never a favour I was doing. It is how the work moved from one pair of hands to the next, and it is how I got any of it in the first place.
It has gone quiet. I still answer questions, and I still like being asked. But the question that used to land on my desk now goes to a tool, and the tool is quicker than me, and it does not take its time or make anybody feel stupid for asking. Sitting where I sit, I would do the same.
What is left is a trade with nobody at the bottom of it. The early years of this work were always where you learned it. Small jobs and dull faults, the bits nobody senior wanted. That is the shelf the tools reached first. Not by design, as far as I can see. It is where the cheapest work was, and a young person is the cheapest pair of hands in the room.
So the door I came in through has narrowed while the room behind it went quiet. I am the one at the end of a short queue now, and there is no newer person standing where I stood, holding the same broken thing and waiting to be told what to look at.
I have asked myself whether that matters, given how much of this work is going anyway. It matters to me for a smaller reason than the job. A trade lives in other people's habits, handed over while somebody waits for a fix. When that stops happening, what is left is a set of individuals who each happen to know something, with nothing carrying it forward. I would rather it not go that way, and I have no lever on it.
What I can do is small and it is the same as it ever was. I answer when somebody asks. I write down what I fixed and why, so the next person can read it without me. I keep the sites up and the servers patched. If anyone wants to know how a thing works, I will sit with it for as long as it takes, which is a habit older than the tools and free to keep.