Tech workers might be some of the best-paid employees around, but the relevance of their work is surprisingly fleeting.
Few technology leaders have been as candid about the ephemeral nature of innovation as Steve Jobs was in a rare moment of philosophical reflection. Speaking years before the iPhone would cement his legacy, Jobs offered a sobering perspective on the tech industry that rings even truer today. His metaphor of technological progress as geological sediment—where each layer builds upon the last but remains largely invisible to those standing on the surface—captures something profound about the relentless pace of digital evolution.
“All the work that I’ve done in my life will be obsolete by the time I’m 50,” Jobs observed with characteristic directness. “Apple II’s obsolete now. Apple I’s were obsolete many years ago. The Macintosh is on the verge of becoming obsolete in the next few years.” This wasn’t false modesty from someone who had already revolutionized personal computing multiple times—it was a clear-eyed assessment of technological reality.
Jobs continued his analysis by distinguishing technology from other creative fields: “This is a field where one does not write a Principia, which holds up for 200 years. This is not a field where one paints a painting that’ll be looked at for centuries. This is a field where one does one’s work and in 10 years it’s obsolete and really will not be usable within 10 or 20 years.”
The practical implications were stark in his mind: “I mean, you can’t go back and use an Apple I because there’s no software for it. And another 10 or so you won’t be able to use an Apple II. You wouldn’t be able to fire it up and see what it was like.” He then offered his geological metaphor: “Sort of like sediment of rocks. I mean, you’re building up a mountain and you get to contribute your little layer of sedimentary rock to make the mountain that much higher. But no one on the surface will—they have x-ray vision—will see your sediment. They’ll stand on it. It’ll be appreciated by that rare geologist, but no.”
Jobs’s prediction has proven remarkably prescient. The Apple II line was discontinued in 1993, just as he anticipated. The original Macintosh architecture gave way to PowerPC and then Intel processors before Apple’s transition to its own silicon. Even the revolutionary iPhone, which hadn’t yet been conceived when Jobs made these comments, has seen fifteen generations of hardware evolution that render earlier models increasingly obsolete. Software engineers today work on frameworks and languages that may be deprecated within a decade, while their predecessors’ code becomes digital archaeology—functional perhaps, but incompatible with modern systems and security standards. This cycle of creative destruction isn’t a bug in the tech industry; it’s the fundamental feature that drives progress, ensuring that each generation of innovators builds upon but ultimately surpasses the work of those who came before.