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Tech ain't that deep - and that's a problem<br>Author: Iris Meredith<br>Date published: 2026-07-20<br>The seed of this essay came about when I was writing a note and some exercises for my learning platform Arca(we're officially in early access now, by the way!) about pointers and memory management, using C as a demonstration language. I dedicated about half a day to it, and had quite a bit of fun doing it: at the end of the process I had about 3,000 good words of work done, and had another two articles of similar length sketched out. Moreover, I still don't feel as though I've reached the end of what I could productively say about these subjects by any stretch. This is unusual for me: I usually struggle to write much about purely technical details, and in fact find the whole thing quite boring.<br>Which raises the question: why can I quite happily write 10,000 words about the finer details of pointers and manual memory management in C, but struggle to write a twentieth that number about React? And why is learning C so much more generally useful than learning React? What I mean by the last point is that learning C tends to develop skills that are useful in a lot of other parts of software and tech work: if you know how to write decent C, you'll have a much easier time of understanding PostgreSQL internals, for example, while if you've learned React, it's anyone's guess as to whether or not that'll actually improve your HTML skills, for example.<br>The conclusion that I've come to is that it has to do with the relative depth of the fields. Depth is obviously quite an elusive concept, but if you've been around for long enough, you will have had the experience that some areas of study, some artworks, some writing... generally any kind of thing that you can subject to examination... in any case, some of these things have more depth than others. Some books you can re-read every year and still find something new, or bear reading line-by-line and underlining. Others, meanwhile, you can read once and then never pick up again, and you don't feel as though you've missed much or have any need to read them again. Some skills you can work at for years and still, even after all that time, feel as though you're improving and learning new things, and perhaps be a little in awe of how far you still have to go. With others, you've learned everything in six months and while you might still be improving a bit, you're hardly improving all that much. I have a definite preference in most cases for deeper fields over shallower ones, and realising that, some pieces began to click into place.<br>With that in mind, it became fairly clear to me that the tech industry these days has a depth problem: as much as tech is becoming quite a bit more complex, it's also becoming shallower. Learning new things in tech these days, as often as not, simply doesn't give me the same feeling of satisfaction or achievement as learning or writing C back in the first years of my career did. Being effective in tech these days feels as though it's less about understanding than it is about memorising a big list of buzzwords and all of the catches associated with them. And while LLMs have certainly pushed this into overdrive, the issue has existed, in one form or another, for quite a while now.<br>What do we mean when we say something has depth?<br>The depth of a subject or a field of study is not something obviously or easily defined. We have some intuitive notion of depth: mathematics is a deeper subject than business studies, just as Ulysses is a deeper text than, say, The Day my Bum went Psycho (sincere apologies to Andy Griffith: I loved the book when I was like, ten, but I've aged out of your audience a bit). Similarly, there's a clear perception in the tech world that writing Assembly or C, for example, is deeper magic than writing Java. if you were to ask for a formal definition of depth in this context, though, you might find yourself struggling.<br>The things that we call deep, however, do have some clear commonalities: as much as Ulysses, Gravity's Rainbow, group theory and the music of JS Bach are all very different kinds of thing, you get the sense that they have commonalities which aren't shared with Mills and Boon romances or with, say, Cardi B's musical output. This suggests that there are some criteria by which we're deciding whether something has depth or not, and those bear examination. Given that, let's look at some candidate criteria now.<br>Our first candidate criterion is that of active engagement. Looking at fields or works that we consider to be deep, all of them reward and almost demand careful, deliberate engagement with them. While you might listen to Bach in the background while doing something else, you get a lot more out of something like his Magnificat if you listen...