Comment by ThrowawayR2
10 hours ago
It's an allegory about trusting "best practices", standardized bodies of knowledge¹, and "that's the way it's always been done". Not that those things necessarily don't work, they do in the story as well as in real life, but they need to adapt to change and the story illustrates what happens when they harden from best practice into unquestioned dogma.
¹ There's even a BoK for software developers, the SWEBOK, but I've never met anybody who's read it.
It's also about hyperspecialization. A concept that was beginning to be noticed at the time.