I think there are a few things that make it "worthy" of literary consideration:
1. Read a straight horror story, it's quite a surprising twist at the end
2. A critique on the senselessness of following tradition just for the sake of it -- the way a society can just go along with something without really understanding why
3. The banality of evil, and how it can often look like something totally ordinary, rather than some nefarious demon
I loved it when I first read it -- it truly shocked it in middle school and I still have a visceral feeling when thinking about it many years later
> with a pre-built you're at the very least paying for someone to assemble it for you, so it's always going to be more expensive as a baseline
Except isn't it possible that pre-built companies actually get better deals on hardware bought in bulk, and therefore could offset the labor costs with cheaper materials?
Surely nothing has ever done wrong with this limitless source of clean energy to give people pause? There's no uninhabitable areas of the Earth due to this?
Or maybe their actual problems are caused by automation, tax cuts on the rich, and a lack of social safety net that lets people live in dignity, but the media they consume mostly blames immigration and crime.
Yes. But also, all technologies will eventually be used as weapons. And so its important for us to understand how they can be weaponized and to consider the social cost of that weaponization.
Part of being a good engineer is finding the right balance.
I know engineers who would gladly duplicate code all over the code base to avoid creating a new abstraction.
I know engineers who create polymorphic abstractions for a single caller with a very obvious set of parameters.
So much of wisdom is in finding balance and not being dogmatic about rules.