The Millennial Urge to be a Spy Kid

It’s 2002, and I just got back from Blockbuster after snagging a coveted copy of Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams. I’m with a group of my friends, eating popcorn and candy in the basement. Life is good, and it’s about to get better.

The technology and the world being built in front of me feel like a glimpse into a real future. I can now recognize that this was the start of my Engineering Career. And 25 years later, there are so many recurring themes from the Spy Kids trilogy that I see every day. The one that stands out? The iconic spy smartwatches that could not tell time.

In the movie, the kids have these iconic smartwatches. They had all these “crazy” features like GPS trackers, maps, sonar, holograms (which, yeah still waiting for that one). Most of us are wearing more processing power on our wrists right now than the OSS could have dreamed up in the early 2000s.

But there is a moment that defines the tech industry, specifically consumer electronics. Juni looks at his $100,000 super-watch gadget thingy and can’t find the time.

The engineer, Machete, couldn’t fit it in:

“I forgot to put in a watch! There wasn’t any room! With all the radar and the sonar and the beacon and the satellite… there was no room for the clock!”

Machete, working on the worlds tiniest camera

Anyone building products, software or hardware, has been here before. You get an initial set of feature requirements, and slowly over time, those features start to creep, bloat, and distort. The product you have at the end may look like what you set out to build, but under the hood, you’re wrestling a bunch of “cool” extras.

The first thing that comes to mind here is usability and grand vision, especially in today’s world of AI. When everyone can build anything, it is super important that you are building the right thing, the useful thing.

When everyone can build anything, it is super important that you are building the right thing, the useful thing.

Did Juni ever even use sonar? Would he have rather been able to tell the time? Probably.

But sometimes, engineers and product teams get overzealous, especially around new tech. They push to get these hot new items into a product, but it should always come back to usability and to standing strong in the “why” of what we set out to build.

Now, that doesn’t mean things don’t change. In fact, things should change, and part of a good Firmware Team is to make that possible, but perhaps that is an article for a different time.

The core issue here (myself included) is that we all have this Millennial urge to be a Spy Kid. We want the most powerful gadgets, the latest software, and we want to be building “cool stuff.”

Sometimes we have our Machete hat on, obsessing over the radar and the beacons. But we also have to use our Juni hat, our user hat. And that smartwatch user? Yeah, they definitely want their watch to tell the time.

The Definitive List of the Coolest Tech in the Spy Kids Trilogy

1. Spy glasses
2. The smartwatch ( The one that can tell time, IYKYK)
3. Inflate-A-Suit
4. Instant cement
5. Ralph the Spy bug
6. Rocket boots
7. Floop’s entire castle (including the thumb people)
8. Electric Shock bubbles
9. Acid crayons
10. Machete’s shock gum