I am writing this post because I had quite the day at work a few days ago. In some ways it was no different than any other day. I attempted to build structured things while keeping from drowning in the torrent of chaos and uncertainty that is the environment where I’m paid to do such work. On any given day, I do not succeed in building quite as much as I had wanted to and this harsh review of my own performance is almost certainly contributing to my now dueling apoplectic and depressing views of my work. We will be discussing those views today.
To be clear, this post is a followup to a post I made back in May of 2018 called “Unplanned Obsolescence”. This is relevant because of the topic and what I’m about to say. It is also relevant because I happen to be employed by the same people I was finishing out a notice for when I wrote that post. That may strike you as odd, but it doesn’t sit that way with me. In my older age, I have become exceptionally aware of the cyclical nature of the universe. This newfound knowledge has made me cynical in ways that even I couldn’t have imagined eight years ago when I wrote that original post.
Back then I felt like an old man. Today I am an old man. Back then I felt like I was beginning to become detached from the industry. Today I am detached from the industry. Back then I felt like I could still find a path forward simply by finding the appropriate niche to occupy. Today I know that is just a sweet little lie I told myself because the truth was just too hard to face. Financially its a truth that I’m still not ready to face.
After I left this job initially, I spent a few years working directly for somebody that I had some prior professional history with. While it started off great, he eventually turned the arrangement on its head and found a way to screw me as he tends to do to everybody. If you’d like, you can read about that “delightful” fellow here in “Pop Goes the Gaslighting Weasel”. After that I went to work for a luxury custom lighting company and while they were some of the nicest people I have ever worked with and I probably should’ve just stayed there, I just couldn’t. Most of the reasons why were adequately captured in the post, “Low Code Software Development Is A Lie”.
I probably should’ve swallowed my technical pride and just stayed there. I would’ve been unhappy from a technical perspective, which I am now, but it would’ve been for very different reasons. The truth is that it would’ve made for a nice long and comfortable exit ramp from this career. But I made a different choice and instead I’m here now writing this particular post. Is this a cycle? Yes. Is it vicious? Yes. But that’s not the fault of my current employer, but more like a clinical observation of how this industry tends to work. We claim to always be reinventing ourselves, but if you are at all familiar with our history, you know that’s just yet another lie we tell ourselves. What we really do is unleash new things upon the world, which create a litany of unintended problems and then unleash new things that purport to solve those problems.
On a larger scale, Tech goes through cycles of centralization and decentralization. We are in the midst of a rather long centralization cycle as evidenced by the fact that big tech now has their fingers in every pie. They have done this by convincing the vast majority of people in the industry that they can’t succeed without indulging some number of big tech parasites / middlemen gorging themselves on our collective posterior via notions like the Cloud and AI. If that sounded like I am implying that the industry has turned into a parasitic creature in need of a host for sustenance, then let me apologize. I didn’t mean to imply it, I meant to directly state it. That’s what we have devolved into.
The worst part is that we don’t even know what we are and what we’ve become. Most of us seem blissfully unaware of it. That’s because we are just as dependent on the industry as our customers are. Our collective denial has upped the ante on unethical behavior and has essentially devalued the core fundamentals of engineering that used to be valued by a measurable percentage of us.
So with that being said, lets return to the story around the incident at work that inspired this post. While I was deep within one of the pockets of chaos that threatened to smother me, I made the following statement in Slack channel:
I would rather it not work at all than be incorrect
This is a statement that reflects a core tenet of my approach to this work. If the output is going to be wrong, then I would rather not produce any output at all. It’s either right or its dead on arrival. Our customers deserve for it to be right, regardless of what the situation is. We call ourselves engineers goddammit. That has to fucking mean something. If it doesn’t mean that we value correct output over everything else and largely at the expense of other considerations, then that word is a terrible lie and we should stop referring to ourselves that way.
Sadly in this case, our team was not responsible for the inaccuracy, thus it was not something I could fix. The quoted statement above was my final attempt to convince the manager of the team who is responsible for the inaccuracy to actually do something about it now rather than promising to maybe to look at it later. I failed to accomplish that goal.
That’s because this belief and my need to state it is one of many ways in which my obsolescence rears its ugly head dozens of times each day. The mantra of this industry has become, “Sit down, be quiet and do what we tell you to do”. Anybody who knows me knows that this was never going to be my schtick as I’m simply incapable of working that way. I won’t make any apologies for it either.
If you want to build solutions to problems, then the first step towards success will always be to identify problems. But nowadays people don’t seem to care about the real identifiable problems but rather seem content to invent fake problems to address. But why is that?
I believe a lot of it revolves around our embrace of the Cloud and AI. Both of these choices have injected more uncertainty, so much so that uncertainty has now become the default state rather than an exceptional state we try to avoid. Cloud services go down all of the time. If your company depends on a few dozen of these things, chances are that at any given time at least one of them is only semi-functional, if at all. We see this on a regular basis at work and its just kind of crazy how accepting we are of it. If our own stuff goes down, its a massive five alarm fire, but if some random AWS dependency goes down, well that’s just how it is and we just need to manage customer expectations.
But while the embrace of the Cloud was a bad decision, the embrace of AI is so beyond the pale that I believe it threatens to destroy whatever remnants of old school fundamentals still exist in this trade. Whereas the Cloud increased our tolerance for downtime, quirks and general chaos, AI triples down on all of it. You can argue and prove that AI is wrong a lot of the time. Nobody cares. It was right a handful of times and that’s all that matters. You can argue and prove that AI is overtly making other people’s lives worse. Nobody cares. They all continue to hit the proverbial easy button because its “easier” regardless of how many other people are fucked over because of it.
At the end of the day what this really means is that Big Tech has completed its metamorphosis from a provider of useful tools into a festering den of institutionalized uncertainty. The new business model involves selling you solutions to problems they themselves created. It’s basically a new age form of the old school snake oil salesman. Despite the best efforts of a few and proud individuals willing to push back on this, the industry has clearly made its choice.
Most of the actual technical people at this point have decided that its easier to go along for the ride rather than attempt to uphold the principles of the past. I get it. We are all wage slaves. We all have families to provide for, obligations to meet and mortgages to pay. I wish more of us would stand up for our values, but that would require us to have fostered an attachment to those values to begin with. Perhaps that was just something that deranged people like myself did.
So how did we get here? The MBAs are how we got here. They are the constant that allowed this line of thinking to spread so far and so wide that it has infected virtually every tech company you can think of. The worst part is that we let them do it to us. Each time I think about this, I’m reminded of one of my favorite quotes from the movie Trainspotting:
They’re just wankers. We, on the other hand, are COLONIZED by wankers. Can’t even find a decent culture to be colonized BY. We’re ruled by effete arseholes. It’s a SHITE state of affairs to be in, Tommy, and ALL the fresh air in the world won’t make any fucking difference!
The MBAs are the wankers and we let them colonize us, the Software Engineers. It’s a truly pathetic state of affairs. That is the short and sweet version of the story around how their love affair with gaslighting and uncertainly has now become our love affair with those things.
So where does that leave me and those like me? In a word, fucked. At least in the short term.
I have been and continue to be obsolete. But that obsolesce is eating away at my mental state as I try and fail to combat the forces that amplify it every work day for what has now become an endless series of painful weeks that all blur together into a growing amorphous blob of trauma. Amusingly enough I pay a therapist to help guide me through navigating that trauma. That poor woman even reads my blog posts as they serve as a relatively decent indicator of what the trajectory of my mental state is whenever we meet.
So why am I here yet again lamenting about my plight to the void we call the Internet? Well it’s because I’m quite sure that I’m not the only one. There are others, most of us are just afraid to say the things that I’ve said here, because saying these things runs the risk of getting a proverbial scarlet letter permanently affixed to your professional reputation. The good news is that I can say those things now because I just don’t care about that reputation anymore. Somebody has to sling truth in the face of collective insanity regardless of the cost, and I’m happy and crazy enough to be that person.
On some level though even I have to grin when staring down the barrel of the irony birthed from the fact that the industry’s institutionalized uncertainty has now created an entire sea of uncertainty. This is the sea that I feel like I’m drowning in despite my years long campaign to avoid it. I think the lesson there is that if you become affixed to a particular group of people, as I am affixed to tech, eventually the aura spawned by their collective choices, whether it is good or bad, will eventually become your own. Eventually you’ll end up exactly where I am now: You either have to accept that or make a different choice. This perhaps more eloquently stated in a quote from Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, “Mother Night”:
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
To put it bluntly: In the end, if you let the wankers colonize you, they are going to win. Damn shame, that. The good news is that the economic realities of our system will eventually assert themselves in such a way that the wankers are going to find themselves having to defend a lot of the very stupid decisions they have made as of late. Given their general lack of empathy and intelligence, I believe they will fail miserably at that and a lot of them will end up displaced from the industry as well.
This will not last. We will reach the other side. When we get there, we will have a chance to change things and it is vital that we do not drop the ball. I may not be there to be part of it, but regardless I will continue to look forward to that day. The tech industry can be better than this but we can only get their collectively.
To do that we must displace the wankers.