Sometime over the last weekend I was confronted with a thought that hadn’t occurred to me before. This thought might’ve been the missing piece of the puzzle that prevented me from being able to effectively grapple with the ongoing decay of the tech industry. So what was the thought? It was simple: The presence of rationality in our industry is no longer guaranteed.
Why is that important? Well it’s important because most of my opinion pieces, regardless of how you consume it or where you get it, rely heavily on the premise that regardless of whatever insane off the wall shit is happening right now, eventually the system will correct the issue because the system itself tends to move towards a more rational state over time. But what if that is no longer true? How does that change things?
For me personally, it actually changes a lot. One of my biggest frustrations with the industry is how often we tend to act irrationally even though history and data dictate that a different path would make more logical sense. So much of the aggravation expressed here is based on the premise that this industry is supposed to be a rational actor and thus every time we callously discard that notion, I can’t help but to take it personally. This is ultimately because it feels very counter to the purpose that we are supposed to be serving. In this way, the thought is actually comforting. If irrationality is now the baseline assumption and if we have entered a cycle in which irrationality can be expected to prosper rather than wither then ultimately one can neither predict rationality nor expect it.
It also scares the living hell out of me. Why? Because it betrays the possibility that even when the AI bubble pops, the insanity won’t just peter out and crawl back under whatever primordial rock it emerged from beneath. If rationality no longer has a reserved seat at the table, then there really is no telling how any of the players caught up in the forthcoming bubble burst are ultimately going to act when push comes to shove, at least not from a rational standpoint.
So what inspired me to have this thought? I honestly do not know. All I know is that when I look back over the course of my career through the lens of this shiny new idea, it seems clear that any increase in rationality we experienced was likely a coincidence rather than an engineered outcome. This has probably been the case for at least the last decade. That makes sense of course, because I’ve been bitching about the industry on various blogs for at least a decade now.
So why is this realization important? It’s because I was in denial. Irrationality has been the sea in which we have been swimming for a very long time. With each passing year it has gotten worse and worse. But for a long time there were enough rational actions being taken by seemingly rational actors to allow one to believe that this was not the case. For example, if you just turned a blind eye to the insanity of crypto-currency and the stupidity of the blockchain, you could maybe fool yourself into believing that pre-AI everything was fine. It was not.
There are many examples of this that span over the course of multiple decades. One of my favorite examples is how our supposedly rational industry took the four simply principles outlined in the Agile Manifesto and turned them into the lumbering and horrific behemoth known as SCRUM. I actually wrote a blog post about this very thing back in 2018 called “Agile is Good and Scrum is Dumb”. Here is another post from 2022 in which I skewer Cryto, NFTs and the Metaverse called “Scam Review: Big Tech Bullshit”.
Of course I came close to realizing this at several points. Back in 2023 I wrote “Developer Brethren, its Time to Embrace Boring!” and I made the following statement:
Let me go even further here: I like it when my developer tools are boring. If they are boring, it means they are consistent and reliable. It means that they aren’t creating undue drama in my life or the lives of my end users. As an industry, we should all be striving towards building things that ultimately end up being boring. But of course that engineer like inclination flies in the face of all the scam-adjacent tech bro behavior that makes up the public face of our industry. You can’t spend all of your time hyping up investors and rich assholes so they’ll give you stacks of cash by telling them that you are going to be building boring and reliable tools based on boring and reliable technologies that already exist. Not unless you are building something that is actually innovative. Which most of us aren’t.
This bit of text actually gets to the root of the problem: Money. You see at some point tech went from being an industry that produced useful tools to being an industry that could make people rich. All you needed was an idea. You don’t even have to execute the idea competently - just get close enough and raise enough interest that some big-moneyed interest wants to buy you out at which point you can retire in a wonderland that lies beyond the wildest dreams of avarice. At the end of the day, the prospect of extreme personal gain is what inspires most of us to turn a blind eye to what our industry has become.
Regardless of how close I came to realizing this in the past, consciously realizing this even at this very late stage of the game is important. That’s because denial is a hell of a drug. A large part of my denial was driven by the idea that our core mission is to transform the irrational and inefficient into the rational and efficient. So grappling with irrationality is not out of the norm. However if the industry itself has become irrational, then theoretically serving that purpose has also become impossible. The trick of it though is that because our industry has slowly become irrational, most of us are incapable of seeing it. Like the proverbial frog in the pot that is slowly being boiled, inside our engine of chaos the vast majority of our day to day routine resembles business as usual.
It’s not like irrational actors are walking around generally self aware of how irrational they happen to be… well at least not most of them. In their eyes the actions they are taking feel rational likely because their emotions tell them as much. So given that, it stands to reason that most of us are consciously unaware of this. It also stands to reason that the implicit embrace of irrationality is being treated and executed as if it was a rational action, which makes it all the more confusing. Regardless rationality is no longer a guarantee in this industry. Hedge your bets accordingly. What does that mean precisely? I don’t know. But we are absolutely going to discuss this as a topic moving forward, count on it.
As it stands now, I feel a sense of relief. Admitting to myself that the industry is operating on an irrational baseline will likely reduce my frustration when confronted with our daily stream of irrational bullshit. If the expectation is now irrational action, then it’s power to disappoint me will wane. That is something that I’m very much looking forward to.