Goodbye Tech
Every tech company is different, every tech company is the same. Welcome to the suck.
Yeah no. I'm out.
Of course it's generative AI. Not the tech. The social phenomenon and the mass hysteria of the managerial class. They jumped at the slightest whiff of being able to cut staff, cut costs, cut corners. The unavoidable end of the tech industry McKinsification. It's not new tho. The only thing the average tech company managed to do with every subsequent silver bullet is shoot themselves in the foot. Object Oriented Programming will save us! Now it's agile! The future is big data, wait no, it's blockchain! At every turn, not grasping that the problem was cultural and not that they weren't copying the latest Silicon Valley trend.
Younger, the web represented the new frontier, the democratization of knowledge and entrepreneurship. The barrier of entry was having an internet connection and a laptop. Of course, the newly minted mega corps of the early 00s just sucked everything that was good about it. Growth at all cost and all that. Actual bots -- or human acting like bots -- pleasing algorithms for a quick buck killed the Internet in the mid 2010s. LLMs, like a super bacteria, finished the job and picked the bones clean. Going on the commercial internet is now a source of pain, a labyrinth of dark patterns and traps.
I am grateful I entered the industry at the tail end of it's golden age. Still riding the hyper growth wave of early internet and early mobile. I got to make a lot of money doing what I was already doing in my free time since I was a kid. When I started working, I had no quip calling my job software engineering. Now, I don't remember the last time I got to solve actual problems for a user. The industry is more interested in building companies than building products. The inextricable march toward a fully realized mix of Gervais and Peter principle.
I mourn our collective loss of the digital realm to corporate interests. I don't mourn being obligated to use shit products from shit companies because some business idiot decided he needed to do something. Goodbye Jira, Chrome, and Windows, and every other piece of crap SaaS that adds to the true cost of my employment. I was able to ship in spite of them, not because.
Although I'm stopping selling my particular software and product making skills, I am not breaking up with tech entirely. I will continue fostering my digital homestead, using and hosting software that respects me and solve my issues. I still want to write code, slowly, mostly by hand. I already type syntax as fast as my understanding of the things I'm building grows. Doing the thing is doing the thing and no amount of delegating makes you better at it.
As for money and not dying of hunger, I'm switching to providing something closer to real human needs. I am not fooling myself than the grass is greener there. Not even close to inflated software salaries and miles harder on the body. More hours too and still working with other humans, some of them ego full idiots. But hey, at least I won't be dealing with self imposed idiosyncrasies and make belief problems anymore. With blameless culture, accountability washing and ritualistic meetings to share information that should easily be surfaced with project management tools.
So long tech industry, I am happy that you can now go faster toward the wall your were already speeding toward before generative AI. I won't be there for the crash.
o7