Short disclosure, I work as a Software Developer in the US, and often have to keep my negative opinions about the tech industry to myself. I often post podcasts and articles critical of the tech industry here in order to vent and, in a way, commiserate over the current state of tech and its negative effects on our environment and the Global/American sociopolitical landscape.
I’m generally reluctant to express these opinions IRL as I’m afraid of burning certain bridges in the tech industry that could one day lead to further employment opportunities. I also don’t want to get into these kinds of discussions except with my closest friends and family, as I could foresee them getting quite heated and lengthy with certain people in my social circles.
Some of these negative opinions include:
- I think that the industries based around cryptocurrencies and other blockchain technologies have always been, and have repeatedly proven themselves to be, nothing more or less than scams run and perpetuated by scam artists.
- I think that the AI industry is particularly harmful to writers, journalists, actors, artists, and others. This is not because AI produces better pieces of work, but rather due to misanthropic viewpoints of particularly toxic and powerful individuals at the top of the tech industry hierarchy pushing AI as the next big thing due to their general misunderstanding or outright dislike of the general public.
- I think that capitalism will ultimately doom the tech industry as it reinforces poor system design that deemphasizes maintenance and maintainability in preference of a move fast and break things mentality that still pervades many parts of tech.
- I think we’ve squeezed as much capital out of advertising as is possible without completely alienating the modern user, and we risk creating strong anti tech sentiments among the general population if we don’t figure out a less intrusive way of monetizing software.
You can agree or disagree with me, but in this thread I’d prefer not to get into arguments over the particular details of why any one of our opinions are wrong or right. Rather, I’d hope you could list what opinions on the tech industry you hold that you feel comfortable expressing here, but are, for whatever reason, reluctant to express in public or at work. I’d also welcome an elaboration of said reason, should you feel comfortable to give it.
I doubt we can completely avoid disagreements, but I’ll humbly ask that we all attempt to keep this as civil as possible. Thanks in advance for all thoughtful responses.
I don’t get the term ‘technical debt’. Most people seem to use it to say “We took shortcuts previously, so now we need to go back and do things properly”.
FIrst, it’s a bad metaphor. You take on debt to invest in long term things that will provide future benefits. Telling the bean counters that you need to stop working on useful features to ‘pay back technical debt’ is not making things clearer to them.
Second, you write software, what the heck are you talking about? Compare to civil engineering. If an area gets busier and the existing narrow wood bridge is no longer suitible, engineers don’t say “Wow what idiots built this road with no eye to future growth?” It was built with the needs and resources of the time. To improve it, the bridge needs to be closed, demolished, and rebuilt with planning, labour and materials.
Instead software is empherial. You don’t need to demolish what’s there. No need to build temporary alternative infrastructure. No need for new materials and disposal of the old. It’s just planning and labour to redo a piece of software. It always seems so whiny when people complain about technical debt, as if switching to a different build system is anywhere close to the difficulty of fixing real life; replacing lead pipes with copper for an entire city, or removing asbestos from buildings.
I don’t feel comfortable sharing any personal opinions at work. The workplace is somewhere one should arrive, work, go home, not somewhere to share opinions and in doing so make potential enemies or risk your position.
Why do I care if my colleagues know my opinion on X or Y? It changes nothing about my life or theirs, we’re not even friends, just colleagues, or work friends at best.
Anyway yeah, that’s just my thoughts :-)
Blockchain is a joke
CI/CD and a lot of container fuckery is entirely unnecessary for like 80-90% of orgs
The jobs AI will eliminate are managerial and their hustle to implement it will their own death sentence
Most IT infra exists solely to justify work that is pointless work.
One if the worst IT sectors is ad tech. The entire industry rationally should not exist.
Good article on this:
Much of what we do and have built is overpriced and useless bullshit that doesn’t make anybody better off.
We are inventing solutions and products to manage other solutions and products to manage other solutions and products to…etc etc.
Websites used to be static HTML pages with some simple graphics, images, and some imbedded stuff. Now, you need to know AWS for your IaaS, Kubernetes to manage your scaling and container orchestration for the thousands of Docker containers that you use to compose your app written in some horrific pile of JavaScript related web stacks like NodeJS, Typescript, React, blah blah blah…
Then you need a ton of other 3rd party components that handle authentication, databasing, backups, monitoring, signaling, account creation/management, logging, billing, etc etc.
It’s circles within circles within circles, and all that to make a buggy, overpriced, clunky web app.
Similar is true for IT, massive software suites that most people in the company use 10% of their functionality for stupid shit.
I’m all for advancing technology, I love technology, it’s my job and my hobby.
But the longer I work in this industry, the more I get this sick feeling that we lost the train long time ago. Buying brand new $1,500 laptops every 3 years so that most of our users can send emails, browse the web, and type up occasional memos.
An inability to understand that ‘e-mail’ doesn’t get an S is not how I guessed you work in a lot of Azure.
Few things would make me happier than to never log into an Azure instance ever again lol.
CEOs and all management suite are mostly useless except for making the business worse for the employees and customers for the sake of investors.
Most employees are perfectly fine with slow and steady growth instead of maximizing it.
It’s interesting the preconceived notions over managements usefulness and the actual role a CEO plays in a company. I’ve had a lot of conversations with people over the years and everyone just expects that it “has to be this way or it won’t work”. Like every admin position is critical or the company will fail, completely disregarding that most of those positions didn’t exist before and the company ran just fine.
There’s a lot of misinformation over what their actual job entails. Management is mostly just one big “telephone” game (been on all sides of it, got out just in time before it warped my perception of life). The original role of being support is completely absent in their duties as our society and culture has changed. People also think a co-op would never work because you need a big shot CEO who runs the company and makes all the decisions (they don’t, plenty of examples in reality).
It’s kinda funny to hear a lot of the tech people on here mention imposter syndrome. Every person in administration has this feeling deep down inside that they aren’t important and they have no clue what they’re doing. The only difference is everyone in the C-suite pat’s eachother on the back and help build each other’s ego up so they can just pretend they don’t feel it. It’s why people in these positions get so defensive and irate if you start dissecting their actual duties and importance. They’ve been reassured everyday that what they do is integral when it’s suppose to be the managers job to make his employees feel that way.
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rabbits in skinner boxes pressing two buttons for a treat is not a far cry from tech workers sitting in cublices pressing 104 buttons for paycheck nor internet users doing it for imaginary internet points.
Luckily, as I work for the local govt, I can talk all the shit I want about the tech sector and technologies as a whole. My colleagues obviously don’t agree with every opinion I share (some 3 even think Amazon is “actually good” and one networking guy is a cryptobro), but none of us are at any risk from talking shit about companies and their leaders, or tech shenanigans in general. Now, talking about our higher ups is trouble.
Right now, Ai is a party trick.
Tomorrow, Ai will inform the FBI that #29933 is planning on murdering his sister, and deploy a team of armed drones to escort him to prison, if he makes it.
Tomorrow, the department stores and supermarkets will be empty and you’ll pick up your groceries from an automated warehouse that inserts them into your car.
Tomorrow, the mail bot will barf your mail into a labeled box, wherin you’ll find your prescription medication, bottled labeled and packaged by nobody, which you take right after you go out to eat at an empty restaurant, where your food is brought to you by an automated track that says tHaNk Yo in an inhuman tone before cutting off too soon.
No conversations, no traveling, no hassle, no humanity, or sincerity whatsoever.
hooray?
Why the fuck is everyone so stoked about this? Vending-machine land sounds insufferable.
Well, this scenario COULD result in the fabled Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism, where machines take care of most of the labor and the benefit of this is shared among everyone. But more likely, most of the benefit of this will be given to a select few.
All software should be open source
All software should be released as a common good that cannot be captured by corporations. Otherwise it’s just free labor for Amazon, Google and Facebook
For the sake of humanity
IT is slowly starting to get regulated like a real engineering field and that’s a good developement.
I’m sad that I missed my opportunity to take a PE exam in software engineering.
No class consciousness. Too many tech workers think they’re rugged individuals that can negotiate their own contracts into wealth.
Working for free on nights and weekends to “hit that deadline” is not good. You’re just making the owners rich, and devaluing labor. Even if you own a lot of equity, it’s not as much as the owners.
And then there’s bullshit like return to office mandates and people are like “oh no none of us want to do this but there’s no organized mechanism to resist”
Join Tech Workers Coalition
On a bright note I’m optimistic that ai bloated garbage and advertising will eventually push a critical mass of people to using decentralized and open source tools, or possibly that non-profits and co-ops will start to spring up to manage more ethical services that could potentially replace the mainstream ones.
When you’re not trying to make some dude disgustingly richer, you don’t need a ton of advertising (imo).
I also think tech workers should unionize. On a darker note, I think outsourcing/offshoring post-covid is going to kill any unions viability. You need bargaining power (withhold your labor) and I’m not sure that will exist for this trade because of how easy it will be to find workers.
I also think tech workers should unionize. On a darker note, I think outsourcing/offshoring post-covid is going to kill any unions viability.
Quite possibly, but that’s just another part of the onshore/offshore cycle. And having worked for a company that utilized offshore for coverage reasons, I’m not that worried about my position. Offshore techs are decent, but I have to clean up after them more than my onshore coworkers.
You need bargaining power (withhold your labor) and I’m not sure that will exist for this trade because of how easy it will be to find workers.
Offshore may work as scabs, but much like scabs, the work quality is noticeably worse. Ultimately, I think tech workers are a bigger hindrance to a tech union than the threat of offshoring is. Mainly because of the house cat like “rugged individualism” they’re sure they have and a lack of overall understanding of the system we work in.
What do you think would help overcome that obstacle to unionization?
This post exemplifies an interesting combination of optimism and pessimism.
Most of the high visibility “tech bros” aren’t technical. They are finance bros who invest in tech.
