Tech industry seems broken

News
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https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/get-me-out-of-data-hell/

How have we been running things like this for two years? Millions of dollars were spent on this system. Our CTO, who has never written code themselves, gets on stages every few months and just lies to people about things that the CTO can’t possibly understand, pretending that any of this works and that they’re a leader in the space. Then their friends buy the same software — I know because recruiters keep calling to ask me if I’ll help lead the efforts. Almost every large business in Melbourne is rushing to purchase our tooling, tools like Snowflake and Databricks, because the industry is pretending that any of this is more important than hiring competent people and treating them well. I could build something superior to this with an ancient laptop, an internet connection, and spreadsheets. It would take me a month tops.

HN Discussion: Get me out of data hell | Hacker News

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Terrible companies are perpetual cognitohazards where everyone is bullied all day. The median companies (which some people call “good” for lack of ever having seen better) lack the outright bullying but still consist of people that are trying to convince themselves that it’s fine to feel disempowered or subservient all day.

We’ve been writing total nonsense to half the logs for over a year and no one noticed? We only have two jobs. Get the data and log that we got the data. But the logs are nonsense, so we aren’t doing the second thing, and because the logs are nonsense I don’t know if we’ve been doing the first thing.

This isn’t really surprising at this point. The more people I talk to, the more I realize that everyone is acting like they know exactly what the system is doing but once you start poking at the picture they paint, it all falls apart.

We (developers) need to do a better job at understanding fundamentals and we also need to be holding people accountable. Call out crap when you see it, whether it’s from a colleague or from a boss.

The issue is raised with the team, but because fixing this critical error in our auditability is not on the board and Velocity Must Be Up, fixing the logs is judged to be less important than… parsing… the nonsense logs.

Here again, I’m afraid that the “xp (extreme programming)”, “agile philosophy”, and more have been morphed into something completely unrecognizable, in order to cater to a larger audience of software developers, who haven’t experienced the fundamental problems with traditional software development and don’t have the understanding to convey when things are going wrong during development.

I still believe in project management but I’m trying to stay away from much of agile, scrum, (insert other catchphrase) fad.

This is very stupid, but compared to minimum wage in my home country, I am being compensated spectacularly to deal with this particular brand of stupidity.

I’ve even degraded team morale because I’ve convinced some of the engineers that things should be better, but not management, so now some of the engineers are upset. I’m a net negative for this team

I have personally experienced this - both by being the negative person, effecting others on the team, and by listening to people who had lost trust in the leadership at my previous workplace. A majority of software developers don’t have the financial strength or mental resolve to quit when they know they are negatively impacting the team.

I remember reading this other story by the same author a while back - I Accidentally Saved Half A Million Dollars — Ludicity - also linked in the above article. i love the following line from this article

It’s cosplaying as a real business and the board thinks the costume is convincing.

On a personal note, I will likely be following in the footsteps of the author when I move on from FOSS United. I don’t see myself working full-time at most of the organizations in India, primarily because I don’t want to spend 40 hours a week for the rest of my life in “the pain zone”. I realized at my previous job that I’m happiest when I’m working on internal code that boosts org-wide developer productivity and I just don’t know of enough orgs at the moment that are willing to invest heavily on dev productivity improvements.

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I think the problem starts at the very top - people who are good at politics and climbing corporate ladders call the shots. They are more interested in “what others say” than having any original insight into building and maintaining complex computer systems. These are the exact same people who will look at “AI” to solve all their mess. Fun times ahead.

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I think the problem starts at the very top - people who are good at politics and climbing corporate ladders call the shots. They are more interested in “what others say” than having any original insight into building and maintaining complex computer systems.

^ reminded me of this article - Paul Graham and the Cult of the Founder - by Dave Karpf. I have added a few excerpts from the article below but the whole thing is well worth a read

They have constructed an altar to founders and think disruption is inherently good because it enables such marvelous financial engineering. They don’t build shit, and they think the employees and managers who run their actual companies ought to show more deference.

The Silicon Valley of the 1980s, 90s, and even the 00s still culturally elevated hackers like Woz. The “founders” (entrepreneurs, really) didn’t understand the tech stack, but they knew how to bring a product to market. Steve Jobs couldn’t code for shit, and for much of its history, Silicon Valley revered Woz as much as it did Jobs.

Aaron was, in a sense, my generation’s equivalent of Woz. It isn’t a perfect analogy. But as archtypes go, it fits well enough. They don’t even try to produce Aarons anymore. Everyone is trying to be Sam frickin’ Altman now.

The Cult of the Founder says that founders are all Steve Jobses. They are unique visionaries. They can make mistakes, but their mistakes are of the got-too-far-ahead-of-society variation. Non-founders just cannot understand them. Other techies can’t either. The most talented hackers in the world are really just employees, after all.

The tech industry was never perfect. It never lived up to its lofty ambitions. But it has gotten demonstrably worse. And I think the fork-in-the-road moment was when the industry stopped trying to celebrate old-school hackers like Aaron Swartz and started working full-time to build monuments to Sam Altman instead.

Paul Graham did that. More than anything, Graham’s cultural influence has been elevating and exalting “founders” as a unique and special boys. And the broader tech industry is worse off as a result.

P.S. I loved reading this

He (Aaron Swartz) had a temper, but he pretty much only directed it toward idiots in positions of power.

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