(2024-12-23) Fed up with the industry
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Seriously, I'm sick and tired. The mainstream IT industry is a total mess now.
Yes, I say that. It stopped solving real problems long ago, it stopped making
the world a better place long ago, it started being "a thing in itself" with
all the "innovations" made up to merely justify its own further existence.
And it's not just because a new fad appears every 3 to 5 years, which in
turn just adds to an already long list of totally useless and, in the long
run, even harmful things that simply must die. No, the main issue with that
is being able to produce at least some value for the company (or even the
entire industry) no longer equals to being able to produce any value for the
world's people. In fact, in some cases, NOT producing that value for the
companies (especially big corporations) ends up being more useful for the
society.
Of course, big corps like to tell everyone how they value every employee and
contractor of theirs, while telling the employees (and especially
contractors) at the same time that no one is irreplaceable and ending up
treating them like their own property. Been there, seen that. On top of
that, regardless of the company size, there's a clear observation made
throughout the 12 years in the field: the more your management (up to the
very top) starts talking about "company values", "teamwork", "commitment to
the success", "devotion to perfect delivery" and other similar BS, the more
likely it is that you're not going to get a raise anytime soon or even get
your current salary in time. Because all that is just a fancy way of
shifting responsibility to the innocent workers and saying "we want y'all to
work twice as more while you'll get nothing extra". This is how the VAI
syndrome is cultivated en masse, by the way.
What's VAI, you may ask? Nothing to do with AI (more on that later though),
it's short for Vigorous Activity Imitation. A popular acronym where I'm
from. And it's not just IT-specific, it's the source of problems in all
sorts of areas. The IT sector is just one of those where most of VAI really
can go undetected. Everyone there imitates vigorous activity to some extent
because, under the corporate pressure, what you really do becomes not as
important and even irrelevant compared to what you show that you're doing.
All those "daily standups", "sprint planning meetings", "quarterly planning
meetings", "task grooming sessions", "tech demos", "all-hands", "performance
reviews"... I might have missed a few but you get the idea. Any sane person
would think all this exists for the sole purpose of wasting everyone's time
and energy, but not the corporate zombies who desperately need this to
fulfill their VAI goals. And then there is a whole lot of positions just for
serving this VAI infrastructure: project managers, scrum masters (tell me a
single reason why a team leader can't do the task management job), delivery
managers and who knows who else. Not so long ago, I was on a project where
there were far more managers than the actual engineers. And everyone seemed
to be fine with that. Good old bureaucracy in a new shell.
Needless to say, what you see is very far from what you get at the end of the
day. No one there is actually motivated to write efficient and bugless code,
it's enough for it to be able to pass the tests and to work on the tech
demos. No one there is actually motivated to build secure infrastructure
unless/until they explicitly are told to do so. Combined with the moronic
management that just can't know any better than installing Faildows on
mission-critical systems, no wonder that the disasters like WannaCry or
CrowdStrike had such a success. And I'm afraid that's just the beginning.
Because the old suits are slowly but surely getting replaced with
TikTok-brained dummies who are even more clueless but think they already
know everything and keep jumping onto every new fad without a second
thought. And the most recent plague they let into the business, GenAI,
already has started showing its fruit with serious data breaches and leaks.
And we're talking huge amounts of data being processed every second. So, at
this point, I think it's too late to talk about potential leaks, what could
happen already has, we can only talk about those that have been discovered
and those that haven't. And I believe that the amount of undiscovered leaks
is much larger than the number of ones we know about. Even when a company
uses third-party AI to automate its VAI (see the connection?), everyone's
privacy is already at risk: employees, contractors and clients. And the
unsuspecting public is the one who usually suffers the most.
Given all that, as well as my local situation making it increasingly
uncomfortable to continue conducting any business here legally, I'm planning
to quit my job at some point in the coming year. As of now, I've got enough
savings for the next 3 to 5 years, and I'm sure I'll figure out what to do
afterwards, what matters today is just staying alive. You may call it a
burnout, but "better to burn out than fade away", as the song goes. Not that
anyone is going to miss me or even notice that, but I don't want to be a
part of all that anymore. It is, in my opinion, wiser to watch this bubble
burst from afar.
